History > 2006 > USA > Education (II)

SAT Reading and Math Scores

Show a Significant Decline

August 30, 2006
The New York Times
By KAREN W. ARENSON

The average score on the reading and math portions of the newly expanded SAT showed the largest decline in 31 years, according to a report released yesterday by the College Board on the performance of the high school class of 2006.

The drop confirmed earlier reports from puzzled college officials that they were seeing lower scores from applicants. The average score on the critical reading portion of the SAT, formerly known as the verbal test, fell 5 points, to 503, out of a maximum possible score of 800. The average math score fell 2 points, to 518. Together they amounted to the lowest combined score since 2002.

Officials of the College Board, the nonprofit organization that administers the SAT, dismissed suggestions by numerous high school guidance counselors that students were getting tired out by the new three-part test which now runs three and three-quarters hours, rather than three.

“Fatigue is not a factor,” Wayne Camara, vice president for research and analysis at the College Board said at a news conference. “We are not trying to say that students are not tired. But it is not affecting, on the whole, student performance.”

Instead, the officials attributed the drop to a decline in the number of students who took the exam more than once. The board said 47 percent of this year’s students took the test only once, up from 44 percent last year. The number taking the test three times fell to less than 13 percent from nearly 15 percent.

Students typically gain 14 points a section when they take the test a second time, and another 10 or 11 points a section on the third try.

The SAT writing test includes a 25-minute essay, which counts for about 30 percent of the writing score, and 49 multiple-choice questions on grammar and usage, which count for the rest. The average score on the writing section was 497 out of a possible 800, the board said.

Girls performed better than boys on this section of the exam, averaging 502 versus 491 for boys. That partly offset girls’ lower scores on math and reading, but did not close the longstanding score gap between boy and girls.

Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board, pointed out that the decline in scores represented less than one-half of a test question in reading and one-fifth of one test question in math. Still it was the largest year to year decline since 1975, and officials expressed concerns about the overall performance of American students.

“The data does suggest that as a nation, critical reading and writing are lagging behind the progress we are making in math,” Mr. Camara said.

The SAT score decline contrasted with the increase in scores on the ACT exam, the other primary college admissions test. This month, ACT reported its biggest score increase in 20 years. The ACT also has a writing section, but it is optional.

Seppy Basili, senior vice president at Kaplan Inc., the education and test preparation company, said the new SAT test undoubtedly affected scores because students were less familiar with it and because fewer students repeated it. But Mr. Basili said he thought the length played a greater role than the College Board acknowledged.

“It is not just that the test is 3 hours and 45 minutes,” he said. “It is that the whole experience is five hours or more,” he said, factoring in things like breaks.

Most states, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, saw scores decline in reading and math. In New York, average reading scores fell 4 points to 493 and math scores 1 point to 510. In Connecticut, reading was down 5 points to 512 and math 1 point to 516. In New Jersey, reading fell 7 points to 496 and math 2 points to 515.

In New York City, Joel I. Klein, the chancellor of the education department, said, “My only reaction is, it shows that we have to continue to work harder.”

The number of students taking the SAT nationally fell slightly, by about 10,000 students, to just under 1.5 million, or about 48 percent of more than 3 million students who graduated from high school this year.

At a time when many elite colleges have expressed interest in recruiting more low-income students, the number of students from families earning $30,000 or less who took the SAT fell by more than 13 percent, to 183,317, while the number from families earning $100,000 or more rose 8 percent, to 225,869.

Mr. Camara said that of the information collected about students, the income data was the least reliable. He said he did not know what accounted for the decrease in low-income students taking the test.

Counselors in high schools where the SAT has long dominated, said more of their students were taking the ACT. Some have said that in the wake of the College Board’s disclosure this spring that it had mis-scored more than 5,000 exams, they have urged their students to consider the ACT.

    SAT Reading and Math Scores Show a Significant Decline, NYT, 30.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/education/30sat.html?hp&ex=1156996800&en=645ef9b533220442&ei=5094&partner=homepage

U.S. Issues New Rules on Schools and Disability

August 4, 2006
the New York Times
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 — For more than 25 years, federal law had required that schools nationwide identify children as learning disabled by comparing their scores on intelligence tests with their academic achievement. This meant that many students had to wait until third or fourth grade to get the special education help they needed.

In regulations issued today after changes to the law, the federal Education Department said states could not require school districts to rely on that method, allowing districts to find other ways to determine which children are eligible for extra help.

It was the final step in the federal government’s repudiation of the old approach, which had come under severe criticism from advocates for children with disabilities, testing experts and eventually federal officials themselves. Advocates for those children applauded the change.

“If you talk to principals and special ed directors, there is pent-up demand for better ways to serve struggling kids than waiting until they crash and burn in third and fourth grade,’’ said James H. Wendorf, executive director of the National Center for Learning Disabilities. The new rules also require schools to alert parents as they begin exploring whether children may need special education, another change that won praise from advocates for children with disabilities.

The regulations come after Congress updated laws covering special education for some six million schoolchildren nationwide in late 2004.

Comparing intelligence tests with academic achievement, known as the discrepancy model, came under intense criticism in the debates over the law and over special education.

Federal officials and advocates for children with disabilities contended that the practice of waiting for children to fall behind on tests in third or fourth grade before getting them extra help consigned them to failure, and opened the way for the disproportionate numbers of poor and minority children to be labeled as needing special education.

The 2004 law abandoned reliance on that approach. And the new regulations favor alternative methods of identifying children who need services, like evaluating the response of struggling children to extra help before the third grade.

The 2004 law also streamlined procedures and reduced the paperwork involved in providing children special education services, and relaxed burdens on schools when children with disabilities had behavioral problems.

A draft of the regulations published in June 2005 prompted an outpouring of 5,500 letters and comments to the Education Department from advocates for children with disabilities, as well as parents, teachers’ unions, and state, district and local education officials.

The department posted the final regulations on its Web site today, along with answers to each of the comments it received. The final regulations will be published in the Federal Register on Aug. 14, and will take effect 60 days later.

In unveiling the new rules, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said her priority was “that we not lose our vigilance for educational attainment for every child.”

Advocates for children with disabilities said they were disappointed that the regulations did not address some problems they saw in the 2004 federal law.

For example, the law says that instead of reviewing each disabled child’s educational plan every year automatically, schools could review them only once every three years, provided parents agree to the change. The regulations do not help ensure parents are properly notified, advocates said.

“But who is going to make sure that parents now know what they’re giving up if they agree to that?” said Ricki Sabia, associate director of the National Down Syndrome Society Policy Center. “The department could have made clear what constitutes that agreement.”

    U.S. Issues New Rules on Schools and Disability, NYT, 4.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/04/education/04education.html

Evolution Fight Shifts Direction in Kansas Vote

August 3, 2006
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY and RALPH BLUMENTHAL

TOPEKA, Kan., Aug. 2 — Less than a year after the Kansas Board of Education adopted science standards that were the most wide-reaching in the nation in challenging Darwin’s theory of evolution, voters on Tuesday ousted the conservative majority on the board that favored those guidelines.

Several of the winners in the primary election, whose victories are virtually certain to shift the board to at least a 6-to-4 moderate majority in November, promised Wednesday to work swiftly to restore a science curriculum that does not subject evolution to critical attack.

They also said they would try to eliminate restrictions on sex education passed by the current board and to review the status of the education commissioner, Bob Corkins, who they said was hired last year with little background in education.

In a state where a fierce fight over how much students should be taught about the criticism of evolution has gone back and forth since 1999, the election results were seen as a significant defeat for the movement of intelligent design, which holds that nature by itself cannot account for life’s complexity.

Defenders of evolution pointed to the results in Kansas as a third major defeat for the intelligent design movement across the country recently and a sign, perhaps, that the public was beginning to pay attention to the movement’s details and, they said, its failings.

“I think more citizens are learning what intelligent design really is and realizing that they don’t really want that taught in their public schools,” said Eugenie C. Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education.

In February, Ohio’s board of education dropped a mandate that 10th-grade biology classes include critical analysis of evolution. Last year, a federal judge ruled that teaching intelligent design in the schools of Dover, Pa., was unconstitutional. But Ms. Scott said that opponents of evolution were hardly finished.

“They’ve had a series of setbacks,” she said, “but I don’t think for one moment that this means the intelligent design people will fold their tents and go away.”

Supporters of intelligent design and others who had favored the Kansas science standards said they were disappointed in Tuesday’s outcome, but they said they had also won a series of little-noticed victories in other states, including South Carolina. There, supporters said, state officials decided this summer to require students to look at ways that scientists use data “to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory.”

John G. West, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a group in the forefront of the intelligent design movement, said any repeal of the science standards would be a disservice to students here, and an effort to censor legitimate scientific challenges to Darwin’s theories. Still, he said, no local political skirmish will ultimately answer the broad issue.

“The debate over Darwin’s theory will be won or lost over the science,” he said.

It is not clear, however, that the Kansas vote necessarily reflected a widespread change in thinking around the state. The overall turnout in Tuesday’s election was 18 percent, the lowest here in at least 14 years, a fact some local political experts attributed to low-key races statewide and painfully steamy weather.

Several groups that favored the teaching of evolution had worked to turn out moderate voters. The groups included the Kansas Alliance for Education, which raised more than $100,000 to campaign against the current majority and the science guidelines, and Kansas Citizens for Science.

If future school board elections turn out a different group of motivated voters, the results could shift again, as they have in previous elections.

Five seats were at stake in Tuesday’s vote, four of them held by the board’s conservative Republican majority. Two conservatives lost to moderates in the Republican primary, ensuring a shift in control on the 10-member state board. Both winners will face Democratic opponents in November, but the Democrats are both considered moderates as well.

“We need to teach good science and bring the discussion back to educational issues, and not continue focusing on hot-button issues,” said Jana Shaver, a teacher and college trustee from Independence.

Ms. Shaver is one of the moderate winners in the Republican primary. She ran far ahead of the conservative candidate, Brad Patzer, who was trying to claim the seat of his mother-in-law, Iris Van Meter, who did not seek re-election.

Reached by telephone on Wednesday, Ms. Van Meter refused to speak to a reporter. “I have nothing to say to you,” she said.

Connie Morris, a former teacher and author who had described evolution as “a nice bedtime story,” also lost in the Republican primary, to Sally Cauble, another teacher.

Ms. Cauble, a local school board member from Liberal, said she favored returning to what she considered a more traditional science curriculum drawn up by a committee of science experts.

The Kansas standards, which were to take effect in classrooms in 2007, do not specifically require or prohibit discussion of intelligent design. They call for students to learn about “the best evidence for modern evolutionary theory, but also to learn about areas where scientists are raising scientific criticisms of the theory.”

The guidelines also say that evolution “has no discernable direction or goal.” Experts say that language goes beyond the general requirement for critical analysis of evolution as adopted by some other states.

Some members of the state school board, who supported the guidelines and were not up for election, seemed frustrated at the prospect that the board would once again revisit the guidelines.

“If the liberals take over in January, which appears likely, then I am going to have very little to say about it,” said Steve E. Abrams, the board chairman.

Kathy Martin, a board member and supporter of the standards, said: “I assume we will go back over that stuff. I don’t see a need for it, but there you have it.”

Kansas has been over this ground before. In 1999, the state made national headlines by stripping its curriculum of nearly any mention of evolution. Two years later, voters removed several conservative board members, and the curriculum change was reversed.

Then, a conservative majority took hold in 2004 and revived the issue, leading to the bitter 6-to-4 vote last year, in which the board adopted the current standards.

Monica Davey reported from Topeka for this article, and Ralph Blumenthal from Houston.

    Evolution Fight Shifts Direction in Kansas Vote, NYT, 3.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/us/03evolution.html?hp&ex=1154664000&en=c43df5486e76b157&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Evolution Opponents Lose Kansas Board Majority

August 2, 2006
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

Kansas voters on Tuesday handed power back to moderates on the State Board of Education, setting the stage for a return of science teaching that broadly accepts the theory of evolution, according to preliminary election results.

With just 6 districts of 1,990 yet to report as of 8 a.m. Central time today, two conservatives — including incumbent Connie Morris, a former west Kansas teacher and author who had described evolution as “a nice bedtime story” — appear to have been defeated decisively by two moderates in the Republican primary elections. One moderate incumbent, Janet Waugh from the Kansas City area, held on to her seat in the Democratic primary.

If her fellow moderates prevailed, Ms. Waugh said last week, “we need to revisit the minutes and every decision that was 6-4, re-vote.”

Ms. Morris lost to Sally Cauble, a teacher from Liberal, who has favored a return to traditional science standards.

Taking another seat from the conservatives in the Republican primary was Jana Shaver of Independence, a former teacher and administrator, who ran far ahead of Brad Patzer. Mr. Patzer is the son-in-law of the current board member Iris Van Meter, who did not seek reelection.

In another closely fought Republican race, in the Kansas City-Olathe district, Harry E. McDonald, a retired biology teacher, lost to the conservative incumbent John W. Bacon, an accountant.

The results seem likely to give the moderates a 6-4 edge on the 10-member board when it takes over in January. Half the members of the board are elected every two years. The election results are not final until certified by the Kansas Secretary of State, Ron Thornburgh, following an official canvas.

Both moderate Republican winners face Democratic opponents in November, but the Democrats are moderates as well, favoring a return to the traditional science standards that prevailed before a conservative majority elected in 2004 passed new rules for teaching science. Those rules, enacted last November, called for classroom critiques of Darwin’s theory. Ms. Waugh, the Democrat, does not face a Republican opponent in the general election.

The changes in the science standards, favored by advocates of intelligent design who believe life is too complex to be have been created by natural events, put Kansas at the vanguard of efforts by religious advocates critical explanations of the origin of life that do not include a creator. But intelligent design was not referenced in the Kansas standards.

The curriculum changes, coming after years of see-sawing power struggles between moderates and conservatives, drew widespread ridicule and, critics complained, threatened Kansas’s high standing in national education circles. But Steve E. Abrams, the chairman of the board and a veterinarian from Arkansas City, said the changes only subjected evolution to critical scientific scrutiny.

    Evolution Opponents Lose Kansas Board Majority, NYT, 2.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/us/02cnd-kansas.html?hp&ex=1154577600&en=938d196883854b8d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Evolution’s Backers in Kansas Mount a Counterattack

August 1, 2006
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

KANSAS CITY, Kan., July 29 — God and Charles Darwin are not on the primary ballot in Kansas on Tuesday, but once again a contentious schools election has religion and science at odds in a state that has restaged a three-quarter-century battle over the teaching of evolution.

Less than a year after a conservative Republican majority on the State Board of Education adopted rules for teaching science containing one of the broadest challenges in the nation to Darwin’s theory of evolution, moderate Republicans and Democrats are mounting a fierce counterattack. They want to retake power and switch the standards back to what they call conventional science.

The Kansas election is being watched closely by both sides in the national debate over the teaching of evolution. In the past several years, pitched battles have been waged between the scientific establishment and proponents of what is called intelligent design, which holds that nature alone cannot explain life’s origin and complexity.

Last February, the Ohio Board of Education reversed its 2002 mandate requiring 10th-grade biology classes to critically analyze evolution. The action followed a federal judge’s ruling that teaching intelligent design in the public schools of Dover, Pa., was unconstitutional.

A defeat for the conservative majority in Kansas on Tuesday could be further evidence of the fading fortunes of the intelligent design movement, while a victory would preserve an important stronghold in Kansas.

The curriculum standards adopted by the education board do not specifically mention intelligent design, but advocates of the belief lobbied for the changes, and students are urged to seek “more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.”

Though there is no reliable polling data available, Joseph Aistrup, head of political science at Kansas State University, said sharp ideological splits among Republicans and an unusual community of interest among moderate Republicans and some Democrats were helping challengers in the primary.

Kansas Democrats, moreover, have a strong standard-bearer in the incumbent governor, Kathleen Sebelius, who has distanced herself from the debate.

“And if a conservative candidate makes it through the primary, there’s a Democratic challenger waiting” in the general election, Professor Aistrup said.

Several moderate Republican candidates have vowed, if they lose Tuesday, to support the Democratic primary winners in November. With the campaign enlivened by a crowded field of 16 candidates contending for five seats — four held by conservatives who voted for the new science standards last year — a shift of two seats could overturn the current 6-to-4 majority. The four-year terms are staggered so that only half the 10-member board is up for election each two years.

The acrimony in the school board races is not limited to differences over the science curriculum but also over other ideologically charged issues like sex education, charter schools and education financing. Power on the board has shifted almost every election since 1998, with the current conservative majority taking hold in 2004.

“Can we just agree God invented Darwin?” asked a weary Sue Gamble, a moderate member of the board whose seat is not up for re-election.

The chairman of the board, Dr. Steve E. Abrams, a veterinarian and the leader of the conservative majority, said few of the opposition candidates were really moderates. “They’re liberals,” said Dr. Abrams, who is not up for re-election.

He said that the new science curriculum in no way opened the door to intelligent design or creationism and that any claim to the contrary “is an absolute falsehood.”

“We have explicitly stated that the standards must be based on scientific evidence,” Dr. Abrams said, “what is observable, measurable, testable, repeatable and unfalsifiable.”

In science, he said, “everything is supposedly tentative, except the teaching of evolution is dogma.”

Harry E. McDonald, a retired biology teacher and self-described moderate Republican who has been going door to door for votes in his district near Olathe, said the board might have kept overt religious references out of the standards, “but methinks they doth protest too much.”

“They say science can’t answer this, therefore God,” Mr. McDonald said.

Connie Morris, a conservative Republican running for re-election, said the board had merely authorized scientifically valid criticism of evolution. Ms. Morris, a retired teacher and author, said she did not believe in evolution.

“It’s a nice bedtime story,” she said. “Science doesn’t back it up.”

Dr. Abrams said his views as someone who believes that God created the universe 6,500 years ago had nothing to do with the science standards adopted.

“In my personal faith, yes, I am a creationist,” he said. “But that doesn’t have anything to do with science. I can separate them.” He said he agreed that “my personal views of Scripture have no room in the science classroom.”

Dr. Abrams said that at a community meeting he had been asked whether it was possible to believe in the Bible and in evolution, and that he had responded, “There are those who try to believe in both — there are theistic evolutionists — but at some point in time you have to decide which you’re going to put your credence in.”

Last year’s changes in the science standards followed an increasingly bitter seesawing of power on the education board that began in 1998 when conservatives won a majority. They made the first changes to the standards the next year, which in turn were reversed after moderates won back control in 2000. The 2002 elections left the board split 5-5, and in 2004 the conservatives won again, instituting their major standards revisions in November 2005.

Critics said the changes altered the science standards in ways that invited theistic interpretations. The new definition called for students to learn about “the best evidence for modern evolutionary theory, but also to learn about areas where scientists are raising scientific criticisms of the theory.”

In one of many “additional specificities” that the board added to the standards, it stated, “Biological evolution postulates an unguided natural process that has no discernable direction or goal.”


John Calvert, manager of the Intelligent Design Network in Shawnee Mission and a lawyer who wrote material for the board advocating the new science standards, said they were not intended to advance religion.

“What we are trying to do is insert objectivity, take the bias out of the religious standard that now favors the nontheistic religion of evolution,” Mr. Calvert said.

Janet Waugh, a car dealer and the only moderate Democrat on the board whose seat is up for election, said that just because some people were challenging evolution did not mean their views belonged in the curriculum.

“When the mainstream scientific community determines a theory is correct, that’s when it should be in the schools,” Ms. Waugh said. “The intelligent design people are trying to cut in line.”

The races have been hard-fought. With the majority of the 100,000 registered Republicans in Mr. McDonald’s northeast Kansas district usually ignoring primary elections, a few hundred ballots could easily be the margin of victory.

So Mr. McDonald, who with $35,000 is the lead fund-raiser among the candidates, printed newsletters showing his opponent, the conservative board member John W. Bacon, with a big red slash through his face and the slogan, “Time to Bring Home the Bacon.” Mr. Bacon did not respond to several calls for a response.

But many of the homeowners Mr. McDonald visited Friday night showed little interest in the race. Jack Campbell, a medical center security director, opened the door warily, and when Mr. McDonald recited his pitch, seemed disappointed. “I thought I won some sweepstakes,” Mr. Campbell said.

Last Thursday night at Fort Hays State University, Ms. Morris debated her moderate Republican challenger, Sally Cauble, a former teacher, and the Democratic candidate, Tim Cruz, a former mayor of Garden City, whom Ms. Morris once accused of being an illegal immigrant. (He said he was third-generation American, and Ms. Morris apologized.)

The audience asked about Kansas being ridiculed across the country for its stance on evolution.

“I did not write the jokes,” Ms. Morris said.

Spectators split on the winner.

“There are so many more important issues in Kansas right now,” said Cheryl Shepherd-Adams, a science teacher. “The issue is definitely a wedge issue, and I don’t want to see our community divided.”

    Evolution’s Backers in Kansas Mount a Counterattack, NYT, 1.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/us/01evolution.html?hp&ex=1154491200&en=bb3d3e73e4d597cd&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Our Lady of Discord

July 30, 2006
The New York Times
By SUSAN HANSEN

IT takes a singular sense of purpose to turn a lone Michigan pizza joint into a multibillion-dollar global brand. Yet the founder of Domino’s Pizza, Thomas S. Monaghan, certainly had it more four decades ago, when he bought his first restaurant in Ypsilanti, Mich., near Detroit — and he has brought that same sense of mission to the task of giving his pizza fortune away.

Since netting about $1 billion from the 1998 sale of Domino’s to Bain Capital, Mr. Monaghan, 69, has become one of the leading philanthropists in the country and the biggest benefactor of conservative Catholic institutions.

In the past eight years, his Ave Maria Foundation, based in Ann Arbor, Mich., has donated $140 million to promote conservative Catholic education, media and other organizations, including Detroit-area parochial grade schools, a law school and small regional colleges in Michigan and Nicaragua, along with radio stations and a fellowship group for Catholic business leaders.

His boldest charitable venture by far, however, is Ave Maria University, a four-year liberal arts campus under construction 30 miles northeast of Naples, Fla., to which Mr. Monaghan has donated or pledged $285 million so far. Along with the university, which enrolled its first students three years ago on a temporary campus, he and a local developer are building an adjoining new town called Ave Maria.

The bar for the school has been set high, with plans to eventually attract up to 6,000 students to what supporters, including Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, predict will be a top-tier academic institution devoted to the Catholic faith.

Mr. Monaghan, who has called the Florida campus and town “God’s will,” has even loftier intentions. He has said that he sees the university, which says it adheres to a strict interpretation of Catholic doctrine, as a chance to save souls. “I’m a businessman. I get to the bottom line,” Mr. Monaghan, who declined to be interviewed for this article, told The Orlando Sentinel in 2004. “And the bottom line is to help people get to heaven.”

Yet as he aims for the divine, Mr. Monaghan has been facing some unexpected earthly trials, including a revolt at his law school in Ann Arbor and sharp criticism by many of the conservative Catholics who once supported his foundation’s projects.

In many ways, Mr. Monaghan’s troubles illustrate how difficult it can be for wealthy, driven entrepreneurs to make the transition to full-time philanthropy, particularly when they have single-minded ideas about how they want their money spent. Traits that make successful business leaders — ego, ambition, determination, even a touch of imperiousness — do not necessarily go over well in charitable work, causing even the most well-intentioned projects to founder.

As the legendary investor Warren E. Buffett recently noted when he donated most of his $40 billion fortune to an established foundation rather than create one of his own, making a mint — as difficult as that is — can be easier than giving it away.

As he tries to build a new university and town in his own image, Mr. Monaghan has been experiencing some of those difficulties firsthand. Faculty members, students and parents tied to his Detroit-area schools have complained that he runs his charitable foundation like a sole proprietorship, starting and abandoning projects as whim strikes him. And they characterize his new Florida university as a vanity venture that could well prove to be a colossal waste of cash.

“It all belongs to Tom Monaghan; that’s the problem,” said Therese M. Bower of Cincinnati, whose son attended Ave Maria College, one of the schools Mr. Monaghan founded in Michigan. His foundation moved to close the school’s Ypsilanti campus to focus on building his university in Florida.

“If Tom were a real philanthropist,” said Jay W. McNally, the former director of communications and advancement at the college, “he would donate his money and step off.” Mr. McNally said the school let him go after he told federal officials that some financial aid for students in Michigan had been diverted to Florida; Ave Maria University later returned $259,000 in federal money.Mr. Monaghan’s many defenders, including Bowie K. Kuhn, the former baseball commissioner, and Michael Novak, a Catholic theologian, dismissed much of the criticism as carping by academics. “If it weren’t Monaghan, it would be dissatisfaction with whomever,” says Mr. Novak, an Ave Maria University trustee.

Mr. Kuhn, who is on the board of the Ave Maria School of Law, said Mr. Monaghan had every right to use his money as he wished. “Tom makes very good judgments, and he sticks to his guns,” he said.

Mr. McNally, a former editor of the Detroit archdiocese’s newspaper, said he too had admired Mr. Monaghan’s determination. Back in the 1980’s, Mr. McNally recalled, he and other conservative Catholics cheered Mr. Monaghan’s donations to anti-abortion causes and his refusal to withdraw that support even when abortion-rights groups called for a boycott of Domino’s.

He and other conservative Catholics were equally enthusiastic when Mr. Monaghan’s foundation began its push into higher education eight years ago, starting Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti and the Ave Maria School of Law in neighboring Ann Arbor, and taking over the administration of St. Mary’s College in nearby Orchard Lake, Mich.

Many Detroit-area Catholics said they gave up jobs and teaching posts elsewhere to work at the schools, with some faculty members moving from hundreds of miles away because, as a former Ave Maria College biology professor, Andrew J. Messaros, recalled, they were committed to promoting a faithful version of core Catholic teachings.

“I bought into the whole vision lock, stock and barrel,” Professor Messaros said. He added that he took a $16,000 pay cut from a tenure-track position at the West Virginia University School of Medicine to teach at Ave Maria in mid-2003.

Mr. Monaghan had considered building Ave Maria University, along with a 250-foot crucifix, in Ann Arbor Township, but local officials denied him the necessary zoning changes in 2002. That fall, he announced that the Barron Collier Company, a Florida developer, had donated 750 acres of farmland to the university on the northwest edge of the Everglades. His new plan was to build Ave Maria University in Florida, while investing another $50 million in a separate partnership with Barron Collier to build the adjoining Ave Maria town.

NICHOLAS J. HEALY JR., who was president of Ave Maria College in Michigan and is now president of the Florida university, promptly set up a temporary campus near Naples. It opened with about 100 students in a retirement complex in fall 2003; enrollment has grown to nearly 400 students.

“We’ve tried to create an environment traditional Catholics can be comfortable with,” Mr. Healy said, adding that the devotion to the faith was put into action in many ways: from single-sex dorms and daily rosary walks to a scholarship that the school, in keeping with what it describes as its strong pro-life ethic, recently began offering in the name of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman whose husband won a bitter court fight in 2004 to authorize doctors to stop life support.

While Mr. Healy was opening the Florida university, financing for Mr. Monaghan’s projects in Michigan began to disappear. In late 2002, the foundation said it would no longer support St. Mary’s. An expected shutdown of the school was averted only when another Catholic institution, Madonna University in nearby Livonia, Mich., agreed to take it over.

In Ypsilanti, the news that Ave Maria College would be merged into the new university in Florida went down a little easier — at least initially — given that Mr. Monaghan pledged to keep the Michigan campus open until 2007, so that the school’s 230 students could stay and finish their degrees.

Despite that assurance, however, Professor Messaros said that by the fall of 2003 school officials were pressuring him and other faculty members to move to Florida quickly — or risk losing their jobs. “Their attitude was, ‘This is what we’re going to do. Take it or leave it,’ ” he said.

Mrs. Bower, whose son Paul was a junior at Ave Maria College when the move to Florida began to accelerate, said she became concerned that the Michigan campus was being deserted. She grew more anxious in 2004 when word got out that school administrators in Florida had tried to have most of the books at the Michigan campus’s library shipped to Naples.

“I thought, ‘Wait! There are still students there. They can’t just take all the stuff,’ ” said Mrs. Bower, who created a Web site — geocities.com/aveparents — to help keep the Michigan campus intact.

Another parent — Edward N. Peters, who taught canon law in a theology program now based at Ave Maria University — threatened to sue if the campus was dismantled.

“It has become clear that Tom Monaghan regards Ave Maria not as a kind of public trust but rather as his personal domain which he can effectively treat however he wants,” Professor Peters, whose son attended the college, wrote in a June 2004 letter to the college board. He added that since Mr. Monaghan shifted his attention to Florida, he had cut support for several of his Michigan projects, including a weekly Catholic newspaper and a new convent. “Ironically, the very legacy that was being built up with Monaghan’s help is now being torn down at his will,” Professor Peters wrote. “It is a tragic and scandalous waste of the human and financial resources given by God.”

In late 2004, Father Neil J. Roy, Ave Maria College’s academic dean, actually did sue Mr. Monaghan and the school’s trustees in a bid to stall the Michigan campus’s closure, but a state court judge dismissed the suit last September. The exodus of faculty and students to Florida and elsewhere continued, and last year school officials began making cash buyout offers to the 30 or so students who had planned to continue studies on the Ypsilanti campus in 2007.

Paul R. Roney, executive director of Mr. Monaghan’s foundation, said he understood that the decision to shift resources to Florida was difficult for some in Ypsilanti to accept. But he added that Mr. Monaghan had honored his promise to keep the campus operating through 2007 — albeit now with just three students and a handful of professors. “Any pledges that were made have been more than fulfilled,” Mr. Roney said.

Despite all the criticism, Mr. Healy, Ave Maria University’s president, said that most professors in Michigan happily relocated to Florida.

For a while, the Ave Maria School of Law seemed immune to the strife. Its enrollment, now about 380, was growing, and the American Bar Association had granted it full accreditation. But Mr. Monaghan wants to relocate that school to Florida, too, upsetting teachers, students and alumni. Opponents say it is crazy to leave an intellectual center like Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan, for an undeveloped outpost on the edge of the Everglades.

“There’s nothing there yet, with all due respect,” said Chris McGowan, a law school alumnus who noted that students in Ann Arbor have easy access to a federal courthouse and many local internship opportunities.

He and others who are fighting the move said the only reason the school’s board was even considering it was that Mr. Monaghan, the chairman, had invested more than $330 million in the Florida university and town and wanted the law school there to shore up that investment.

One veteran board member — Charles E. Rice, an emeritus professor of law at Notre Dame University — tried to make the case against the move. But he said that Mr. Monaghan and other board members, including the law school’s dean, Bernard Dobranski, “did not want a contrary voice,” so last fall they adopted term-limit bylaws and ejected him from the board.

Dean Dobranski denied the bylaws change was directed at Professor Rice, noting that three other members left the board at the same time.

Faculty members, students and alumni rallied around Professor Rice, however, and since last fall they have mounted a campaign that has included pointed attacks against Mr. Monaghan and resolutions calling on Dean Dobranski to resign.

“The bigger issue is school governance,” said Jason B. Negri, president of the law school’s alumni association. Specifically, he criticized Mr. Monaghan’s insistence on operating the school like a private business and what he said was the board’s failure to stand up to him.

MR. KUHN rejected that criticism. “This is not a bunch of trained dogs,” he said of his fellow directors, adding that the board would not make any decision on relocating the law school to Florida until a feasibility study on the move was completed and members had seen the results.

“The key question is where we will thrive in the long term,” said Dean Dobranski. He pointed out that Mr. Monaghan had given the law school $50 million, so “it’s not unreasonable for him to say ‘I think the move is a good idea.’ ” Dean Dobranski added, “He’s to be commended for how he’s used his wealth.”

At the university’s construction site in Florida, the fruits of Mr. Monaghan’s generosity are coming into view. Miles of pipes and electricity lines have been laid, and buildings are going up. Mr. Healy, the president, said the school should be out of its temporary home and on the new campus by August 2007.

Not that the process has been easy — or cheap. Mr. Healy said damage from hurricanes last year and the year before, along with strong demand for raw materials in China has sent labor, cement and steel prices soaring — nearly doubling building costs and eating up Mr. Monaghan’s money faster than expected. Indeed, in the next year, Mr. Roney said, the Ave Maria Foundation’s assets might drop to as little as $15 million from $251 million in 1999.

As a result, school officials have had to scale back plans. For now, they have settled for putting up only about half of the 14 buildings they originally intended to complete in the first phase of campus construction. Mr. Healy is counting on more money from Mr. Monaghan as houses are sold in the adjoining town, because Mr. Monaghan has promised to donate his share of profits, expected to exceed $100 million, to the university. “Very few schools have this kind of start-up capital,” Mr. Healy said.

But it could be several years or more before the university sees much of that cash, given that home sales will not start until later this year, amid a cooling housing market, and the whole town — which has been planned to include 11,000 homes, a retail district and an 18-hole golf course — will not be completed until around 2015.

IN the meantime, Mr. Novak, the Ave Maria trustee, said the university would have to raise millions of dollars to cover salaries and other operating expenses and to keep construction, expected to cost at least $1 billion over the next 50 years, moving forward. The school has raised about $20 million in the last three years and is now expanding efforts to sell “naming opportunities” for campus buildings. Mr. Novak said he was hopeful that that initiative would attract some major donors, but he added, “until you actually get them in the door you don’t have them.”

Kate Cousino, the 2004 salutatorian of Ave Maria College, said she would not be writing any checks. In fact, she said that she and other Ave Maria graduates recently started an alternative alumni group because they didn’t want fund-raisers for the Florida campus asking them for donations.

She and other critics of Mr. Monaghan say that other like-minded Catholics will hesitate to hand over money now that, at least in conservative Catholic circles, word of his troubles has gotten out. “I think he’s really turned off a lot of his target market,” said Terrence L. McKeegan, an Ave Maria law school graduate.

Mr. McKeegan, who now works for a human-rights group at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, said recent fund-raising letters suggested that the university may be facing a cash crunch. One letter signed by Mr. Monaghan, for example, said that steeper construction costs had hampered the university’s ability to buy books for its library, and urgently appealed for donations. Mr. McKeegan and others predicted that the university would wind up amounting to far less than the first-rate institution Mr. Monaghan has envisioned in spite of all the money he has put into it.

Professor Messaros called the millions that Mr. Monaghan has spent “mind-numbing.” His fortune could have been spent helping the poor or assisting established universities or on any number of better causes, instead of on building what he called “a ‘Citizen Kane’ monument to waste,” Professor Messaros added.

Mr. Healy, the university president, and Mr. Novak, the trustee, denied that that the controversy had hurt fund-raising efforts. “We haven’t seen any decline in our support at all,” Mr. Healy said, adding that the extra attention could even help. “The more publicity there is,” he said, “the better off you are.”

Mr. Novak said that many of the difficulties Mr. Monaghan and university officials have faced are not surprising. “All good things are fraught with troubles,” he said. “You just have to work through them.” The school already has a standout theology program, a strong sacred music program and a devoted student body, he said. He said he had faith the university would thrive over time.

“I feel very strongly,” Mr. Novak said, “that this is something the Lord wants.”

    Our Lady of Discord, NYT, 30.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/business/yourmoney/30monaghan.html

Families Challenging Religious Influence in Delaware Schools

July 29, 2006
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

GEORGETOWN, Del. — After her family moved to this small town 30 years ago, Mona Dobrich grew up as the only Jew in school. Mrs. Dobrich, 39, married a local man, bought the house behind her parents’ home and brought up her two children as Jews.

For years, she and her daughter, Samantha, listened to Christian prayers at public school potlucks, award dinners and parent-teacher group meetings, she said. But at Samantha’s high school graduation in June 2004, a minister’s prayer proclaiming Jesus as the only way to the truth nudged Mrs. Dobrich to act.

“It was as if no matter how much hard work, no matter how good a person you are, the only way you’ll ever be anything is through Jesus Christ,” Mrs. Dobrich said. “He said those words, and I saw Sam’s head snap and her start looking around, like, ‘Where’s my mom? Where’s my mom?’ And all I wanted to do was run up and take her in my arms.”

After the graduation, Mrs. Dobrich asked the Indian River district school board to consider prayers that were more generic and, she said, less exclusionary. As news of her request spread, many local Christians saw it as an effort to limit their free exercise of religion, residents said. Anger spilled on to talk radio, in letters to the editor and at school board meetings attended by hundreds of people carrying signs praising Jesus.

“What people here are saying is, ‘Stop interfering with our traditions, stop interfering with our faith and leave our country the way we knew it to be,’ ” said Dan Gaffney, a host at WGMD, a talk radio station in Rehoboth, and a supporter of prayer in the school district.

After receiving several threats, Mrs. Dobrich took her son, Alex, to Wilmington in the fall of 2004, planning to stay until the controversy blew over. It never has.

The Dobriches eventually sued the Indian River School District, challenging what they asserted was the pervasiveness of religion in the schools and seeking financial damages. They have been joined by “the Does,” a family still in the school district who have remained anonymous because of the response against the Dobriches.

Meanwhile, a Muslim family in another school district here in Sussex County has filed suit, alleging proselytizing in the schools and the harassment of their daughters.

The move to Wilmington, the Dobriches said, wrecked them financially, leading them to sell their house and their daughter to drop out of Columbia University.

The dispute here underscores the rising tensions over religion in public schools.

“We don’t have data on the number of lawsuits, but anecdotally, people think it has never been so active — the degree to which these conflicts erupt in schools and the degree to which they are litigated,” said Tom Hutton, a staff lawyer at the National School Boards Association.

More religion probably exists in schools now than in decades because of the role religious conservatives play in politics and the passage of certain education laws over the last 25 years, including the Equal Access Act in 1984, said Charles C. Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, a research and education group.

“There are communities largely of one faith, and despite all the court rulings and Supreme Court decisions, they continue to promote one faith,” Mr. Haynes said. “They don’t much care what the minority complains about. They’re just convinced that what they are doing is good for kids and what America is all about.”

Dr. Donald G. Hattier, a member of the Indian River school board, said the district had changed many policies in response to Mrs. Dobrich’s initial complaints. But the board unanimously rejected a proposed settlement of the Dobriches’ lawsuit.

“There were a couple of provisions that were unacceptable to the board,” said Jason Gosselin, a lawyer for the board. “The parties are working in good faith to move closer to settlement.”

Until recently, it was safe to assume that everyone in the Indian River district was Christian, said the Rev. Mark Harris, an Episcopal priest at St. Peter’s Church in Lewes.

But much has changed in Sussex County over the last 30 years. The county, in southern Delaware, has resort enclaves like Rehoboth Beach, to which outsiders bring their cash and, often, liberal values. Inland, in the area of Georgetown, the county seat, the land is still a lush patchwork of corn and soybean fields, with a few poultry plants. But developers are turning more fields into tracts of rambling homes. The Hispanic population is booming. There are enough Reform Jews, Muslims and Quakers to set up their own centers and groups, Mr. Harris said.

In interviews with a dozen people here and comments on the radio by a half-dozen others, the overwhelming majority insisted, usually politely, that prayer should stay in the schools.

“We have a way of doing things here, and it’s not going to change to accommodate a very small minority,’’ said Kenneth R. Stevens, 41, a businessman sitting in the Georgetown Diner. “If they feel singled out, they should find another school or excuse themselves from those functions. It’s our way of life.”

The Dobrich and Doe legal complaint portrays a district in which children were given special privileges for being in Bible club, Bibles were distributed in 2003 at an elementary school, Christian prayer was routine at school functions and teachers evangelized.

“Because Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior, I will speak out for him,” said the Rev. Jerry Fike of Mount Olivet Brethren Church, who gave the prayer at Samantha’s graduation. “The Bible encourages that.” Mr. Fike continued: “Ultimately, he is the one I have to please. If doing that places me at odds with the law of the land, I still have to follow him.”

Mrs. Dobrich, who is Orthodox, said that when she was a girl, Christians here had treated her faith with respectful interest. Now, she said, her son was ridiculed in school for wearing his yarmulke. She described a classmate of his drawing a picture of a pathway to heaven for everyone except “Alex the Jew.”

Mrs. Dobrich’s decision to leave her hometown and seek legal help came after a school board meeting in August 2004 on the issue of prayer. Dr. Hattier had called WGMD to discuss the issue, and Mr. Gaffney and others encouraged people to go the meeting. Hundreds showed up.

A homemaker active in her children’s schools, Mrs. Dobrich said she had asked the board to develop policies that would leave no one feeling excluded because of faith. People booed and rattled signs that read “Jesus Saves,” she recalled. Her son had written a short statement, but he felt so intimidated that his sister read it for him. In his statement, Alex, who was 11 then, said: “I feel bad when kids in my class call me ‘Jew boy.’ I do not want to move away from the house I have lived in forever.”

Later, another speaker turned to Mrs. Dobrich and said, according to several witnesses, “If you want people to stop calling him ‘Jew boy,’ you tell him to give his heart to Jesus.”

Immediately afterward, the Dobriches got threatening phone calls. Samantha had enrolled in Columbia, and Mrs. Dobrich decided to go to Wilmington temporarily.

But the controversy simmered, keeping Mrs. Dobrich and Alex away. The cost of renting an apartment in Wilmington led the Dobriches to sell their home here. Mrs. Dobrich’s husband, Marco, a school bus driver and transportation coordinator, makes about $30,000 a year and has stayed in town to care for Mrs. Dobrich’s ailing parents. Mr. Dobrich declined to comment. Samantha left Columbia because of the financial strain.

The only thing to flourish, Mrs. Dobrich said, was her faith. Her children, she said, “have so much pride in their religion now.”

“Alex wears his yarmulke all the time. He never takes it off.”

    Families Challenging Religious Influence in Delaware Schools, NYT, 29.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/29/us/29delaware.html

Most States Fail Demands Set Out in Education Law

July 25, 2006
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

Most states failed to meet federal requirements that all teachers be “highly qualified” in core teaching fields and that state programs for testing students be up to standards by the end of the past school year, according to the federal government.

The deadline was set by the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush’s effort to make all American students proficient in reading and math by 2014. But the Education Department found that no state had met the deadline for qualified teachers, and it gave only 10 states full approval of their testing systems.

Faced with such findings, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who took office promising flexible enforcement of the law, has toughened her stance, leaving several states in danger of losing parts of their federal aid.

In the past few weeks, Ms. Spellings has flatly rejected as inadequate the testing systems in Maine and Nebraska. She has also said that nine states are so far behind in providing highly qualified teachers that they may face sanctions, and she has accused California of failing to provide federally required alternatives to troubled schools. California could be fined as much as $4.25 million.

The potential fines are far higher than any the Education Department has levied over the law, and officials in several states, already upset with many of the law’s provisions, have privately expressed further anger over the threat of fines. But Ms. Spellings faces pressure for firm enforcement of the law from a broad array of groups, including corporations and civil rights organizations.

“In the early part of her tenure, Secretary Spellings seemed more interested in finding reasons to waive the law’s requirements than to enforce them,” said Clint Bolick, president of the Alliance for School Choice, a group based in Phoenix that supports vigorous enforcement of provisions that give students the right to transfer from failing schools. “More recently, she seems intent on holding states’ feet to the fire.”

In an interview, Ms. Spellings acknowledged her shift in emphasis.

“I want states to know that Congress and the president mean business on the law,” she said. She has stressed that message in part, she said, because the deadlines, which expired this month, were not met, and because lawmakers have been asking her whether states are meeting the law’s requirements.

“I’m enforcing the law — does that make me tough?” she said. “Last year it was, ‘We’re marching together toward the deadline,’ but now it’s time for, ‘Your homework is due.’ ”

Douglas D. Christensen, the Nebraska education commissioner, has accused Ms. Spellings and her subordinates of treating Nebraska in a “mean-spirited, arbitrary and heavy-handed way” after their announcement on June 30 that the state’s testing system was “nonapproved” and that they intended to withhold $127,000 in federal money.

In an interview in Lincoln, Neb., Mr. Christensen said he first realized the administration’s attitude had changed in April, when Raymond Simon, deputy education secretary, addressed most of the 50 state school superintendents at a gathering in Washington.

“Ray went on a 12-minute diatribe of ‘You folks just ain’t getting it done’ and said the department would be strictly interpreting the law from here on,” Mr. Christensen said.

Mr. Simon disputed that account — “I’m not a diatribe type of guy,” he said — but acknowledged that he had spoken bluntly.

“I tried to emphasize that we continue to be partners,” Mr. Simon said, “but that there are some things we cannot be flexible on.”

Mr. Bush signed the act into law in January 2002. Under his first education secretary, Rod Paige, legislators, educators and teachers unions criticized the law’s many rules and what they said was its overemphasis on standardized testing.

After Ms. Spellings took office in January 2005, she allowed some states to renegotiate the ways they enforced the law, and on major issues she offered ways to comply that prevented thousands of schools from being designated as failing.

Her efforts softened the outcry from states. But they brought criticism from corporate executives who hoped the law would shake up schools to protect American competitiveness. Criticism also came from civil rights groups that wanted the law to eliminate educational disparities between whites and minorities, and from groups angry that although the law required districts to help students in failing schools transfer out, only 1 percent of eligible students had done so.

Some experts say most parents do not want to remove children from neighborhood schools. But others say districts have subverted the program, partly by informing parents about their options too late.

Mr. Bolick’s group, the Alliance for School Choice, used a similar argument in a complaint filed this year against the Los Angeles Unified School District, where 250,000 students were eligible for transfers in 2005-6, but only about 500 successfully transferred. That complaint generated considerable news coverage and moved Ms. Spellings to action.

On May 15, she wrote every state, linking the “unacceptably low” participation in transfer programs to the “poor and uneven quality” of many districts’ implementation. “We are prepared to take significant enforcement action,” she said.

At the California Department of Education, Diane Levin, the state’s No Child Left Behind administrator, said she had assumed that California was on solid ground because a federal review of its enforcement of the law was ending positively.

But then California received a letter from Ms. Spellings’s office demanding extensive new documentation by Aug. 15 on the transfer programs in the state’s 20 largest districts. Officials warned California that if the documentation proved inadequate, the government would withhold part of the $700 million the state was to receive this fall for high-poverty schools, said Ms. Spellings’s spokesman, Kevin Sullivan.

Ms. Levin said California felt whipsawed. “We’re doing everything the law asks us to do,” she said, “which in a state this size is a huge amount of work, and we’re treated like we’re doing nothing.”

Dozens of other states have also felt the tougher enforcement.

In May, federal officials ruled that nine states were so far from meeting the teacher qualification provision that they could lose federal money. Ms. Spellings said she would decide on the penalties after August, when states must outline plans for getting 100 percent of teachers qualified.

At the end of June, Henry L. Johnson, an assistant secretary of education, wrote to 34 states, including New York and New Jersey, saying that their tests had major problems and that they must provide new documentation during a period of mandatory oversight.

Dr. Johnson warned some states that federal money might be withheld. And he rejected the testing programs in Maine and Nebraska. His letter to Maine said $114,000 would be withheld unless the state could change Washington’s mind.

Nebraska is the only state allowed to meet the testing requirements with separate exams written by teachers in its 250 districts rather than with one statewide test.

Dr. Johnson’s letter to Nebraska said that although locally written tests were permissible, the state had not shown it was holding all districts to a high standard.

Before announcing that decision, Dr. Johnson visited the Papillion-La Vista School District, south of Omaha.

Harlan H. Metschke, Papillion’s superintendent, said he had told Mr. Johnson that Nebraska’s tests helped teachers focus on students’ learning needs, unlike standardized tests, which compared students from one school with another.

“But federal officials have the mentality that there has to be one state test,” Mr. Metschke said.

    Most States Fail Demands Set Out in Education Law, NYT, 25.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/education/25child.html?hp&ex=1153886400&en=714139991b389efa&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Feeling Strains, Baptist Colleges Cut Church Ties

July 22, 2006
The New York Times
By ALAN FINDER

GEORGETOWN, Ky. — The request seemed simple enough to the Rev. Hershael W. York, then the president of the Kentucky Baptist Convention. He asked Georgetown College, a small Baptist liberal arts institution here, to consider hiring for its religion department someone who would teach a literal interpretation of the Bible.

But to William H. Crouch Jr., the president of Georgetown, it was among the last straws in a struggle that had involved issues like who could be on the board of trustees and whether the college encouraged enough freedom of inquiry to qualify for a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Dr. Crouch and his trustees decided it was time to end the college’s 63-year affiliation with the religious denomination. “From my point of view, it was about academic freedom,’’ Dr. Crouch said. “I sat for 25 years and watched my denomination become much more narrow and, in terms of education, much more interested in indoctrination.’’

Georgetown is among a half-dozen colleges and universities whose ties with state Baptist conventions have been severed in the last four years, part of a broad realignment in which more than a dozen Southern Baptist universities, including Wake Forest and Furman, have ended affiliations over the last two decades. Georgetown’s parting was ultimately amicable. But many have been tense, even bitter.

In Georgia and Missouri, disputes over who controls the boards of Baptist colleges led to prolonged litigation. In Tennessee, a clash over whether Belmont University in Nashville could appoint non-Baptists to its board led the Tennessee Baptist Convention to vote in May to remove the entire board. Belmont’s trustees are still running the university, and while negotiations are continuing, the battle for control could end up in court.

“The future of Baptist higher education has rarely been more fragile,’’ R. Kirby Godsey, the former president of Mercer University in Macon, Ga., said in a speech in Atlanta in June. The Georgia Baptist Convention voted last November to sever ties with Mercer.

The issues vary from state to state. But many Southern Baptist colleges and their state conventions have been battling over money, control of boards of trustees, whether the Bible must be interpreted literally, how evolution is taught, the propriety of some books for college courses and of some plays for campus performances and whether cultural and religious diversity should be encouraged.

At the root of the conflicts is the question of how much the colleges should reflect the views of their denomination. They are part of the continuing battle among Southern Baptists for control of their church’s institutions.

More than 20 years ago, theological and cultural conservatives gained control over moderates in the Southern Baptist Convention, the denomination’s broadest body, representing more than 16 million worshipers. Similar shifts then occurred in many, but not all, state Baptist conventions, which have considerable independence.

The struggle has continued. Last month, the Southern Baptist Convention elected a president who promised to be “a big-tent conservative” and defeated candidates supported by the convention’s establishment.

Southern Baptist colleges are affiliated with the state conventions, and it does not make sense to many members of the conventions to provide significant annual subsidies to Baptist colleges that they view as out of tune with conservative positions on central religious tenets, including how to interpret the Bible. “I did feel that Georgetown was not on the same page as most Kentucky Baptists,’’ said Dr. York, who was president of the Kentucky Baptist Convention last year.

But efforts to rein in what many Southern Baptists see as inappropriate departures from religious orthodoxy have looked to many professors and college administrators like efforts to limit academic freedom.

“The convention itself in its national and state organizations has moved so far to the right that previous diversity on the faculty and among the trustees is no longer possible,’’ said Bill Leonard, dean of the Divinity School at Wake Forest. “More theological control of the curriculum and the faculty has been the result.’’

David W. Key, director of Baptist Studies at the Candler School of Theology at Emory, put it more starkly. “The real underlying issue is that fundamentalism in the Southern Baptist form is incompatible with higher education,’’ Professor Key said. “In fundamentalism, you have all the truths. In education, you’re searching for truths.’’

The state conventions do not own the colleges, but in most cases they approve trustees and provide annual subsidies. Their power over the boards has often been at the center of contention, with the stakes often involving academic direction.

“We don’t want to cut our ties,’’ said R. Alton Lacey, president of Missouri Baptist University, which has been fighting the Missouri Baptist Convention in court since 2002 over who controls the university’s board. “We just don’t want the conventions politicizing our boards.’’

The Georgia Baptist Convention’s severing of ties with Mercer University followed an unsuccessful effort by the state convention, which did not have the authority to appoint the university’s trustees, to gain that power. Many Baptist leaders were also troubled by a forum at Mercer on issues affecting gay men and lesbians, Dr. Godsey, the university’s former president, said.

Officials at Georgetown had long been concerned that differences with state Baptists might become irreconcilable. In 1987, college officials negotiated an agreement with state Baptist leaders that allowed either side to end the affiliation, with four years’ notice. Both sides said that they had wanted to continue the relationship, but that the strains had recently become acute.

Georgetown asked the Kentucky Baptist Convention two years ago to allow 25 percent of the college’s trustees to be non-Baptist, but the proposal was rejected. Only about half of Georgetown’s students are Baptist, and less than half of the alumni are Baptist, Dr. Crouch, the college’s president, said.

“I realized that our fund-raising depended on getting non-Baptists on our board,’’ Dr. Crouch said.

Then, a year ago, the Kentucky convention turned down a nominee for Georgetown’s board for the first time. Around the same time, Dr. York asked the college to look for a religion professor who would teach theologically conservative positions.

“You ought to have some professor on your faculty who believes Adam and Eve were the first humans, that they actually existed,’’ Dr. York said.

Dr. Crouch and Georgetown’s trustees decided it was time to exercise their escape clause. The college and the convention wanted to avoid the kind of contention becoming common in neighboring states.

“I think the fear was that I was going to lead a kind of takeover,’’ said Dr. York, a professor and associate dean at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. “But I’m only going to fight a battle that I can win and that I want to win.’’

Kentucky convention delegates voted overwhelmingly in November to approve a separation; the group agreed to phase out its $1.4 million annual contribution to Georgetown over four years, and the college became self-governing.

Dr. Crouch noted that some Baptist universities that severed ties with state conventions in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s have become essentially secular. He hopes that will not happen at Georgetown.

“We call ourselves a Christian college grounded in historic Baptist principles,’’ he said.

Georgetown continues to pursue serious academic ambitions, like pursuing a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the college honor society. Only 270 colleges and universities have Phi Beta Kappa chapters, and there are rigorous standards for new ones. Among the most important requirements are freedom of inquiry and expression on campus, along with respect for religious, ethnic and racial diversity.

A Georgetown requirement that tenured professors be Christian could pose problems with the honor society. The college must also improve on a number of specific standards, including increasing the number of books in its library and reducing professors’ course loads. Phi Beta Kappa considers applications over a three-year cycle, and Dr. Crouch hopes Georgetown will be ready to reapply in 2009.

“Phi Beta Kappa is the gold standard,’’ said Rosemary Allen, the Georgetown provost.

Some of the few students on campus this summer said they supported Georgetown’s decision to become independent and to improve its academic standing, although they acknowledged they had not followed events closely.

“It’s good to go to a college that’s religious, but it doesn’t really matter to me,’’ said John Sadlon, a sophomore. “What matters to me is getting my education.’’

    Feeling Strains, Baptist Colleges Cut Church Ties, NYT, 22.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/education/22baptist.html?hp&ex=1153627200&en=6d7fde21bc163e72&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Public Schools Perform Near Private Ones in Study

July 15, 2006
The New Yorrk Times
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

WASHINGTON, July 14 — The Education Department reported on Friday that children in public schools generally performed as well or better in reading and mathematics than comparable children in private schools. The exception was in eighth-grade reading, where the private school counterparts fared better.

The report, which compared fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores in 2003 from nearly 7,000 public schools and more than 530 private schools, found that fourth graders attending public school did significantly better in math than comparable fourth graders in private schools. Additionally, it found that students in conservative Christian schools lagged significantly behind their counterparts in public schools on eighth-grade math.

The study, carrying the imprimatur of the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the Education Department, was contracted to the Educational Testing Service and delivered to the department last year.

It went through a lengthy peer review and includes an extended section of caveats about its limitations and calling such a comparison of public and private schools “of modest utility.”

Its release, on a summer Friday, was made with without a news conference or comment from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.

Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, the union for millions of teachers, said the findings showed that public schools were “doing an outstanding job” and that if the results had been favorable to private schools, “there would have been press conferences and glowing statements about private schools.”

“The administration has been giving public schools a beating since the beginning” to advance its political agenda, Mr. Weaver said, of promoting charter schools and taxpayer-financed vouchers for private schools as alternatives to failing traditional public schools.

A spokesman for the Education Department, Chad Colby, offered no praise for public schools and said he did not expect the findings to influence policy. Mr. Colby emphasized the caveat, “An overall comparison of the two types of schools is of modest utility.”

“We’re not just for public schools or private schools,’’ he said. “We’re for good schools.”

The report mirrors and expands on similar findings this year by Christopher and Sarah Theule Lubienski, a husband-and-wife team at the University of Illinois who examined just math scores. The new study looked at reading scores, too.

The study, along with one of charter schools, was commissioned by the former head of the national Center for Education Statistics, Robert Lerner, an appointee of President Bush, at a time preliminary data suggested that charter schools, which are given public money but are run by private groups, fared no better at educating children than traditional public schools.

Proponents of charter schools had said the data did not take into account the predominance of children in their schools who had already had problems in neighborhood schools.

The two new studies put test scores in context by studying the children’s backgrounds and taking into account factors like race, ethnicity, income and parents’ educational backgrounds to make the comparisons more meaningful. The extended study of charter schools has not been released.

Findings favorable to private schools would likely have given a lift to administration efforts to offer children in ailing public schools the option of attending private schools.

An Education Department official who insisted on anonymity because of the climate surrounding the report, said researchers were "extra cautious" in reviewing it and were aware of its “political sensitivity.”

The official said the warning against drawing unsupported conclusions was expanded somewhat as the report went through in the review.

The report cautions, for example, against concluding that children do better because of the type of school as opposed to unknown factors. It also warns of great variations of performance among private schools, making a blanket comparison of public and private schools “of modest utility.” And the scores on which its findings are based reflect only a snapshot of student performance at a point in time and say nothing about individual student progress in different settings.

Arnold Goldstein of the National Center for Education Statistics said that the review was meticulous, but that it was not unusual for the center.

Mr. Goldstein said there was no political pressure to alter the findings.

Students in private schools typically score higher than those in public schools, a finding confirmed in the study. The report then dug deeper to compare students of like racial, economic and social backgrounds. When it did that, the private school advantage disappeared in all areas except eighth-grade reading.

And in math, 4th graders attending public school were nearly half a year ahead of comparable students in private school, according to the report.

The report separated private schools by type and found that among private school students, those in Lutheran schools performed best, while those in conservative Christian schools did worst.

In eighth-grade reading, children in conservative Christian schools scored no better than comparable children in public schools.

In eighth-grade math, children in Lutheran schools scored significantly better than children in public schools, but those in conservative Christian schools fared worse.

Joseph McTighe, executive director of the Council for American Private Education, an umbrella organization that represents 80 percent of private elementary and secondary schools, said the statistical analysis had little to do with parents’ choices on educating their children.

"In the real world, private school kids outperform public school kids," Mr. McTighe said. "That’s the real world, and the way things actually are."

Two weeks ago, the American Federation of Teachers, on its Web log, predicted that the report would be released on a Friday, suggesting that the Bush administration saw it as "bad news to be buried at the bottom of the news cycle."

The deputy director for administration and policy at the Institute of Education Sciences, Sue Betka, said the report was not released so it would go unnoticed. Ms. Betka said her office typically gave senior officials two weeks’ notice before releasing reports. "The report was ready two weeks ago Friday,’’ she said, “and so today was the first day, according to longstanding practice, that it could come out."

    Public Schools Perform Near Private Ones in Study, NYT, 15.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/15/education/15report.html?ex=1153368000&en=e8914c56557ff0e6&ei=5087%0A

The New Gender Divide

At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust

July 9, 2006
The New York Times
By TAMAR LEWIN

Nearing graduation, Rick Kohn is not putting much energy into his final courses.

"I take the path of least resistance," said Mr. Kohn, who works 25 hours a week to put himself through the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "This summer, I looked for the four easiest courses I could take that would let me graduate in August."

It is not that Mr. Kohn, 24, is indifferent to education. He is excited about economics and hopes to get his master's in the field. But the other classes, he said, just do not seem worth the effort.

"What's the difference between an A and a B?" he asks. "Either way, you go on to the next class."

He does not see his female classmates sharing that attitude. Women work harder in school, Mr. Kohn believes. "The girls care more about their G.P.A. and the way they look on paper," he said.

A quarter-century after women became the majority on college campuses, men are trailing them in more than just enrollment.

Department of Education statistics show that men, whatever their race or socioeconomic group, are less likely than women to get bachelor's degrees — and among those who do, fewer complete their degrees in four or five years. Men also get worse grades than women.

And in two national studies, college men reported that they studied less and socialized more than their female classmates.

Small wonder, then, that at elite institutions like Harvard, small liberal arts colleges like Dickinson, huge public universities like the University of Wisconsin and U.C.L.A. and smaller ones like Florida Atlantic University, women are walking off with a disproportionate share of the honors degrees.

It is not that men are in a downward spiral: they are going to college in greater numbers and are more likely to graduate than two decades ago.

Still, men now make up only 42 percent of the nation's college students. And with sex discrimination fading and their job opportunities widening, women are coming on much stronger, often leapfrogging the men to the academic finish.

"The boys are about where they were 30 years ago, but the girls are just on a tear, doing much, much better," said Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education in Washington.

Take Jen Smyers, who has been a powerhouse in her three years at American University in Washington.

She has a dean's scholarship, has held four internships and three jobs in her time at American, made the dean's list almost every term and also led the campus women's initiative. And when the rest of her class graduates with bachelor's degrees next year, Ms. Smyers will be finishing her master's.

She says her intense motivation is not so unusual. "The women here are on fire," she said.

The gender differences are not uniform. In the highest-income families, men 24 and under attend college as much as, or slightly more than, their sisters, according to the American Council on Education, whose report on these issues is scheduled for release this week.

Young men from low-income families, which are disproportionately black and Hispanic, are the most underrepresented on campus, though in middle-income families too, more daughters than sons attend college. In recent years the gender gap has been widening, especially among low-income whites and Hispanics.

When it comes to earning bachelor's degrees, the gender gap is smaller than the gap between whites and blacks or Hispanics, federal data shows.

All of this has helped set off intense debate over whether these trends show a worrisome achievement gap between men and women or whether the concern should instead be directed toward the educational difficulties of poor boys, black, white or Hispanic.

"Over all, the differences between blacks and whites, rich and poor, dwarf the differences between men and women within any particular group," says Jacqueline King, a researcher for the American Council on Education's Center for Policy Analysis and the author of the forthcoming report.

Differences Seen Early

Still, across all race and class lines, there are significant performance differences between young men and women that start before college.

High school boys score higher than girls on the SAT, particularly on the math section. Experts say that is both because the timed multiple-choice questions play to boys' strengths and because more middling female students take the test. Boys also score slightly better on the math and science sections of national assessment tests. On the same assessments, 12th-grade boys, even those with college-educated parents, do far worse than girls on reading and writing.

Faced with applications and enrollment numbers that tilt toward women, some selective private colleges are giving men a slight boost in admissions. On other campuses the female predominance is becoming noticeable in the female authors added to the reading lists and the diminished dating scene.

And when it gets to graduation, differences are evident too.

At Harvard, 55 percent of the women graduated with honors this spring, compared with barely half the men. And at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, a public university, women made up 64 percent of this year's graduates, and they got 75 percent of the honors degrees and 79 percent of the highest honors, summa cum laude.

Of course, nationwide, there are young men at the top of the class and fields like computer science, engineering and physics that are male dominated.

Professors interviewed on several campuses say that in their experience men seem to cluster in a disproportionate share at both ends of the spectrum — students who are the most brilliantly creative, and students who cannot keep up.

"My best male students are every bit as good as my best female students," said Wendy Moffat, a longtime English professor at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. "But the range among the guys is wider."

From the time they are young, boys are far more likely than girls to be suspended or expelled, or have a learning disability or emotional problem diagnosed. As teenagers, they are more likely to drop out of high school, commit suicide or be incarcerated. Such difficulties can have echoes even in college men.

"They have a sense of lassitude, a lack of focus," said William Pollack, director of the Centers for Men and Young Men at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School.

At a time when jobs that require little education are disappearing, Mr. Mortenson predicts trouble for boys whose "educational attainment is not keeping up with the demands of the economy."

In the 1990's, even as women poured into college at a higher rate than men, attention focused largely on their troubles, especially after the 1992 report "How Schools Shortchange Girls" from the American Association of University Women.

But some scholars say the new emphasis on young men's problems — recent magazine covers and talk shows describing a "boy crisis" — is misguided in a world where men still dominate the math-science axis, earn more money and wield more power than women.

"People keep asking me why this is such a hot topic, and I think it does go back to the ideas people carry in their heads," said Sara Mead, the author of a report for Education Sector, a Washington policy center, that concluded that boys, especially young ones, were making progress on many measures. It suggested that the heightened concern might in part reflect some people's nervousness about women's achievement.

"The idea that girls could be ahead is so shocking that they think it must be a crisis for boys," Ms. Mead said. "I'm troubled by this tone of crisis. Even if you control for the field they're in, boys right out of college make more money than girls, so at the end of the day, is it grades and honors that matter, or something else the boys may be doing?"

Women in the Majority

What is beyond dispute is that the college landscape is changing. Women now make up 58 percent of those enrolled in two- and four-year colleges and are, over all, the majority in graduate schools and professional schools too.

Most institutions of higher learning, except engineering schools, now have a female edge, with many small liberal arts colleges and huge public universities alike hovering near the 60-40 ratio. Even Harvard, long a male bastion, has begun to tilt toward women.

"The class we just admitted will be 52 percent female," said William Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions.

While Harvard accepts men and women in proportions roughly equal to their presence in the applicant pool, other elite universities do not. At Brown University, men made up not quite 40 percent of this year's applicants, but 47 percent of those admitted.

Women now outnumber men two to one at places like the State University of New York at New Paltz, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Baltimore City Community College. And they make up particularly large majorities among older students.

The lower the family income, the greater the disparity between men and women attending college, said Ms. King of the American Council on Education's Center for Policy Analysis.

Thomas diPrete, a Columbia University sociology professor, has found that while boys whose parents had only a high school education used to be more likely to get a college education than their sisters, that has flipped.

Still, the gender gap has moved to the front burner in part because of interest from educated mothers worrying that their sons are adrift or disturbed that their girls are being passed over by admissions officers eager for boys, said Judith Kleinfeld, a University of Alaska professor who has created the Boys Project (boysproject.net), a coalition of researchers, educators and parents to address boys' troubles.

"I hate to be cynical, but when it was a problem of black or poor kids, nobody cared, but now that it's a problem of white sons of college-educated parents, it's moving very rapidly to the forefront," Dr. Kleinfeld said. "At most colleges, there is a sense that a lot of boys are missing in action."

Beyond the data points — graduation rates, enrollment rates, grades — there are subtle differences in the nature of men's and women's college experiences.

In dozens of interviews on three campuses — Dickinson College; American University; and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro — male and female students alike agreed that the slackers in their midst were mostly male, and that the fireballs were mostly female.

Almost all speculated that it had something to do with the women's movement.

"The roles have changed a lot," said Travis Rothway, a 23-year-old junior at American University, a private school where only 36 percent of last year's freshmen were male. "Men have always been the dominant figure, providing for the household, but now women have broken out of their domestic roles in society. I don't think guys' willingness to work and succeed has changed, it's more that the women have stepped up."

Ben Turner, who graduated from American this spring, said he did not believe that work habits were determined by gender — but acknowledged that he and his girlfriend fit the stereotypes.

"She does all her readings for classes, and I don't always," Mr. Turner said. "She's more organized than me, so if there's a paper due a week from Monday, she's already started, and I know I'll be doing it the weekend before. She studies more than I do because she doesn't like cramming and being stressed. She just has a better work ethic than I do."

Ms. Smyers, also at American, said she recently ended a relationship with another student, in part out of frustration over his playing video games four hours a day.

"He said he was thinking of trying to cut back to 15 hours a week," she said. "I said, 'Fifteen hours is what I spend on my internship, and I get paid $1,300 a month.' That's my litmus test now: I won't date anyone who plays video games. It means they're choosing to do something that wastes their time and sucks the life out of them."

Many male students say with something resembling pride that they get by without much studying.

"If I take a class and never study, I can still get a B," said Scott Daniels, a 22-year-old at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "I know that if I'd applied myself more, I would have had better grades."

On each campus, many young men concluded that the easy B was good enough. But on each campus, some had seen that attitude backfire.

Michael Comes arrived at Dickinson two years ago from a private school in New Jersey where he had done well, but floundered his freshman year.

"I came here with the attitudes I'd had in high school, that the big thing, for guys, is to give the appearance of not doing much work, trying to excel at sports and shine socially," Mr. Comes said. "It's like some cultural A.D.D. for boys, I think — like Bart Simpson. For men, it's just not cool to study."

So when he no longer had parents and teachers keeping after him, or a 10:30 p.m. lights-out rule, he did not do much work.

"I stayed in my room a lot, I slept a lot, and I messed up so much that I had to go to summer school," Mr. Comes said. "But I'm back on track now."

'A Male Entitlement Thing'

On each campus, the young women interviewed talked mostly about their drive to do well.

"Most college women want a high-powered career that they are passionate about," Ms. Smyers said. "But they also want a family, and that probably means taking time off, and making dinner. I'm rushing through here, taking the most credits you can take without paying extra, because I want to do some amazing things, and establish myself as a career woman, before I settle down."

Her male classmates, she said, feel less pressure.

"The men don't seem to hustle as much," Ms. Smyers said. "I think it's a male entitlement thing. They think they can sit back and relax and when they graduate, they'll still get a good job. They seem to think that if they have a firm handshake and speak properly, they'll be fine."

Such differences were apparent in the 2005 National Survey of Student Engagement. While the survey of 90,000 students at 530 institutions relies on self-reporting, it is used by many colleges to measure themselves against other institutions.

Men were significantly more likely than women to say they spent at least 11 hours a week relaxing or socializing, while women were more likely to say they spent at least that much time preparing for class. More men also said they frequently came to class unprepared.

Linda Sax, an associate professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles, has found similar gender differences in her study of 17,000 men and women at 204 co-ed colleges and universities.

Using data from U.C.L.A.'s Higher Education Research Institute annual studies, she found that men were more likely than women to skip classes, not complete their homework and not turn it in on time.

"Women do spend more time studying and their grades are better," Professor Sax said, "but their grades are better even more than the extra studying time would account for."

Researchers say such differences make sense, given boys' experience in their earlier school years. And some experts argue that what is being seen as a boy problem is actually maleness itself, with the noisy, energetic antsiness and high jinks of young boys now redefined as a behavior problem by teachers who do not know how to handle them.

There is also an economic rationale for men to take education less seriously. In the early years of a career, Laura Perna of the University of Pennsylvania has found, college increases women's earnings far more than men's.

"That's the trap," Dr. Kleinfeld said. "In the early years, young men don't see the wage benefit. They can sell their strength and make money."

Lingering Money Worries

At Greensboro, where more than two-thirds of the students are female, and about one in five is black, many young men say they are torn between wanting quick money and seeking the long-term rewards of education.

"A lot of my friends made good money working in high school, in construction or as electricians, and they didn't go to college, but they're doing very well now," said Mr. Daniels, the Greensboro student, who works 25 to 30 hours a week. "One of my best friends, he's making $70,000, he's got his own truck and health benefits. The honest truth is, I feel weird being a college student and having no money."

Mr. Kohn said it was, literally, an accident that he landed at Greensboro.

"In high school, I had a G.P.A. of 1.9 and I never took the SAT's because I knew I wasn't going to college," he said. "If you don't have goals, you don't set yourself up to be disappointed."

But soon after high school, Mr. Kohn was in a serious car crash, and discovered in rehabilitation that the state would pay for community college. To his surprise he did well enough to transfer to Greensboro, where he now plans to pursue a master's degree. But when Mr. Kohn overheard a freshman woman describing her plans, including four summer school courses to help her get a master's in education a bit earlier, he was bemused.

"For a freshman to be in such a hurry, it seems a little obsessive," he said.

Many of the young women studying at Greensboro have older brothers without college degrees, or younger brothers with little interest in college.

The seven children of the Thompson family of Oxford, N.C., embody the gender differences regarding education.

There are three men and four women in the family, ranging in age from 36 to 23. Christina and Lynette, the two youngest, are both at Greensboro. The two oldest daughters went to college, too. But none of the sons got college degrees: one is a truck driver, one is autistic and living at home and one is a floor manager at a Research Triangle company.

"I think women feel more pressure to achieve," said Christina Thompson, a political science major who plans to go to law school.

Right, said her youngest sister.

"In the past, black women in the South couldn't do much except clean, pick cotton or take care of someone's children," Lynette Thompson said. "I think from our mother we got the feeling we should try to use the opportunities that are available to us now."

They and many other women at Greensboro say it is not bad to be on a campus with twice as many women as men because it encourages them to stick to their studies without the distraction of dating.

Maybe, said Ashleigh Pelick, a freshman who is dating a marine she met before college — but she teased a friend, Madison Barringer: "You know you'll go crazy if you never have another boyfriend before you graduate."

Ms. Barringer, a 19-year-old whose parents did not go to college, laughed. But she did acknowledge the gender imbalance as a possible problem.

"I know it sounds picky, but I don't think I'd marry someone without a college degree," she said. "I want to be able to have that intellectual conversation."

Creating a balance of men and women is now an issue for all but the most elite colleges, whose huge applicant pools let them fill their classes with any desired mix of highly-qualified men and women But for others, it is a delicate issue. Colleges want balance, both for social reasons and to ensure that they can attract a broad mix of applicants. But they do not want an atmosphere in which talented, hard-working women share classes with less qualified, less engaged men.

The calculus is different at different institutions. By administrators' accounts, American University has been relatively unconcerned to see its student body tipping female, faster than most others.

The admissions office said that its decisions were gender blind, and that it accepted a larger share of female applicants. In an interview, Ivy Broder, the interim provost, seemed surprised, but not bothered, that American had a higher proportion of women than Vassar College, which formerly admitted only women.

American has no engineering school and no football team; it is a campus where the Democrats' organization is Democratic Women and Friends; "The Vagina Monologues" sells out at annual performances; and almost 1,000 people turned out for the Breastival, a women's health fair.

The faculty is attracting more and more women: a majority of the professors now on the tenure track are female.

Women on campus say there is great female solidarity. What there is not much of, said Gail Short Hanson, the director of campus life, is a dating scene.

Said Ms. Hanson: "If there's a dance, like the Founder's Day dance in February, do the women get their hair done? Yes. Do they get their nails done? Yes. But do they have a date? Probably not. So who do they dance with? Whoever wants to dance."

If American University is comfortable being largely female, that is not the case on Dickinson College's charming but isolated campus in central Pennsylvania. At a time when most colleges are becoming increasingly female, Dickinson has raised its proportion of men. Even rarer is that Dickinson has publicly discussed its quest for gender balance.

The Goal: More Male Students

Robert Massa, vice president for enrollment, began campaigning for more male students shortly after he arrived at Dickinson in 1999 and discovered that only 36 percent of the incoming freshmen were male and that the college had accepted 73 percent of the women who applied, but only 53 percent of the men.

Dickinson adapted to the growing female majority by starting a women's center, adding a women's studies major and offering courses on Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf.

In his effort to attract men, Mr. Massa made sure that the admissions materials included plenty of pictures of young men and athletics. Dickinson began highlighting its new physics, computer science and math building, and started a program in international business. Most fundamental, Dickinson began accepting a larger proportion of its male applicants.

"The secret of getting some gender balance is that once men apply, you've got to admit them," Mr. Massa said. "So did we bend a little bit? Yeah, at the margin, we did, but not to the point that we would admit guys who couldn't do the work."

Longtime Dickinson administrators say that at isolated campuses with their own social worlds, gender balance is especially important.

"When there were fewer men, the environment was not as safe for women," said Joyce Bylander, associate provost. "When men were so highly prized that they could get away with things, some of them become sexual predators. It was an unhealthy atmosphere for women."

In education circles, Mr. Massa is sometimes accused of practicing unfair affirmative action for boys. He has a presentation called "What's Wrong With You Guys?" in which he says that Dickinson does not accept a greater proportion of male than female applicants, and that women still get more financial aid.

"Is this affirmative action?" Mr. Massa said. "Not in the legal sense." He says that admissions to a liberal arts college is more art than science, a matter of crafting a class with diverse strengths.

Mr. Massa reshaped Dickinson in one year. Of the freshmen admitted in 2000, 43 percent were male, and in recent years Dickinson's student body has been about 44 percent male. This year, Dickinson admitted an equal share of the male and the female applicants.

In the Dickinson cafeteria on a spring afternoon, the byplay between two men and two women could provide a text on gender differences. The men, Dennis Nelson and Victor Johnson, African-American football players nearing the end of their junior year, teased each other about never wanting to be seen in the library. They talked about playing "Madden," a football video game, six hours a day, about how they did not spend much time on homework.

"A lot of women want a 4.0 average, and they'll work for it," Mr. Nelson said. "I never wanted it because it's too much work to be worth it. And a lot of women, they have everything planned out for the next three years."

Mr. Johnson jumped in: "Yeah, and it boggles my mind because I don't have my life planned for the next 10 minutes. Women see the long-term benefits, they take their classes seriously, and they're actively learning. We learn for tests. With us, if someone calls the night before and says there's going to be a test, we study enough for a C."

His female friends offered their assessment. "They're really, really smart, and they think they don't have to work," Glenda Cabral said.

But they do. After two years of good grades, Mr. Johnson this year failed Spanish and Arab-Israeli relations.

"He called me the night before the test and asked who Nasser was," Julie Younes said, rolling her eyes.

At Dickinson, as elsewhere, men are overrepresented among the problem students. Of 33 students on probation this year, all but six were male. They account for most disciplinary actions, too.

"If it's outside-the-line behavior, boys are pretty much the ones doing it," Ms. Bylander said. "This generation, and especially the boys, is technology-savvy but interpersonally challenged. They've been highly structured, highly programmed, with organized play groups and organized sports, and they don't know much about how to run their own lives."

Disengagement Is Noticed

Men are underrepresented when it comes to graduation and honors. Eighty-three percent of women who were Dickinson freshmen in 2001 graduated four years later, compared with 75 percent of the men. Dickinson women, who made up just over half of last year's graduates, got slightly more than two-thirds of the cum laude, magna and summa degrees.

Since the process of human development crosses all borders, it makes sense that Europe, too, now has more women than men heading to college. The disengagement of young men, though, takes different forms in different cultures. Japan, over the last decade, has seen the emergence of "hikikomori" — young men withdrawing to their rooms, eschewing social life for months or years on end.

At Dickinson, some professors and administrators have begun to notice a similar withdrawal among men who arrive on campus with deficient social skills. Each year, there are several who mostly stay in their rooms, talk to no one, play video games into the wee hours and miss classes until they withdraw or flunk out.

This spring, Rebecca Hammell, dean of freshman and sophomores, counseled one such young man to withdraw.

"He was in academic trouble from the start," Ms. Hammell said. "He was playing games till 3, 4, 5 in the morning, in an almost compulsive way. From early in the year, his teachers reported that he was either not coming to class or falling asleep once he was there. I checked with the Residential Life office, and they said he was in his room all the time."

Of course, female behavior has its own extremes. In freshman women, educators worry about eating disorders and perfectionism.

But among the freshman men, the problems stem mostly from immaturity.

"There was so much freedom when I got here, compared to my very structured high school life, that I kept putting things off," said Greg Williams, who just finished his freshman year. "I wouldn't do much work and I played a lot of Halo. I didn't know how to wake up on time without a mom. I had laundry problems. I shrank all my clothes and had to buy new ones."

Still, men in the work force have always done better in pay and promotions, in part because they tend to work longer hours, and have fewer career interruptions than women, who bear the children and most of the responsibility for raising them.

Whether the male advantage will persist even as women's academic achievement soars is an open question. But many young men believe that, once in the work world, they will prevail.

"I think men do better out in the world because they care more about the power, the status, the C.E.O. job," Mr. Kohn said. "And maybe society holds men a little higher."

    At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust, NYT, 9.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/education/09college.html?hp&ex=1152417600&en=9e7c68c097d2ec04&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Schools' Efforts on Race Await Justices' Ruling

June 24, 2006
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — School officials in Berkeley, Calif., take race as well as parent income into account as they assign students to public schools, with a result that many black children who live downtown are bused to classes in the mostly white neighborhoods on the hills that overlook San Francisco Bay.

In Lynn, Mass., the authorities guarantee that children can attend their neighborhood school, but consider race in weighing students' transfer requests, sometimes blocking those that would increase racial imbalance.

And here in Louisville, the school board uses race as a factor in a student assignment plan to keep enrollments at most schools roughly in line with the district's overall racial composition, making this one of the most thoroughly integrated urban school systems in the nation.

As different as they are, all these approaches and many more like them could now be in jeopardy, lawyers say, because of the Supreme Court's decision this month to review cases involving race and school assignment programs here and in Seattle.

"We'll be watching this very closely, because whichever way the Supreme Court rules, it will certainly have an impact on our district," said Arthur R. Culver, superintendent of schools in Champaign, Ill., where African-American students make up 36 percent of students. Under a court-supervised plan, the district keeps the proportion of black students in all schools within 15 percentage points of that average by controlling school assignments.

Over the past 15 years, courts have ended desegregation orders in scores of school districts. But many districts around the country seek to maintain diversity with voluntary programs like magnet schools and magnet programs, clustering plans that group schools in black neighborhoods with those in white, and weighted admissions lotteries that assign classroom seats by race.

All of this is now a gray area of the law until there is guidance from the Supreme Court on how far school systems may go in the quest for racial diversity.

Courts in the 1990's mostly struck down the use of race in assignment decisions, but three federal rulings since 2003 have permitted its use. As the legal ambiguity has grown, hundreds of districts have dropped voluntary efforts to maintain racial balance. Others have vigorously pursued them, even as a debate has emerged over whether racially mixed schools provide the nation with important educational benefits.

"Most school districts believe that there are educational benefits in having students attend school with other students of different backgrounds," said Maree Sneed, a lawyer who filed a brief in the Louisville case on behalf of the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of the nation's largest urban districts. "It prepares them to be better citizens."

But Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Washington group critical of affirmative action, said such assertions were based on "touchy-feely social science."

"It'd be dangerous for the court to allow discrimination whenever a school board produces some social scientist who claims that racially balancing schools to the nth degree is essential for teaching students to be good citizens," Mr. Clegg said.

The debate comes as immigration, housing patterns and ethnic change have made achieving racial balance in the schools an increasing challenge.

A study published this year by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University reported that partly because of the rapid growth of Latino and Asian populations, the traditional black-white model of American race relations was breaking down. Yet white students remained the most racially isolated group, even though they were attending schools with more minority students than ever before, the report said.

Although whites in 2003-04 made up 58 percent of the nation's public school population, the average white student attended a school where 78 percent of pupils were also white, the study said.

The proportion of black students attending schools where 10 percent of students or fewer were white increased to 38 percent in 2003-04 from 34 percent in 1991-92.

Gary Orfield, the project's director, said a decision barring the use of race in student assignments would most likely intensify those trends.

"School boards would be captives to the racial segregation that occurs in housing markets," Mr. Orfield said. "Boards would be forbidden to do what courts once ordered them to do, and what they now want to do voluntarily."

How many of the nation's 15,000 districts currently consider race in assigning students to schools is unclear because no one keeps track, experts said. A brief filed in the Louisville case by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative public-interest law firm, asserts that "nearly 1,000 districts" have some type of race-based assignment plan.

But that figure traces from a 1990 Department of Education survey of schools, and David J. Armor, a George Mason University professor who participated in that survey, said that in the 1990's, many districts abandoned race-based plans. Still, he estimated that "many hundreds of school districts" continued to use race in assigning students to schools.

Many of the nation's largest urban districts have so few white students that large-scale plans to seek racial balance are hardly feasible. New York, where 14 percent of students are white, does not consider race in school assignments, said Michael Best, the Department of Education's general counsel. The only exception is Mark Twain Intermediate School in Brooklyn, where a 1974 federal court order requires that the school's racial demographics be kept in line with surrounding middle schools.

At least a half-dozen cities have developed voluntary student transfer programs that involve enrolling minority students from an urban district in a suburban district.

The Jefferson County district in Louisville is one of the most thoroughly integrated urban school systems in the nation. That is partly because its boundaries include suburbs as well as Louisville's urban core. Sixty percent of students are white, and 35 percent are black.

Its student assignment plan, which evolved from a court-ordered desegregation effort, keeps black enrollment in most schools in the range of 15 percent to 50 percent by encouraging, and in some cases obliging, white students to attend schools in black neighborhoods, and vice versa.

Fran Ellers and her husband are writers who are white. They live in the Highlands neighborhood east of downtown. But they enrolled their children, Jack and Zoe, at Coleridge-Taylor Montessori Elementary in the largely black West End.

"We wanted a diverse environment," Ms. Ellers said. "When I toured Coleridge-Taylor, I was struck by the mix of black and white children, quietly working together as equals in a classroom."

Nechelle D. Crawford, by contrast, who is African-American and lives in the West End, said her sons Keion and Jeron could attend Coleridge-Taylor, but instead she opted to send them to Wilder Elementary in a largely white suburb 25 minutes away by bus. "The boys love Wilder," Mrs. Crawford said, adding that there are a number of international students. "They have different opportunities, see different faces."

In a survey carried out in 2000 by the University of Kentucky, 67 percent of parents said they believed that a school's enrollment should reflect the overall racial diversity of the school district.

A white lawyer, Teddy B. Gordon, ran for a seat on the Jefferson County School Board in 2004, promising to work to end the district's desegregation plan. He finished last, behind three other candidates.

Mr. Gordon represents the plaintiff in the Louisville case, Crystal D. Meredith, who is white. She sued after the district denied her request to transfer her son Joshua from Young Elementary, in the West End, to Bloom Elementary, nearer her home. The district said the transfer would disrupt Young's racial balance.

Judge John G. Heyburn II of Federal District Court ruled against Ms. Meredith in 2004, saying that the district had shown a "compelling interest" in maintaining integrated schools. A federal appeals court upheld that ruling, but the Supreme Court has now agreed to review the case.

In an interview, Mr. Gordon predicted that if Louisville's student assignment plan was overturned, the schools would rapidly resegregate. But that should be of no concern, he said.

"We're a diverse society, a multiethnic society, a colorblind society," he said. "Race is history."

Chester Darling, the lawyer who represented parents in a 1999 suit challenging a school assignment plan in Lynn, Mass., holds similar views. "If children are in segregated schools, de facto or not, as long as they are getting the education they need that's fine," he said.

Lynn, nine miles north of Boston, is one of 20 Massachusetts school districts that receives financial incentives for promoting racial balance under state law. Lynn's plan seeks to keep the proportion of nonwhite students in elementary schools within 15 percent of the overall proportion of minorities in the district's student population. Last year, 32 percent of students were white, and 68 percent were nonwhite.

Under the Berkeley plan, parents choose three schools, and the district weighs classroom space and parents' education and income, as well as race in assigning the child.

"New parents would prefer to have their kids in a neighborhood school, that's pretty overwhelming," said Michele Lawrence, Berkeley's superintendent. "But if I surveyed parents who have gone through the process and met teachers, they would have a high percentage of satisfaction."

David M. Herszenhorn contributed reporting from New York for this article.

    Schools' Efforts on Race Await Justices' Ruling, NYT, 24.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/24/us/24race.html?hp&ex=1151208000&en=125474bfd9ac18c5&ei=5094&partner=homepage

In Gilded Age of Home Schooling, Students Have Private Teachers

June 5, 2006
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

In what is an elite tweak on home schooling — and a throwback to the gilded days of education by governess or tutor — growing numbers of families are choosing the ultimate in private school: hiring teachers to educate their children in their own homes.

Unlike the more familiar home-schoolers of recent years, these families are not trying to get more religion into their children's lives, or escape what some consider the tyranny of the government's hand in schools. In fact, many say they have no argument with ordinary education — it just does not fit their lifestyles.

Lisa Mazzoni's family splits its time between Marina del Rey, Calif., and Delray Beach, Fla. Lisa has her algebra and history lessons delivered poolside sometimes or on her condominium's rooftop, where she and her teacher enjoy the sun and have a view of the Pacific Ocean south of Santa Monica.

"For someone who travels a lot or has a parent who travels and wants to keep the family together, it's an excellent choice," said Lisa's mother, Trish Mazzoni, who with her husband owns a speedboat company.

The cost for such teachers generally runs $70 to $110 an hour. And depending on how many hours a teacher works, and how many teachers are involved, the price can equal or surpass tuition in the upper echelon of private schools in New York City or Los Angeles, where $30,000 a year is not unheard of.

Other parents say the model works for children who are sick, for children who are in show business or for those with learning disabilities.

"It's a hidden group of folks, but it's growing enormously," said Luis Huerta, a professor of public policy and education at Teachers College of Columbia University, whose national research includes a focus on home schooling.

The United States Department of Education last did a survey on home schooling in 2003. That survey did not ask about full-time in-home teachers. But it found that from 1999 to 2003, the number of children who were educated at home had soared, increasing by 29 percent, to 1.1 million students nationwide. It also found that, of those, 21 percent used a tutor.

Home schooling is legal in every state, though some regulate it more than others. Home-school teachers do not require certification, and the only common requirement from state to state is that students meet compulsory-attendance rules.

Scholars who study home-schooling trends, business owners who serve home-schooling families and abundant anecdotal evidence also suggest that private teaching arrangements are on the rise. Some families do it for short stints, others for years at a time.

Bob Harraka, president of Professional Tutors of America, has about 6,000 teachers from 14 states on his payroll in Orange County, Calif., but cannot meet a third of the requests for in-home education that come in, he said, because they are so specialized or extravagant: a family wants a teacher to instruct in the art of Frisbee throwing, button sewing or Latin grammar. A family wants a teacher to accompany them for a yearlong voyage at sea.

"Sailing comes up at least once or twice a year," Mr. Harraka said.

Parents say in-home teaching arrangements offer unparalleled levels of academic attention and flexibility in scheduling, in addition to a sense of family cohesion and autonomy over what children learn. To them, these advantages make up for the lack of a school social life, which they say can be replicated through group lessons in, say, ballet or sculpture.

Jon D. Snyder, dean of the Bank Street College of Education in New York, said his main concerns about this form of education were whether tutors and students were a good fit, and whether students got enough social interaction.

"From a purely academic standpoint, it goes back to a much earlier era," Dr. Snyder said. "The notion of individual tutorials is a time-honored tradition, particularly among the elite."

Think Plato, John Stuart Mill and George Washington. Philosopher kings and gentleman farmers. Because of the cost of in-home tutoring, the idea will probably not spread like wildfire, and just as well, Dr. Snyder said.

"Public education has social goals; that's why we pay tax dollars for it," he said. "When Socrates was tutoring Plato, he wasn't concerned about educating the other people in Greece. They were just concerned about educating Plato."

On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Krystal and Tiffany Wheeler earn high school credits in adjacent pastel bedrooms after breakfast. The teachers come to them.

Their mother, Charlene Royce, said she wanted her girls to experience the benefits of a personalized education but did not feel comfortable teaching herself.

"I feel that education is better this way, one on one," said Ms. Royce, whose expertise is in finding electronics companies in which to invest. "It was never an option for me to do it — I wouldn't know how."

For help, she turned to a Manhattan business, On Location Education, which took care of the logistics, providing her with curricula and teachers. Ms. Royce gets weekly progress reports and a visit every couple of months from a woman she calls "the mobile principal."

To meet their social needs — and for exercise — Tiffany and Krystal attend dance and piano classes, among other things, and belong to a gym.

Lisa Mazzoni takes acting and dance classes in Hollywood. She is also enrolled in a school for distance learning that provides a curriculum for her tutor, Rob Cox, of Professional Tutors of America, to teach.

"I do love the fact that instead of waking up at 5:30 every morning I get to wake up at 8:30," said Lisa, who is 17 and attended private school until this year.

"It makes life so much easier," Lisa continued. "I don't have to worry about missing tests and if I really wanted to, I could bring the work with me — because it's all in the computer — if I'm in Florida visiting my dad or going to a boat race."

When Nick Niell, an investment banker, and his wife, Sarah, moved to New York from East Sussex, England, for about a year in 2003, four teachers would come on weekdays to Mr. Niell's townhouse on 69th Street near Madison Avenue to teach his three school-aged children. Mr. Niell said he could not find a British school in the city and wanted his children to study the same things they would have studied in England. A floor of the house was converted into classroom space.

"It was quite good fun," said Mr. Niell, whose teachers came through Partners with Parents, a Manhattan in-home tutoring service.

The families embracing the one-on-one home-school model are turning the original concept on its head. Dr. Huerta said the popular notion is that home-schoolers leave schools they see as troubled, certain they can do better as teachers themselves. Hiring teachers for full-time instruction is not typical.

The new and more expansive definitions of home schooling irritate some traditionalists who want to keep the model simpler. "People use the term home schooling for all sorts of interesting things these days," said Celeste Land, a member of the board at the Organization of Virginia Homeschoolers. "Obviously it's not pure home schooling."

But the growing number of home-school support groups has made it easier for the new model to develop. And tutoring is more in the public consciousness these days in part because of the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind, which includes a tutoring component, and the vast array of test prep tutoring services being pitched to an increasingly tested national student body.

Companies that supply teachers and curricula are abundant, also making it easier for families to step away from traditional schools, experts say. And though many who follow the new model are wealthy, increasing numbers of middle class families more sociologically and racially diverse have begun to school their children at home, according to education officials and tutor-service companies.

Laurie Gerber, president of Partners with Parents, said she started to get requests for in-home teachers about three or four years ago.

"Our tutoring business started to become a huge percentage of home-schooling clients, as opposed to tutoring," Ms. Gerber said. "We started a whole home-schooling wing."

The teachers who are hired to home school say the job is great.

"I love it; it's a dream come true," said Mr. Cox, who tutors Lisa Mazzoni. He is a former television and radio news reporter as well as an actor and a certified teacher.

"If you want to travel or have some other business to attend to, there isn't a school system dependent on you being there," he said. "It's your own individual school that operates according to your needs."

Tiffany Wheeler's tutor, Nancy Falong, retired a few years ago after 32 years as a teacher in the New Jersey public schools. Now she works for On Location Education. Sitting next to Tiffany last week, their two world history books turned to the same page on the Marshall Plan, she expressed a sense of delight. "This is pure teaching."

And Tiffany, looking relaxed with bare feet under her bedroom desk, said, "It's fun."

    In Gilded Age of Home Schooling, Students Have Private Teachers, NYT, 5.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/education/05homeschool.html?hp&ex=1149566400&en=0b57e49f8304c2c9&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Harlem, a Test Lab, Splits Over Charter Schools

June 2, 2006
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

The schools sit side by side in a handsome red brick building in Harlem overlooking Morningside Park. But they could not be more different.

The fifth and sixth graders at KIPP Star College Prep Charter School earned some of the highest scores in central Harlem on last year's citywide reading exams. At Public School 125, only 36 percent of the third- through sixth-grade students met city and state reading standards last year.

The contrast in the building on West 123rd Street is emblematic of the inequities, opportunity and experimentation that define education across Harlem after decades of stagnation, and as gentrification is increasing pressures for better schools.

By the end of next year, Harlem will be home to 17 charter schools, publicly financed but privately run — more than in Staten Island, Queens and Lower Manhattan combined. The Bronx has a high concentration, too, but only Brooklyn is expected to have more charter schools by the end of next year.

Harlem also has dozens of struggling traditional schools and six of the Bloomberg administration's new small themed schools.

The variety is prompting sharp debate. Some parents in Harlem are delighted with the new choices and are showing up by the hundreds at lotteries for the limited charter school seats. Others charge that the charter schools are unproven and are milking the traditional public schools of the most promising students.

"The public system failed my first grandson," said Margarita Maya, a Harlem resident, explaining that he did not earn a diploma.

Now, Ms. Maya said, her younger grandchildren attend the Harlem Village Academy charter school. "I wanted something different for the rest," she said, "and I found everything I could ever want in this new school."

But Carmen M. Colon, the president of an association of school district parent councils, says the changes are contributing to resentments between those who are able to grasp the limited new opportunities and those who are not among the chosen.

"You see a lot of interesting and sometimes shocking things in Harlem, mainly the disappearance of the middle ground in terms of schools," she said. "It's a gap that many people think is growing."

Chancellor Joel I. Klein has encouraged the educational ferment. "We're moving on all fronts," he said in an interview. "When I took over the job, what was the lowest performing district? District 5, Harlem. What you do is try to create opportunity."

Mr. Klein said: "I want parents to say, 'Look, we could lose people to charter schools if our school doesn't improve. Competition in this thing works."

Eight percent of the 35,000 students in Harlem, which spans three school districts across Upper Manhattan, attend charter schools. In contrast, only 1 percent of the 1.1 million students citywide attend charter schools.

City education officials do not track where the students in charter schools come from, but say they most likely live in the schools' immediate area.

They also know that the population in Harlem's traditional schools has declined, saying the numbers have dropped by about 1,500 in central Harlem and East Harlem since 2002.

Parts of Harlem stretch into District 3 on the West Side and District 4 in East Harlem. But the heart of the neighborhood is covered by District 5. The schools there range the gamut.

There is Intermediate School 172, which earned a reputation for violence. There are the KIPP schools, part of a growing national chain (it stands for Knowledge Is Power Program). They enjoy Mr. Klein's blessing along with the Village Academies, a local network of charter schools.

The sprawling social service center, the Harlem Children's Zone, is there, too. Its chief executive is Geoffrey Canada, who has opened two charter schools since last year.

Then there is I.S. 275, which is being closed next month because of persistent poor performance, but also P.S. 154, which turned itself around and is in good standing.

Dennis M. Walcott, the deputy mayor for education, said that Harlem would get a new middle school in the fall and that the six new small schools serve almost 1,000 students.

To parents, who have seen the redevelopment of the past decade bring safer streets, new stores and higher-income residents, the level of desire for the new reflects the area's swelling ambition, the aspiration to move away from schools that do not work even if it is into the unknown.

QuYahni Lewis said that she gave up on elementary schools in Harlem when her 9-year-old daughter came home with bite marks and a pencil stab wound. Next year that daughter will be going to KIPP Star, and two of her other children will be at Harlem Link Charter School, where she works as a secretary. "Thank God we ended up getting that," she said of the charter schools.

Ms. Lewis added: "Every day there was another story about this bully or that bully. I found that there were really no good options here outside of paying for school. Where else are we going to go? What else are we going to do?"

Others are suspicious of the charter schools and ask whether they are drawing the most promising students and only making the older, struggling schools worse — not improving them through competition.

Cordell Cleare, an official of the community education council for District 3, said of the new charter schools, "If they're so rich and golden, why aren't they everywhere?"

Robert A. Reed, the president of a central Harlem council of parent associations, said, "They've picked this population as a guinea pig district."

But he also acknowledged that he entered his young daughter in a charter school lottery and she won a seat for next year that she may take.

When Mr. Klein became chancellor in 2002, schools in District 5 still lagged in test scores, as they had for decades, and he said he made improving them a priority. Now, scores there have begun to rise.

In Grades 3 through 8 in 1999, 19.3 percent of students in District 5 met city and state reading standards. In 2005, 36 percent did. School safety and leadership stability continue to be nettlesome issues, parents say.

"We're seeing progress after decades of nonperformance," Mr. Klein said. "We have a lot of work to do, but the thing to do is to continue creating options while we improve existing schools."

Options, however, remain limited, and the harsh feelings about the new schools are particularly strong among longtime residents who see themselves as having already been on the losing end of the recent real estate boom.

Race may also be a factor; some parents refer to charter school operators as "outsiders" who do not understand the local culture. While the schools' populations are mostly minority, a number of the operators are white.

Parents like Mr. Reed also complain that charter school quality varies too wildly, or that their academic results are simply unknown. On many report cards issued by the state, the space for test scores from some charter schools is blank — either because results have yet to materialize, or the school did not include fourth- and eighth-grade classes, which until this year were the only grades subject to state testing.

"Any new school by definition is new," Mr. Klein said, speaking about the lack of data. "When you see a thousand people on a waiting list, you see that, and what does that mean? That's what parents want."

Not so, said former Councilman Bill Perkins, a longtime Harlem representative now running for the State Senate. "They're not going toward charter because it's proven as good, they're going away from what is proven as bad," he said. While some parents said they had thought the gentrification of much of Harlem throughout the 1990's would be accompanied by the improvement of the older public schools, they did not see it happen. Instead the charters started opening.

"Despite this infusion of economic development, the children were failing, and that is exactly the answer to why, in 2001, when we set out to create a model public school, we picked Harlem," said Deborah Kenny, the founder and chief officer of Village Academies, a network of charter schools based in Harlem. "The children were really, really deeply in need."

For her new school, Harlem Success Academy, former City Councilwoman Eva S. Moskowitz chose Harlem, too. "District 5 in central Harlem has had a very long history of significant underperformance," she said. "Something has to break the lock of whatever's going on, and I'm certainly hoping it's charter schools."

Ms. Moskowitz ran head-on into the neighborhood skepticism of new charter schools, when parents and the teachers' union successfully fought her plan to put Harlem Success into P.S. 154. Parents complained that Harlem Success would put a strain on space and resources and the city found her a space in a different school, P.S. 162, where she is also encountering opposition.

"The chancellor comes in and says they're doing us a service with charter schools," said Dawn DeCosta, the teachers' union chapter leader at P.S. 154. "But if your service is crushing somebody else's program, that's not a service."

Parents like Heriberto Ramos, the parent-teacher association president at P.S. 129, remain suspicious that the improvements are not for them, but for the new class of residents whose middle-class backgrounds give their children a head start.

"Schools are a service for the public," he said. "And I feel all this is not for all of us."

On 123rd Street, at least, there is a spirit of cooperation between P.S. 125 and KIPP Star. Sometimes they share a gym or the pool. Often, they share advice.

"Their teachers have asked us for help and I have asked their principal for help," said Maggie Runyan-Shefa, the principal at KIPP Star. "We have stuff to learn from each other."

    Harlem, a Test Lab, Splits Over Charter Schools, NYT, 2.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/02/nyregion/02harlem.html?hp&ex=1149307200&en=99bc8846669fc34c&ei=5094&partner=homepage