History > 2007 > USA > Education (I)

First grader Dajuan Coffee, 6, of Philadelphia,

listens to teacher Pam Mace in class

at M. Hall Stanton Elementary School.

If nothing else,

"No Child's" first five years have proved the maxim

"What gets tested gets taught."

By Eileen Blass, USA TODAY

How Bush education law has changed our schools

UT        8.1.2007

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-01-07-no-child_x.htm

Billionaires Start

$60 Million Schools Effort

April 25, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

Eli Broad and Bill Gates, two of the most important philanthropists in American public education, have pumped more than $2 billion into improving schools. But now, dissatisfied with the pace of change, they are joining forces for a $60 million foray into politics in an effort to vault education high onto the agenda of the 2008 presidential race.

Experts on campaign spending said the project would rank as one of the most expensive single-issue initiatives ever in a presidential race, dwarfing, for example, the $22.4 million that the Swift Vets and P.O.W.s for Truth group spent against Senator John Kerry in 2004, and the $7.8 million spent on advocacy that year by AARP, the lobby for older Americans.

Under the slogan “Ed in ’08,” the project, called Strong American Schools, will include television and radio advertising in battleground states, an Internet-driven appeal for volunteers and a national network of operatives in both parties.

“I have reached the conclusion as has the Gates foundation, which has done good things also, that all we’re doing is incremental,” said Mr. Broad, the billionaire who founded SunAmerica Inc. and KB Home and who has long been a prodigious donor to Democrats. “If we really want to get the job done, we have got to wake up the American people that we have got a real problem and we need real reform.”

Mr. Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, responding to questions by e-mail, wrote, “The lack of political and public will is a significant barrier to making dramatic improvements in school and student performance.”

The project will not endorse candidates — indeed, it is illegal to do so as a charitable group — but will instead focus on three main areas: a call for stronger, more consistent curriculum standards nationwide; lengthening the school day and year; and improving teacher quality through merit pay and other measures.

While the effort is shying away from some of the most polarizing topics in education, like vouchers, charter schools and racial integration, there is still room for it to spark vigorous debate. Advocating merit pay to reward high-quality teaching could force Democratic candidates to take a stand typically opposed by the teachers unions who are their strong supporters.

Pushing for stronger, more uniform standards, on the other hand, could force Republican candidates to discuss the potential merits of a national curriculum, a concept advocates for states’ rights deeply oppose and one that President Bush has not embraced.

The initiative will be announced today in South Carolina, a day before the first Democratic debate. Similar publicity is scheduled for the first Republican debate early next month in Simi Valley, Calif.

Mr. Bush made education a major theme in 2000, paving the way for the No Child Left Behind law and its emphasis on testing. In 1992, President Bill Clinton proposed an array of education initiatives. But this year the issue is overshadowed by the war in Iraq, terrorism and health care.

“Right now it’s too low on the list of priorities for all the candidates,” Mr. Broad said, “and our job is to get it up on the list.”

The project’s first print advertisement addresses the national focus head on, showing a student misspelling “A histery of Irak” on a blackboard. “Debating Iraq is tough,” the advertisement says. “Spelling it shouldn’t be. America’s schools are falling behind. It’s a crisis that takes leadership to solve. So to all presidential candidates we say, ‘What’s your plan to fix our schools?’ ”

The effort will be directed by Roy Romer, the former Democratic governor of Colorado and the recent superintendent of schools in Los Angeles, and by Marc Lampkin, a Republican lobbyist and former deputy campaign manager for Mr. Bush. It will be financed by the billionaires’ respective foundations, which they established with their wives, Melinda Gates and Edythe L. Broad. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is far larger, having disbursed $1.8 billion in education grants compared with $250 million by the Broad Foundation.

Mr. Broad has long been a major political donor, primarily to Democrats, and has been particularly well known as a friend and supporter of Bill and Hillary Clinton. He has contributed personally to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign as well as to other Democratic candidates.

Mr. Gates also gives handsomely, though to campaigns in both parties. The two men emphasized that their education advocacy was nonpartisan.

Supporters of the project also include Bob Kerrey, the former Democratic senator from Nebraska; Ken Mehlman, the former Republican Party chairman; and Louis V. Gerstner, the former chief executive of I.B.M. Several of the presidential candidates yesterday applauded the billionaires’ effort, but some bristled at the notion that they were not paying sufficient attention to education.

“I think 70 days into a campaign that has yet to choose any nominees for either party, to make a sweeping kind of analysis that they are not talking about education is probably a little premature,” said Kevin Madden, a spokesman for former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, a Republican. “If anybody goes onto the campaign trail with Governor Romney, they’ll recognize that education is an important issue to him and to voters.”

A campaign spokesman for Hillary Clinton said Mrs. Clinton was pleased that the issue would get “much-needed attention.”

Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Democratic presidential candidate who has proposed legislation calling for tougher and more uniform education standards, issued a statement praising the Strong American Schools effort. “I look forward to including elements of the Gates-Broad initiative in the current dialogue on how to improve our nation’s schools,” Mr. Dodd said.

Bill Hogan, a senior fellow at the Center for Public Integrity and director of the Buying of the President 2008 project, which is scrutinizing the influence of money in the campaign, said the new effort could prove remarkable in its spending level.

“If we are talking about efforts in presidential campaigns to promote discussion or debate of an issue, there has been nothing like this,” Mr. Hogan said. “This would be off the charts.”

    Billionaires Start $60 Million Schools Effort, NYT, 25.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/25/education/25schools.html

Grenade in Tx School Scare

Was Inactive

April 24, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:20 p.m. ET
The New York Times

SOUTHLAKE, Texas (AP) -- An elementary school was evacuated for more than an hour Tuesday morning after a fourth-grader showed up with a hand grenade, authorities said.

The grenade still had the pin in it, but it was later determined to be inactive, school district spokeswoman Julie Thannum said. A bomb squad had been called in to remove it from a classroom.

''The boy wasn't mad at anyone,'' Cpl. Mike Bedrich of the Southlake Department of Public Safety told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. ''He just thought it would be cool to bring it to school.''

Old Union Elementary school's staff and 530 students were moved away from the building while authorities in the Fort Worth suburb investigated, then were allowed to return a little over an hour later.

Thannum declined to say if any action would be taken against the student.

    Grenade in Tx School Scare Was Inactive, NYT, 24.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Grenade-Scare.html

Va. Tech Classes Resume With Tears, Hugs

April 24, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:12 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) -- On Virginia Tech's first day of classes since last week's shootings, Joe Merola just wanted to give his students a lecture on an equation explaining the voltage in batteries.

But he couldn't get through it. Looking out at 100 students and a Virginia Tech sweat shirt he had placed on a seat to honor a student who was wounded, he broke down.

''I lost it halfway through class,'' Merola said. ''I burst into tears and had to turn it over to the counselors.''

It was a common sentiment around campus as grieving students returned Monday, one week after Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people before turning the gun on himself.

Students and staff paused for moments of silence at the times when Cho opened fire in two campus buildings more than two hours apart.

Next month, Queen Elizabeth II also will pay tribute to the shooting victims when she visits Virginia for the 400th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in the New World, Buckingham Palace said Tuesday. There was no immediate indication what sort of ceremony will be held, but a visit to the campus was ruled out, a palace spokeswoman said on condition of anonymity in line with royal rules.

''As the queen is visiting so shortly after the tragedy, it is important that it be recognized,'' the spokeswoman said in London.

Monday's tributes included an emotional ceremony in which a man in a Virginia Tech hat rang a bell 33 times and students and faculty released white balloons for each victim.

Then 1,000 balloons were released in the school colors -- maroon and orange -- as people stood in silence, hesitant to let the moment pass.

After a few chants of ''Let's Go, Hokies,'' they headed off to class.

Karan Grewal, one of the gunman's suitemates this year, went to two classes Monday, intermediate accounting and taxes. He was surprised to find the classrooms almost full.

''Both of the teachers I went to, they kind of teared up at the beginning of the class when they started talking about what happened,'' he said. ''A couple of students did, too. Then we all got together and kind of took care of business.''

Paul Deyerle attended three classes, and he took comfort in the fact that his abnormal-psychology teacher kept choking up during class. Students hugged and shed tears themselves.

''Ordinarily, professors are so stoic,'' he said. ''It was nice to see someone sharing what I was feeling.''

Monday was the first time since the shootings that Andrea Falletti had been near the memorial to the victims in front of Burruss Hall, which served as a triage center for those shot at nearby Norris Hall. Faint, brownish bloodstains still marred the sidewalk.

''Every day, you wake up and you don't know what you should do. Everyone's like, 'Should we do something? Should we try to have fun?''' said Falletti, a 21-year-old senior. ''You almost feel guilty smiling in Blacksburg.''

Official said as many as 90 percent of Virginia Tech students returned to campus, and added that class attendance Monday hovered around 75 percent.

Provost Mark McNamee reported at least one sign of normalcy: ''The same students who sit in the last row are still nodding off in class.''

The return to class came as investigators worked tirelessly to figure out what motivated Cho and whether he had any contact or connection to his victims.

Police have pulled from the university computer server all e-mails to and from Cho, as well as e-mails to and from his first victim, Emily Hilscher, according to court documents filed Monday. Police also recovered other e-mail logs and Cho's personal cell phone records.

Investigators are also trying to piece together the details of Cho's final months, as he prepared for what ended up being the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

Students only have two weeks of school left -- classes this week and a week of finals. Virginia Tech is allowing students to drop classes without penalty or accept their current grades. That means many students can pick and choose which classes to attend, depending on whether they need to improve their grades.

''I know that a lot of kids were moving out last night and today to go home for the semester. A lot of them had really good grades and thought that it made no sense to stay here,'' said student Meghan Brady, who said she loves Virginia Tech so much that she couldn't imagine heading home for the summer.

Two students remained hospitalized, one in stable condition and another in serious condition.

The killings did not appear to be affecting the number of prospective students, who must decide by May 1 whether they will enroll this fall.

University officials said they have not yet decided on the future of Norris Hall, the classroom and office building where most victims were killed. But it is unlikely that Norris will be used for classes again, McNamee said.

Workers were putting up a chain-link fence around it Monday, and classes that had been held there have been relocated.

Merola, the chemistry professor, said he finally got around to his lecture on the Nernst equation toward the end of class.

At the end, the students ''started lining up and every one of them gave me a hug. That was unexpected for me,'' he said.

''We could use a lot more hugs.''

Associated Press Writers Chris Kahn and Allen G. Breed contributed to this report.

    Va. Tech Classes Resume With Tears, Hugs, NYT, 24.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Virginia-Tech-Shooting.html

Virginia Tech Struggles to Return to Normal

April 24, 2007
The New York Times
By CHRISTINE HAUSER and IAN URBINA

BLACKSBURG, Va., April 23 — For the most part, the campus of Virginia Tech looked like any other on Monday, a week after the nation’s worst mass shooting. Students, laden with overstuffed book bags, shuffled across the sidewalks and greens, cradling cups of coffee and bottles of water. Books were open on desks, and chalk scratched across boards.

But the resemblance to other universities was entirely superficial. On its first day of classes after the shooting that left 33 dead and 24 injured, the campus was still struggling to decide how to resume a semblance of a normal life.

For one thing, only three-quarters of the student body had returned to classrooms. The others remained reluctant to come back or had taken advantage of the university’s offer to take the rest of the semester off. Many of those who returned refused to talk to the remaining reporters, hoping to give the university a chance to escape the echoes of the killings.

In addition, some departments simply could not open their doors and begin teaching again. Norris Hall, the engineering building that was the site of 30 of the 32 killings, has been taped off by the police, and Ishwar K. Puri, chairman of the department of engineering, science and mechanics, said he was trying to find out whether it would be demolished and what could be salvaged.

“In many cases, our faculty and students do not have access to their scientific data, their notes, their personal libraries, their experimental equipment or a lifetime worth of results,” Professor Puri said of Norris Hall, which holds the laboratories where many of his 80 doctoral students and 25 master’s students work. “Imagine going to work and finding no workplace and no records.”

The students whose teachers were among the five engineering and language faculty members killed were reassigned to other classes Monday.

Dr. Puri said that since his students were blocked from their research and lacked some of the professors they needed, some of them might have to delay finishing their dissertations. That, in turn, could mean an end to their grant money.

The police have pulled from the university’s servers all of the e-mail of the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, as well as that of Emily J. Hilscher, a police spokeswoman confirmed Monday. Ms. Hilscher was one of the first two students killed, in the West Ambler Johnston dormitory.

The spokeswoman, Corinne N. Geller, said the police were still analyzing that information as well as cellphone records and computers. “We have not been able to make a definite link between Cho and Ms. Hilscher,” Ms. Geller said, “but we are still processing all that information.”

Another law enforcement official said it appeared that Mr. Cho had not attended any classes in the month since his parents dropped him off on campus after Easter break. The official said Mr. Cho appeared to have used that time to buy supplies and make other preparations for the shootings.

The authorities also confirmed Monday that Mr. Cho had fired all the shots, officially ruling out the possibility of a second gunman.

The burden of finding alternative locations for the classes that had been held at Norris Hall fell largely on the registrar’s office, which tried to match students and classes with available space in other buildings.

“They had to pull up all the data,” said Mark Owczarski, the university’s director of news and information. “You’re dealing with several dozen faculty offices in Norris Hall and several hundred students. They identified all the affected individuals, contacted them all and found new locations for all the classes.”

Rooms in the more than 100 campus buildings appropriate for lectures were used for the relocated classes. In addition, Mr. Owczarski said, several classes were moved to a nearby corporate research park used by start-up companies.

During meetings last week, professors questioned whether a week was enough time to allow students to stay away. University officials decided that canceling the rest of the academic year was an extreme step and that many students might find returning to campus therapeutic. In the end, Virginia Tech officials asked professors to set aside time to discuss the violent events before moving on to regular course work.

In one freshman chemistry class, which had attendance above 80 percent, a university T-shirt and a bouquet of flowers were placed on a seat to signify a member of the class who had been killed, said Joe Merola, the chemistry department chairman.

“I lost it halfway through class,” Dr. Merola said. “I burst into tears and had to turn it over to the counselors.”

After a lengthy discussion of the shootings and the victims, and how to finish out the semester, the class was eventually able to move on to chemistry, he said.

The campus paused momentarily at 9:45 a.m. on the drillfield, the center of campus life, as a single bell tolled exactly a week after the shootings. A minute later, the bell rang 32 more times as a white balloon was released with each toll.

Some students carried bouquets to lay at the impromptu memorials scattered across campus. Three police officers stood, hands on their gun belts, in front of Norris Hall.

Akash Patel, a sophomore majoring in aerospace engineering, who was back on campus after spending the weekend with friends in Northern Virginia, said the university had been very accommodating. “But I’m stuck here, actually,” he said.

Mr. Patel explained that he had decided to finish his classes largely because he had already bought a nonrefundable plane ticket back home to Fremont, Calif., in May.

Other students said they were still figuring out whether to stay.

Xiaomo Liu, a graduate student in computer science from China, said that since he was working with two other students on a research project, he would have to come to a shared decision about stopping the project now or forging ahead with the research.

“If it is anything like last week, we will not be able to focus,” he said. “We will meet and decide whether to take the grade or not. But I am not even sure if we will be able to do that. One group member went to New Hampshire.”

Karan Grewal, 21, a former suitemate of Mr. Cho, said he had decided to finish classes to avoid ending his college career on such a grim note. But Mr. Grewal said he still did not feel comfortable being near Norris Hall.

“It’s just too sad,” he said.

Nikolas Macko, who joined other students in barricading a door to prevent Mr. Cho from entering their Norris Hall classroom during his killing spree, said he was not apprehensive about returning to the building.

“It was a random event, and I’m hopeful that it was independent and isolated,” Mr. Macko said. “For me, that’s the only way we can move forward.”

Sarah Abruzzese contributed reporting from Blacksburg, and William K. Rashbaum from New York.

    Virginia Tech Struggles to Return to Normal, NYT, 24.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/24/us/24virginia.html

Virginia Tech Struggles to Recover From Shootings

April 23, 2007
By IAN URBINA and MANNY FERNANDEZ
The New York Times

BLACKSBURG, Va., April 22 — A girl in an orange and maroon bikini basked in the sun less than 20 feet from the Virginia Tech dorm in which one of the worst massacres in American history had begun.

A group of international students gathered for dinner downtown here to escape a campus emptied as many of their American classmates went home to try to heal with the aid of family.

A mother slathered suntan lotion on her toddler as they watched a college baseball game only blocks from where students crowded around a coffin and struggled to find the right way to talk about a dead friend.

“She was a great person,” a young man named Chris said of Austin Michelle Cloyd, a freshman killed during French class in last Monday’s massacre. “She is a great person,” he said, restating his thought.

The Virginia Tech campus was quiet, sunny, sad and playful this weekend. On parts of campus, a hush fell as most administrators, professors and journalists left, leaving behind an awkward mix of painful reminders and signs of the struggle to return to normal.

Norris Hall, where 30 of the 32 killings occurred, has become a somber spectacle. A line of motorcycles and cars moved slowly on Sunday around the Drill Field, in front of the hall where memorials of flowers, candles and signs were erected.

The chief of the campus police, Wendell Flinchum, posed for photographs with well-wishers not far from a woman wearing a placard that said, “Jesus Loves You.”

Alumni clad in orange and maroon, the university’s colors, huddled under a white tent for a picnic on Saturday, while the campus bookstore struggled to handle the surge in demand for Virginia Tech gear.

Plywood had been erected to seal off the area of the dorm where Mr. Cho claimed his first victim.

And pastors strained in their Sunday sermons to make sense of the senseless. “There is good, and there is hope because we all know that God’s love prevails,” the Rev. Susan Verbrugge told the several hundred parishioners who gathered for services at the Blacksburg Presbyterian Church.

Ms. Verbrugge recounted breaking through the previous week’s numbness as she stopped on a morning walk and found herself yelling at the mountains and at God. Though her shouts were initially met with silence, she said, she soon was reassured by the simplest of things, the chirping of birds.

“God was doing something about the world,” she said. “Starting with my own heart, I could see good.”

In Centreville, Va., where the gunman Seung-Hui Cho was reared, the Korean community grappled with feelings of shame and grief.

“Part of it is that we are feeling shame because he is Korean,” said Myung Sub Chung, pastor of the Young Saeng Korean Presbyterian Church about a mile and a half from the house of Mr. Cho’s family. “Mainly, we are angry because he is the gunman.”

Mr. Chung counseled his parishioners to spend more time with their children and not to overlook the spiritual part of life. He added that the tragedy had struck close to home for him because his son graduated from high school in the same class as Mr. Cho, and his daughter was a close friend of one of his victims.

Classes resume here on Monday, and while professors try to find a sensitive way to shift the discussion back toward course work, investigators continue trying to solve the mystery of Mr. Cho’s motive.

Much of the investigators’ attention is focused on the computer and cellphone of the woman thought to have been the first of Mr. Cho’s victims. Police officials are hoping to see if he might have known the woman, Emily Jane Hilscher.

Investigators are also trying to obtain records related to e-mail and eBay accounts that Mr. Cho might have used to buy magazine clips for one of his guns, evidence that could help them fill in the extent of his premeditation.

Memorial services were held in Blacksburg and across the country this weekend for at least 11 victims, with more scheduled for this week.

In Washington, Va., on Saturday, a flock of white doves was released in memory of Ms. Hilscher, an 18-year-old freshman from Woodville, Va.

“She’d rather wear jeans than a dress, drive a truck than a sports car, clean a stall than her room and visit the stables than the mall,” said Ms. Hilscher’s sister, Erica, 21.

On campus, the weekend was especially difficult for the Virginia Tech’s 2,100 international students, many of whom were stranded far from their families as other students returned home. Many of the international students also spoke of exhaustion after having suddenly become spokespeople for their communities and news providers to their countries.

At times, their burden was unbearable.

One Korean student, a freshman, locked himself away in his dorm room for much of the week and through the weekend to avoid reporters and other students, a university official said.

An engineering student, Rhondy Rahardja, 23, from Jakarta, Indonesia, fought back tears as he told of the guilt he felt having told people back home in the chaotic first hours after the shootings that all the university’s Indonesian students had survived, when in fact one — Partahi Mamora Lumbantoruan, a 34-year-old graduate student — had died.

“That’s why I haven’t really slept much,” Mr. Rahardja said. “We’ve been working hard to process his belongings, so we went to his apartment packing his stuff and then go through the process of expediting the body to Indonesia.”

Healing has been hastened in part by a spike in school spirit.

At the Campus Emporium on North Main Street here, workers struggled to handle the backlog of 400 orders for Virginia Tech coffee mugs, footballs, teddy bears, clothing and other gear. On campus, the University Bookstore sold a season’s supply of VT lapel pins in two days last week.

The chants, banners and slogans typically associated with Virginia Tech sports have gained a more emotional currency. At a convocation the day after the shootings, the rousing student chants filled Cassell Coliseum. The nickname for the university’s athletic teams, Hokies, has become a kind of shorthand for a unity that many students said they felt. “After what happened, we chanted, and at that moment, I really felt like I’m a Hokie,” said Ingrid Ngai, 19, a native of Hong Kong.

Reporting was contributed by Sarah Abruzzese and Christine Hauser in Blacksburg; Suevon Lee in Centreville, Va.; and Alicia C. Shepard in Washington, Va.

    Virginia Tech Struggles to Recover From Shootings, NYT, 23.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/23/us/23vatech.html?hp

Va. Tech Baseball Team Returns to Field

April 21, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:56 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) -- It was a small rally, yet it signaled the start of a much, much larger one.

Trailing Miami by five in the bottom of the eighth, the Virginia Tech Hokies scored three quick runs to tighten their baseball game Friday night, injecting life into a crowd desperate for it.

Tech would lose 11-9, but on a day marked by tears and mourning, prayer vigils and tolling bells, an evening at the ballpark -- Virginia Tech's first sporting event since Monday's rampage by a student gunman -- provided a hint of relief.

''We won before we got to the field today. The scoreboard was insignificant,'' Hokies coach Pete Hughes said.

''It was a bittersweet feeling playing this game,'' outfielder Jose Cueto said. ''It feels good to get out and get away from everything but the fact that we're getting away from that tragedy makes it hurt.''

In certain moments, there was a strange sense of normalcy. A little boy played catch with his dad. Teens scrambled to scoop up foul balls. Fans shifted impatiently in the long lines to buy hot dogs and Cracker Jack.

But Friday was a day of statewide mourning, and even at the ball game, the pain from the slayings of 33 people, including 23-year-old gunman Seung-Hui Cho, was never far from the surface.

Tears spilled down the cheeks of one player from the home team as a recording of Virginia Tech professor Nikki Giovanni's poem, ''We Are Virginia Tech'' echoed through the stadium. Several Hokies cried as the national anthem played.

Miami players and coaches wore black wristbands in memory of the victims during the three-game series against the Hokies.

Miami head coach Jim Morris drew raucous applause when he presented a $10,000 check on behalf of the university for the Hokie Spirit and Memorial Fund.

The rowdy crowd of more than 3,000 -- five times larger than average -- grew somber as they rose to observe a 32-second moment of silence.

Clutching a sign that read ''4.16.07 Never Forget'' senior Kristyn Heiser marveled at how the Hokies were able to play under the emotional circumstances.

''I think it's a symbol of moving forward and not letting this define who we are,'' said Heiser, 22.

Athletic director Jim Weaver echoed her sentiments.

''You've either got to move forward or you move backward,'' Weaver said. ''We think it is the beginning of the healing process.''

Freshman Andrea Hacker, 19, said the game would help her set aside the horrific memories from Monday, when she heard Cho's gunshots from a nearby building.

''Looking around, seeing the seas of orange and maroon -- it's a special time today,'' Hacker said.

''Students need to get back to normal,'' said junior Chance Hellmann, whose friend Nicole White, 20, was killed in the shooting.

''Anything that keeps your mind off this is a good thing,'' he said.

    Va. Tech Baseball Team Returns to Field, NYT, 21.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Virginia-Tech-Baseball.html

Schools Review Safety After Va. Massacre

April 19, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:19 a.m. ET
The New York Times

COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) -- Cell phone text messages. Loudspeakers on towers. Cameras that detect suspicious activity. Colleges and universities are considering these and other measures in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre, seeking to improve how they get the word out about emergencies to thousands of students across sprawling campuses.

The University of Washington in Seattle is weighing whether to use warning sirens. Clemson University in South Carolina recently installed a similar system for weather-related emergencies and now may expand its use.

''You're going to see a nationwide re-evaluation of how to respond to incidents like this,'' said Jeff Newton, police chief at the University of Toledo.

Chuck Green, director of public safety at the University of Iowa, said school officials were discussing a new outdoor warning system just a day before the Blacksburg shootings. The technology would allow for live voice as well as prerecorded messaging.

''We'd like the option to hit one button to reach large numbers of people at one time,'' he said.

Virginia Tech officials did not send an e-mail warning about a gunman on campus until two hours after the first slayings, drawing criticism that they waited too long and relied on e-mail accounts that students often ignore.

''Would a blast e-mail have been the most effective tool in notifying people of Monday's events?'' asked John Holden, a spokesman for DePaul University in Chicago. ''Some of the coverage I'm seeing suggests that old-fashioned emergency alarms or broadcast announcements would probably have been more effective.''

At many schools, officials want to send text messages to cell phones and digital devices as a faster, more reliable alternative to e-mail.

''We have to find a way to get to students,'' said Terry Robb, who is overseeing security changes at the University of Missouri.

The University of Memphis plans to build a system that will act as a schoolwide intercom. Scheduled to be in place by this fall, the system will consist of speakers mounted on three or four tall poles.

At Johns Hopkins University, officials installed more than 100 ''smart'' cameras after two off-campus slayings. The cameras are linked to computers that detect suspicious situations, such as someone climbing a fence or falling down, and alert not only campus security but also Baltimore city police.

Using text messages would require students to provide personal cell phone numbers -- an intrusion that many colleges and universities have until now been reluctant to pursue, said Howard Udell, chief executive officer of Saf-T-Net AlertNow, a Raleigh, N.C., company that specializes in campus security.

Cell phone numbers ''have to be as vital as your Social Security number,'' he said. ''I don't think it's been a priority.''

The Virginia Tech massacre could bring about widespread safety reforms at colleges and universities, much as the Columbine shootings in Colorado led to security improvements at primary and secondary schools, Udell said.

''We're going to use lessons learned from Virginia Tech's tragedy as much as we can,'' said Auburn University spokeswoman Deedie Dowdle.

Text-message alert systems are already in place at some schools, including Penn State University, which started its program in the fall. The system has transmitted 20 emergency messages since its start, ranging from traffic closures to weather-related cancellations or delays.

At the University of Minnesota, 101 of the university's 270 buildings have electronic access devices. A control center can selectively lock and unlock doors, send emergency e-mail and phone messages, and trigger audio tones and messages. Video cameras monitor 871 locations around the university and radio networks link the university with police.

Despite the widespread safety reviews, nothing short of a total lockdown would ensure the safety of campus communities, said Maj. Frank Knight, assistant chief of police at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C.

''Stopping an individual with a weapon from getting on campus is nearly impossible,'' he said. ''We can't ever guarantee the security of the campus 100 percent.''

At Birmingham-Southern, a small private school in Alabama, campus police also use less sophisticated methods: cars equipped with public-address systems and even runners carrying messages.

Campus Police Chief Randy Youngblood said officers used car-mounted loudspeakers during storms in recent years, and the system has been effective on the small campus.

Associated Press writers Doug Whiteman in Columbus, Ohio; Ben Greene in Baltimore; Mike Baker in Raleigh, N.C.; Michael Tarm in Chicago; and Nafeesa Syeed in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this report.

    Schools Review Safety After Va. Massacre, NYT, 19.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Virginia-Tech-Campus-Alerts.html

FACTBOX: Shooting puts Virginia Tech in spotlight

Wed Apr 18, 2007
6:13AM EDT
Reuters

(Reuters) - Virginia Tech university became the site of the worst shooting rampage in U.S. history this week when a gunman killed 32 people and himself.

What follows are several facts about the 135-year-old Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, which specializes in engineering, business and science.

* The main campus consists of more than 100 buildings on 2,600 acres along the eastern slopes of the Appalachian mountains in rural Virginia, about 240 miles (390 km) southwest of Washington.

* It was ranked 34th among U.S. public universities and 77th among all universities this year by U.S. News and World Report. The magazine also ranked its engineering college 17th among U.S. engineering schools.

* Founded in 1872, the school has struggled for a national identity during much of its history in the shadow of its older and more highly rated neighbor, the University of Virginia, which was established by Thomas Jefferson.

* Virginia Tech has a full-time student population of 26,370, which is the largest in Virginia but medium-sized among U.S. colleges and universities. By contrast, Yale University has a student population of about 13,000, while Ohio State University's enrollment is 59,000.

* About 70 percent of the student body is white, 6.3 percent are Asian; 4.4 percent African American and 2.2 percent Hispanic. International students make up 7 percent of the student body.

* Virginia Tech has eight colleges and a graduate school; More than 26 percent of students are enrolled in engineering, 17 percent in liberal arts and human sciences, 14.6 percent in business and 13.7 percent in science.

* Annual undergraduate tuitions and fees are $6,973 for state residents and $19,049 for out-of-state students.

    FACTBOX: Shooting puts Virginia Tech in spotlight, R, 18.4.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUKN1741116520070418

U.S. Limits Access to Student Loan Database

April 18, 2007
The New York Times
By JONATHAN D. GLATER

The Education Department last night cut off outside access to a government database that contains the personal financial information of millions of student aid applicants.

The department acted on concerns that loan companies or other marketers were improperly obtaining private information on potential borrowers.

The shutdown, announced by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, is its strongest response to a broadening student loan scandal that has already implicated loan companies and caused several universities to put their financial aid administrators on leave and review their dealings with lenders.

In a six-page letter to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, chairman of the education committee, Ms. Spellings offered a staunch defense of the department’s practices and its oversight of the student loan industry.

The letter disclosed that since 2003, the department had revoked 261 user IDs that grant access to the database, known as the National Student Loan Data System. The database was used, among other things, to help determine eligibility for financial aid. Of the revoked IDs, 246 belonged to student loan companies, holders of loans, guaranty agencies and loan servicers, and 15 to schools.

Ms. Spellings said that monitoring the database had shown “a significant increase in usage by lenders, loan holders, services and guaranty agencies” and that the uptick “was a matter of concern to us.”

“I hold the department and the thousands of civil service professionals who administer these programs to the highest ethical standards,” Ms. Spellings said to Mr. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts.

The shutdown of access to the database, described as temporary, came a few weeks after the disclosure that a department official involved in oversight of access to the database had sold at least $100,000 of stock in a student loan company. That employee, Matteo Fontana, was put on paid leave; filings released by the department showed that he had disclosed his shareholdings.

The question of improper searches of the database has been a longstanding one. Mr. Fontana, the general manager in the Education Department office that oversees federal student loan programs, warned in an April 2005 letter to loan companies, university financial aid administrators and others with access to the database that the access “is made available only for the general purpose of assisting with determining the eligibility of an applicant for federal student aid and in the collection of federal student loans and grant overpayments.”

But critics said the department until now had taken few steps to protect access to the database.

Representative George Miller, Democrat of California and chairman of the House education committee, said last night, “I am pleased that the secretary has belatedly taken some steps to address these fundamental privacy issues. However, it is long past time for the department to step up to the plate and vigorously investigate both the extent of lenders’ misuse of the student loan database and the exploitation for profit of federal programs” for student aid.

Some financial aid officers said they believed student loan companies were trolling the database for potential borrowers.

“My understanding is that there have been lenders accessing the database for very long periods of time, looking at large numbers of students to mine the database for possible borrowers they can market to,” said Eileen K. O’Leary, director of student aid and finance at Stonehill College in Massachusetts.

The possibility that the department might restrict access to the database was reported Sunday in The Washington Post. Mr. Kennedy had raised concerns about access to the database in a letter to the department. Last night, he hailed Ms. Spellings’s action, saying, “I look forward to working with her to ensure that students receive their loans without sacrificing their privacy.”

Kevin Bruns, executive director of America’s Student Loan Providers, said he hoped that the shutdown “is, in fact, temporary.” He added, “The department’s lax oversight in the past should not be grounds for a permanent shutdown.”

The department’s announcement came after months of investigation of the ties between lenders and universities by Andrew M. Cuomo, New York’s attorney general.

In recent weeks, Mr. Cuomo has won $6.5 million from lenders that he had accused of improper practices. He has criticized a range of tactics including “kickbacks” to universities for steering student loan volume to companies and paying consulting fees to university aid administrators who provide students with information on where to borrow.

Yesterday, Mr. Cuomo briefed his counterparts from more than 40 states on his investigation, raising the possibility that more states will begin seeking to regulate the industry’s practices. “I look forward to working with other states to clean up the student loan industry,” Mr. Cuomo said after the call. “This is a widening national scandal, and we need to address it as such.”

The Education Department itself has been reacting to the heightened scrutiny in other ways. After two members of federal advisory committees on student aid — the directors of financial aid at the University of Texas and at Johns Hopkins University — were found to have financial relationships with a lending company, Ms. Spellings asked them to resign from the committees.

Other committee members say that department officials have contacted them in recent days to verify information they had provided on financial disclosure forms. The department has also announced that it was looking for ways to “enhance” its disclosure program.

The department has been criticized in the past by its inspector general’s office as exercising lax oversight of the kinds of incentives that lenders were offering universities. In her letter to Mr. Kennedy, Ms. Spellings defended the department on that score. “The department’s Office of Federal Student Aid reviews complaints about lender inducements and determines what, if any, action is required,” she wrote. “If it suspects violations, it evaluates the facts and takes appropriate action.”

She added that a review last year had identified “only a few cases where college and lenders may have violated the rules.”

But the department stands in danger of being overtaken by the states. Attorneys general in California, Connecticut, Minnesota and Ohio have indicated they are looking into relationships between student loan companies and colleges and universities.

Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. of California announced yesterday that his office had demanded that two student-loan companies based in the state provide records concerning their financial relationships with public and private universities, and vocational schools in California.

Karen W. Arenson and Sam Dillon contributed reporting.

    U.S. Limits Access to Student Loan Database, NYT, 18.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/us/18loans.html?hp

Unsettled Day on Campuses Around U.S.

April 18, 2007
The New York Times
By TAMAR LEWIN

Universities in Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas canceled classes yesterday, searched campuses or evacuated buildings in response to threats, and a Louisiana public school district locked down its middle school and high school.

After the shootings at Virginia Tech on Monday, nerves were on edge at universities nationwide, as security officials worried about copycat incidents, even as they acknowledged it was almost impossible to prevent shootings by a deranged student. Universities also reviewed their emergency preparedness plans, considering new technologies to reach students and faculty members in case of danger.

“We have a full-fledged police force with 74 sworn officers; we have a SWAT team; we have bomb dogs,” said Chief Jimmy Williamson, of the University of Georgia Police. “But there’s no way to prevent shootings by a crazed person with a gun. With a tornado in the middle of the night, at least you have a Doppler system.”

The high school and middle school in Bogalusa, La., were locked down after rumors spread about a note threatening mass killing and alluding to the Virginia Tech shootings. The note was given to a private-school student, who gave it to his bus driver, who gave it to the principal, who passed it on to the police. So many parents arrived to pull their children out that school officials ordered the lockdown.

“We have arrested the person who wrote the note,” said Chief Jerry Agnew of the Bogalusa Police Department. “The school went into lockdown mode because of a roller-coaster dynamic, with rumors circulating by e-mail and cellphones and parents coming to school to get their kids. It all generated itself.”

Most of the worries yesterday were baseless. At the University of Oklahoma, the police responded to reports of a suspicious person with a weapon. Officials first issued a statement saying the person was “possibly carrying a yoga mat, which was mistaken for a weapon,” but ultimately concluded that the person was carrying an umbrella.

At the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, officials evacuated three buildings for two hours yesterday morning after receiving a telephoned bomb threat. “I have to admit we were erring on the side of caution in light of the tragedy in Virginia,” said Chuck Cantrell, a university spokesman.

In Austin, Tex., where 40 years ago a gunman shooting from a tower on the University of Texas campus killed 14 people, St. Edward’s University, a private Roman Catholic university, evacuated buildings and canceled classes in response to a threatening note.

“It was a nonspecific bomb threat, which is why all the buildings had to be evacuated,” said Mischelle Amador, director of communications at St. Edward’s.

Although the Virginia Tech shootings brought emergency preparedness into the spotlight yesterday, at many universities these concerns — prompted by school shootings, the Sept. 11 attacks, hurricanes and talk of a possible flu pandemic — had already led to more rigorous planning. “Since right after Columbine, all our people are trained in active shooter response,” said Jeff McCracken, interim director of public safety at the University of North Carolina.

At the University of Florida, emergency communications planning has been substantially upgraded in the last two years, with a new blast e-mail system, electronic signs on campus and a text-messaging service for those who sign up.

    Unsettled Day on Campuses Around U.S., NYT, 18.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/us/18campus.html

‘Horror and Disbelief’ at Virginia Tech

April 17, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN M. BRODER

BLACKSBURG, Va., April 16 — Thirty-two people were killed, along with a gunman, and at least 15 injured in two shooting attacks at Virginia Polytechnic Institute on Monday during three hours of horror and chaos on this sprawling campus.

The police and witnesses said some victims were executed with handguns while other students were hurt jumping from upper-story windows of the classroom building where most of the killings occurred. After the second round of killings, the gunman killed himself, the police said.

It was the deadliest shooting rampage in American history and came nearly eight years to the day after 13 people died at Columbine High School in Colorado at the hands of two disaffected students who then killed themselves.

As of Monday evening, only one of the Virginia Tech victims had been officially identified. Police officials said they were not yet ready to identify the gunman or even say whether one person was behind both attacks, which wreaked devastation on this campus of 36,000 students, faculty members and staff.

Federal law enforcement officials in Washington said the gunman might have been a young Asian man who recently arrived in the United States. A university spokeswoman, Jenn Lazenby, could not confirm that report but said the university was looking into whether two bomb threats at the campus, — one last Friday, the other earlier this month — might be related to the shootings.

The university’s president, Charles W. Steger, expressed his “horror and disbelief and sorrow” at what he described as a tragedy of monumental proportions. But questions were immediately raised about whether university officials had responded adequately to the shootings.

There was a two-hour gap between the first shootings, when two people were killed, and the second, when a gunman stalked through the halls of an engineering building across campus, shooting at professors and students in classrooms and hallways, firing dozens of rounds and killing 30. Officials said he then shot himself so badly in the face that he could not be identified.

The university did not send a campuswide alert until the second attack had begun, even though the gunman in the first had not been apprehended.

Mr. Steger defended the decision not to shut down or evacuate the campus after the first shootings, saying officials had believed the first attack was a self-contained event, which the campus police believed was a “domestic” dispute.

“We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur,” he said.

President Bush sent his condolences to the families of the victims and the university community. “Schools should be places of sanctuary and safety and learning,” Mr. Bush said. “When that sanctuary is violated, the impact is felt in every American classroom and every American community.”

The Virginia Tech attacks started early in the morning, with a call to the police at 7:15 from West Ambler Johnston Hall, a 900-student freshman dormitory, as students were getting ready for classes or were on their way there.

Students said a gunman had gone room to room looking for his ex-girlfriend. He killed two people, a senior identified as Ryan Clark, from Augusta, Ga., and a freshman identified by other students on her floor as Emily Hilscher.

The shootings at the engineering building, Norris Hall, began about 9:45.

[Prof. Liviu Librescu and Prof. Kevin Granata were among the victims there, Ishwar K. Puri, the head of the engineering science and mechanics department, wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press.]

One student described barricading himself in a classroom there with other students and hearing dozens of gunshots nearby. Someone tried to force his way into the classroom and fired two shots through the door that did not hit anyone, the student said.

Scott L. Hendricks, an associate professor of engineering, was in his office on the third floor when he heard 40 to 50 shots from what sounded like the second floor. Mr. Hendricks said he had called 911, but the police were already on the way.

The police surrounded the building and he barricaded the door to his office. After about an hour, the police broke down his door and ordered him to flee.

“When I left, I was one of the last to leave,” Mr. Hendricks said. “I had no idea of the magnitude of the event.”

According to the college newspaper, The Collegiate Times, many of the deaths took place in a German class in Norris Hall.

“He was just a normal looking kid, Asian, but he had on a Boy Scout type outfit,” one student in the class, Erin Sheehan, told the newspaper. “He wore a tan button-up vest and this black vest — maybe it was for ammo or something.”

Ms. Sheehan added: “I saw bullets hit people’s bodies. There was blood everywhere. People in the class were passed out, I don’t know maybe from shock from the pain. But I was one of only four that made it out of that classroom. The rest were dead or injured.”

Heavily armed local and state police officers swarmed onto campus. Video clips shown on local stations showed them with rifles at the ready as students ran or sought cover and a freakish snow swirled in heavy winds. The police evacuated students and faculty members, taking many of them to local hotels. A Montgomery County school official said all schools throughout the county were being shut down.

Many parents and students questioned the university’s response to the two fatal shootings in Ambler Johnston Hall, suggesting that more aggressive action could have prevented the later and deadlier attack.

“As a parent, I am totally outraged,” said Fran Bernhards of Sterling, Va., whose daughter Kirsten attends Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, as it is formally known. “I would like to know why the university did not immediately shut down.”

Kirsten Bernhards, 18, said she and countless other students had no idea that a shooting had occurred when she left her dorm room in O’Shaughnessy Hall shortly before 10 a.m., more than two hours after the first shootings.

“I was leaving for my 10:10 film class,” she said. “I had just locked the door and my neighbor said, ‘Did you check your e-mail?’ ”

The university had, a few minutes earlier, sent out a bulletin warning students about an apparent gunman. But few students seemed to have any sense of urgency.

The university’s first bulletin warned students to be “cautious.” Then, 20 minutes later, at 9:50, a second e-mail warning was sent, saying a gunman was “loose on campus” and telling students to stay in buildings and away from windows. At 10:16, a final message said classes were canceled and advised everyone on campus to stay where they were and lock their doors.

Ms. Bernhards recalled walking toward her class, preoccupied with an upcoming exam and listening to music on her iPod. On the way, she said, she heard loud cracks, and only later concluded that they had been gunshots from the second round of shootings. But even at that point, many students were walking around the campus with little sense of alarm.

It was only when Ms. Bernhards got close to Norris Hall, the second of two buildings where the shootings took place, that she realized something was wrong.

“I looked up and I saw at least 10 guards with assault rifles aiming at the main entrance of Norris,” she recalled.

The Virginia Tech police chief, Wendell Flinchum, defended the university’s decision to keep the campus open after the first shootings, saying the information at the time indicated that it was an isolated event and that the attacker had left campus.

At an evening news conference, Chief Flinchum would not say that the same gunman was responsible for the shootings in the dormitory and the classrooms. He said he was awaiting ballistics tests and other laboratory results until declaring that the same person carried out both attacks.

He said accounts from students at the dorm had led the police to a “person of interest” who knew one or both of the victims there. The police were interviewing him off campus at the time of the shootings at Norris Hall. Chief Flinchum said officers had not arrested the man.

“You can second-guess all day,” he said. “We acted on the best information we had. We can’t have an armed guard in front of every classroom every day of the year.”

Classroom buildings are not locked and dormitories are open throughout the day but require a key card for entry at night, university officials said.

Chief Flinchum confirmed that police found some of the Norris Hall classroom doors chained shut from the inside, which is not a normal practice. Some of the people hurt there were injured leaping from windows to escape.

Virginia imposes few restrictions on the purchase of handguns and no requirement for any kind of licensing or training. The state does limit handgun purchases to one per month to discourage bulk buying and resale, state officials said.

Once a person had passed the required background check, state law requires that law enforcement officers issue a concealed carry permit to anyone who applies. However, no regulations and no background checks are required for purchase of weapons at a Virginia gun show.

“Virginia’s gun laws are some of the weakest state laws in the country,” said Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “And where there have been attempts to make some changes, a backdoor always opens to get around the changes, like the easy access at gun shows.”

Students are not allowed to have guns on the campus.

At Ambler Johnston Hall, where the first shootings took place, many if not most students had left and those who remained stayed close to their rooms by late afternoon.

Mr. Clark, the senior who was shot in the dorm, was a resident adviser who went by the nickname Stack on Facebook.com, was well liked and was a member of the university’s marching band, the Marching Virginians, students said. “He was a cool guy,” said one fourth-floor resident.

The shootings unfolded in an age of instant messaging, cellphone cameras, blogs and social networking sites like Facebook. As the hours passed, students who were locked in their classrooms and dormitories passed on news and rumors.

In one cellphone video shown repeatedly on television networks, the sound of dozens of shots can be heard and students can be seen running from Norris Hall.

The student who made the video, Jamal Albarghouti, a graduate student, said he was already on edge because of two bomb threats on campus last week. “I knew this was something way more serious,” he told CNN.

The shooting was the second in the past year that forced officials to issue an alert to the campus.

In August of 2006, an escaped jail inmate shot and killed a deputy sheriff and an unarmed security guard at a nearby hospital before the police caught him in the woods near the university. The capture ended a manhunt that led to the cancellation of the first day of classes at Virginia Tech and shut down most businesses and municipal buildings in Blacksburg. The defendant, William Morva, is facing capital murder charges.

The atmosphere on campus was desolate and preternaturally quiet by Monday afternoon. Students gathered in small groups, some crying, some talking quietly and others consoling each other.

Up until today, the deadliest campus shooting in United States history was in 1966 at the University of Texas, where Charles Whitman climbed to the 28th-floor observation deck of a clock tower and opened fire, killing 16 people before he was shot and killed by the police. In the Columbine High attack in 1999, two teenagers killed 12 fellow students and a teacher before killing themselves.

The single deadliest shooting in the United States came in October 1991, when George Jo Hennard crashed his pickup truck through the window of a Luby’s cafeteria in Killeen, Tex., then shot 22 people dead and wounded at least 20 others. He shot himself in the head.

Reporting was contributed by Sarah Abruzzese, Edmund L. Andrews, Neela Banerjee, Micah Cohen, Shaila Dewan, Cate Doty, Manny Fernandez, Brenda Goodman, David Johnston, Michael Mather, Marc Santora, Amy Schoenfeld, Archie Tse and Matthew L. Wald.

    ‘Horror and Disbelief’ at Virginia Tech, NYT, 17.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/us/17virginia.html?hp

Student Lender Had Early Plans to Woo Officials

April 10, 2007
The New York Times
By JONATHAN D. GLATER and SAM DILLON

The founders of Student Loan Xpress had an explicit plan for corralling a bigger share of the lucrative student loan business: “market to the financial aid offices of schools.”

That was how Robert deRose, Michael H. Shaut and Fabrizio Balestri set out, according to a 2002 regulatory filing by the company, a strategy to use university financial aid offices as the gateway to coveted placements on the lists of lenders recommended to students.

Five years later the company says it is the eighth-largest player in student lending — and it found many ways to court university financial aid directors. It put them on a company advisory board, paid at least two as consultants and sold stock in the venture to others, investigators and university officials say.

Yesterday aides to Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of New York provided new details, saying financial aid officers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Capella University, an online for-profit institution, had served as paid consultants to the lending company.

The company also paid for part of the graduate school tuition for Ellen Frishberg, the Johns Hopkins official, Mr. Cuomo’s office said.

At another university, Widener in Pennsylvania, the lending company sent executives to conferences held by a firm run by the dean of financial aid. It paid the firm $80,000, Mr. Cuomo’s aides said.

These were just the latest in a series of revelations that have already shown that financial aid directors at three universities — Columbia, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Southern California — held stock in the company, as did an Education Department official who helps oversee student lenders.

Yesterday, the three executives were put on leave by the parent company of Student Loan Xpress. It is not clear whether the company or university officials have done anything illegal.

Mr. Cuomo’s aides say they are looking into deceptive business practices, a civil matter. Mr. Cuomo has said the relationships between lenders and the officials whom students rely on for unbiased financial advice pose a conflict of interest.

Some tactics like using financial aid officers as advisers and consultants are used by other companies. And universities that recommended Student Loan Xpress to students say its loan rates are competitive.

Still, the three men were all put on leave yesterday by the CIT Group, which bought Student Loan Xpress in 2005. That company and the broader student loan industry are now under scrutiny by Congress, the Department of Education’s inspector general in Washington as well as by several state attorneys general.

“As a company that holds itself to the highest standards of business ethics and integrity, we take the allegations raised by Attorney General Cuomo very seriously,” said Jeffrey M. Peek, chairman and chief executive of CIT. Mr. deRose, Mr. Shaut and Mr. Balestri have not returned repeated calls seeking comment.

The quick rise of Student Loan Xpress is a window into an industry in which profits have soared along with tuition and student debt.

“All the companies are out there scrapping,” said Richard Lee Colvin, director of the Hechinger Institute at Teachers College at Columbia University. “This may be an outlier, but every single company is out there trying to increase its market share.”

All three executives worked in the student loan industry during the 1990s. Mr. deRose ran the student loan business for American Express from his base in San Diego, where Mr. Balestri, who had been a longtime executive at Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest student loan company, joined him to direct sales operations. In the 1990s Mr. Shaut had worked at companies involved in the student loan market, too.

By 2002, they were all working together in a new company, Education Lending Group, which had Student Loan Xpress as a student loan marketing subsidiary. Mr. Balestri was the president of Student Loan Xpress. Mr. Balestri knew hundreds of loan officials all over the country, and he had built a reputation in the industry as a natural salesman.

“He was very good at sales, always upbeat, talking about how great everything was,” said Dan Davenport, director of admissions and financial aid at the University of Idaho.

Otto Reyer, director of financial aid at Western University of Health Sciences in California, worked with Mr. deRose and Mr. Balestri at American Express and remembers Mr. Balestri in the same way.

“He has a great smile,” Mr. Reyer said. “He’s somebody you can sit down and talk with, easily. He could sell anything.”

In his work to build Student Loan Xpress, Mr. Balestri used some novel marketing tactics. In one initiative, he arranged for the company to help sponsor a coast-to-coast “Scholarships for Everyone” tour by Ben Kaplan, a 25-year-old Harvard graduate and author of a book outlining tactics for obtaining scholarships.

Mr. Kaplan said he met Mr. Balestri, whom he knew by his nickname, Breeze, at conventions of college lending officers, and that on the tour he would occasionally mention Student Loan Xpress as a helpful financial resource for students.

Mr. Balestri was also wooing university officials. People with experience in the student loan industry said that some of the company’s tactics were common. Many student loan companies establish advisory boards composed of university financial aid officers, as did Student Loan Xpress.

Dana Kelly, director of financial planning at High Point University in North Carolina, said she accepted the company’s invitation to sit on its advisory board because she was providing advice about how students might react to various loans. The company was already on the university’s “frequently used lenders” list, she said, and she received payment only for transportation and lodging at meetings.

But in at least one case, Mr. Balestri encouraged a university loan official to buy stock in the company, a practice that several university loan officials say they had never heard of.

Lawrence Burt, director of the financial aid office at the University of Texas at Austin, said that Mr. Balestri encouraged him to buy shares in Education Lending Group and that he bought 1,500 shares for $1,000 in late 2001.

Mr. Balestri, Mr. Burt said, told him “this is kind of a risky venture. We think it will end up turning a profit but we don’t really know for sure.” Mr. Burt said his purchase was not a conflict of interest because the company at the time was focused more on loan consolidation and only later began expanding its business of originating loans. Mr. Burt said he sold in 2003 when the company was raising more money through the sale of additional shares. The shares of Education Lending Group were worth roughly $10 each. That translates into a profit of about $14,000 for him.

Others who put stock up for sale at that time, according to S.E.C. filings, included the financial aid director for Columbia’s undergraduate college and its engineering school, David Charlow; Catherine Thomas, director of financial aid at the University of Southern California, and Matteo Fontana, who is general manager in a unit of the Office of Federal Student Aid at the Department of Education, and, according to a person who knows him, a longtime friend of Mr. Balestri’s. Mr. Fontana planned to sell about $100,000 in stock up for sale in 2003. In the last few days, these officials have been put on paid leave pending investigations.

Last week, Ms. Frishberg of Johns Hopkins said she had been encouraged to acquire stock in 2002, at a dinner she and other members of the company’s advisory board attended. She turned it down, she said.

“I told them it was not allowed in my position,” Ms. Frishberg said.

Johns Hopkins put her on leave after learning that she had received payments from the company. Mr. Cuomo’s office wrote that she received $43,000 for consulting and $22,000 in tuition reimbursement for a doctoral program she was enrolled in. Student Loan Xpress is a preferred lender at Johns Hopkins for some loan programs.

Tim Lehman, director of financial aid at Capella University, also served as a consultant to the company, earning more than $12,000, Mr. Cuomo’s office said. And Walter Cathie, dean of student financial aid at Widener University, runs a firm that holds conferences on student aid, which representatives of Student Loan Xpress attended at a cost of $80,000, Mr. Cuomo’s office said.

A spokesman for Widener yesterday said the university was looking into the matter. Irene Silber, director of public relations at Capella, said yesterday that the university had known of Mr. Lehman’s consulting arrangement and was reviewing it. She said he did not put Student Loan Xpress on Capella’s list of preferred lenders; the company was there when he arrived.

Profits at Student Loan Xpress did not materialize overnight. The company lost $28.3 million in 2002. But by 2003 its loan portfolio had tripled in size to about $3 billion and in the first nine months of 2004, it had profits of about $10 million. The real payback came in 2005, when the CIT Group bought the company for $318 million.

    Student Lender Had Early Plans to Woo Officials, NYT, 10.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/education/10loan.html?hp

To Close Gaps, Schools Focus on Black Boys

April 9, 2007
The New York Times
By WINNIE HU

OSSINING, N.Y. — In an effort to ensure racial diversity, the school system here in northern Westchester County is set up in an unusual way, its six school buildings divided not by neighborhood but by grade level. So all of the second and third graders in the Ossining Union Free School District attend the Brookside School.

But some minority students, the black boys at Brookside, are set apart, in a way, by a special mentoring program that pairs them with black teachers for one-on-one guidance outside class, extra homework help, and cultural activities during the school day. “All the black boys used to end up in the office, so we had to do something,” said Lorraine Richardson, a second-grade teacher and mentor. “We wanted to teach them to help each other” instead of fight each other.

While many school districts have long worked to close the achievement gap between minority and white students, Ossining’s programs aimed to get black male students to college are a new frontier.

Ossining school officials said they were not singling out black boys, but after a district analysis of high school students’ grade-point averages revealed that black boys were performing far worse than any other group, they decided to act. In contrast, these officials said, the performance of black girls compared favorably with other students and did not warrant the same concern.

The district calls it a “moral imperative,” and administrators and teachers say their top priority is improving the academic performance of black male students, who account for less than 10 percent of the district’s 4,200 students but disproportionately and consistently rank at the bottom in grades and test scores. The programs are voluntary, school officials said, and some students choose not to take part.

The special efforts for Ossining’s black male students began in 2005 with a college-preparatory program for high schoolers and, starting last month, now stretch all the way to kindergarten, with 5-year-olds going on field trips to the American Museum of Natural History and Knicks and Mets games to practice counting.

Ossining’s unusual programs for black boys have drawn the attention of educators across the country as school districts in diversifying suburbs are coming under new pressure to address what many see as a seemingly intractable racial divide with no obvious solution.

The federal No Child Left Behind law’s requirement that test scores be analyzed for each racial group has over the past decade spotlighted the achievement gap even in predominantly white suburban districts.

Some of the nation’s leading minority scholars have praised Ossining’s approach, but other educators, parents and civil rights groups contend that such separate programs do more harm than good. Last year, the New York Civil Rights Coalition filed a complaint with the United States Department of Education over such a program at the City University of New York, and the group plans to file a complaint with the state against Ossining’s program.

“I think this is a form of racial profiling in the public school system,” said the coalition’s executive director, Michael Meyers. “What they’re doing here, under the guise of helping more boys, is they’re singling them out and making them feel inferior or different simply because of their race and gender.”

At a time of wider debate over the socioeconomic barriers facing black boys, the focus on boosting educational support has gained traction with policymakers. In Maryland, a state education task force asserted in December that “school, itself, is an at-risk environment for African-American male youth” and issued a 58-page report “to justify fixing it — whatever the cost.”

In New York and other large cities, such concerns have spurred the creation of all-male schools aimed at drawing black students. Now, with debate over the achievement gap spreading beyond city borders, efforts like Ossining’s — though few as comprehensive — are sprouting up in suburbs nationwide.

In Teaneck, N.J., school officials formed an after-school club for black boys in 2005, with local black businessmen serving as role models. In the Cleveland suburbs, the South Euclid-Lyndhurst district has spent more than $20,000 a year on clubs that reward black male students for good grades with sleepovers and guest speakers.

And in the neighboring community of Shaker Heights, one of the nation’s best-known honors programs for black male students, the Minority Achievement Committee Scholars, has since 2004 received calls from more than 40 school districts that want to copy its efforts.

Here in Ossining, where Sing Sing state prison looms as a reminder that more black men are behind bars than enrolled in college, Latoya Morris, who is black, said that most of her black male classmates dropped out of school before she graduated in 1999. Now the mother of a 5-year-old boy in kindergarten, Ms. Morris, a nurse, said the extra support for black boys makes sense because the statistics are stacked against them.

“I don’t want my son to be in jail when he becomes a teenager,” she said. “I want him to have the same chances as a white child.”

The school officials here noted that it is too soon to measure the impact of their programs with test scores, but that the percentage of black students enrolled in college-level courses in 11th and 12th grades has more than doubled to 55 percent this year from 26 percent in 2004.

In the lower grades, teachers have also reported that disciplinary referrals for black boys have dropped — as much as 80 percent at Brookside — and that the boys are missing fewer homework assignments and paying more attention in class. (Efforts are under way now to begin similar programs for Hispanic boys, who have also not performed well.)

Since Lenox Robinson, a 12-year-old sixth grader, joined the district’s mentoring program in October, he has begun saving pennies and quarters in a glass jar under his bed — he has $10 so far — to pay for college. Lenox failed science last marking period mainly because, he said, he stopped trying after his friends made fun of him, adding, “I realize I shouldn’t have done that.”

Programs aimed specifically at black students, and the boys in particular, are a departure from past efforts that sought to erase the achievement gap by raising the performance of every student, but are gaining acceptance in some circles.

This summer, the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell and the investment bank Goldman Sachs are scheduled to convene their third conference of educators and professionals in the past year to brainstorm on “winning strategies for young black men.”

While most schools are reluctant to focus on any particular group of students, opposition has lessened.

Some black scholars said that achievement-gap programs must be tailored to the needs of black male students if the programs are to succeed. Freeman A. Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, said that many black boys grow up with few male role models and in high-crime neighborhoods, where being smart in school is not considered cool. “You can’t just ignore the needs of a group and say all children are the same,” he said.

But Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a Washington-based group that advocates for disadvantaged children, worried that such efforts may unintentionally lump together high-achieving black students with low-achieving ones and, in effect, “declare a whole set of kids at risk.”

“You do have to worry whether you’re creating a stereotype that is as damaging as the one you’re trying to replace,” she said.

The Ossining district is one of the most racially and economically mixed in the affluent Westchester suburbs: about 16 percent of the students are black and 38 percent Hispanic, and nearly one-third qualify for free and reduced lunches.

A New York Times analysis of state education data showed that, among about 150 districts that tested students in the 2004-5 school year, the most recent available, Ossining’s achievement gap between black and white students was in the top fifth. For fourth graders, the gap widened on the English tests from four years earlier, while for eighth graders, the gap narrowed during the same period but was still twice as big as in all the other districts.

Since 2005, Ossining’s programs for black boys have cost more than $50,000, most of it from donations, grants and a student telethon. School officials said they had not received any complaints about the district’s use of resources for this purpose.

None of more than two dozen parents who were interviewed directly criticized the focus on black boys, or said that the boys were receiving preferential treatment. But several said the programs should be made available to struggling students regardless of race.

Under the programs, the extra attention begins in elementary school; every black boy in fourth and fifth grades, for example, is assigned a team of teachers to track his academic progress.

The boys also meet black role models, while their parents attend workshops on planning for college. Motivation is emphasized throughout. As part of a recent dress for success contest, high school boys wore suits to school for a month. The two winners received hand-tailored suits.

Last month, Brookside started a music class in which, with teacher approval, black boys are allowed to miss one period a week to learn to play conga drums and sing West African welcome songs. After one recent drum fest, 9-year-old Arthur Stokeley, a third grader, sat down with his mentor, Ms. Richardson, to review his class work.

“So how was school today?” Ms. Richardson said.

“It was great,” Arthur said.

Griff Palmer contributed reporting.

    To Close Gaps, Schools Focus on Black Boys, NYT, 9.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/nyregion/09school.html?hp

Study gives teachers barely passing grade in classroom

29.3.2007
USA TODAY
By Greg Toppo

The typical child in the USA stands only a one-in-14 chance of having a consistently rich, supportive elementary school experience, say researchers who looked at what happens daily in thousands of classrooms.

The findings, published today in the weekly magazine Science, take teachers to task for spending too much time on basic reading and math skills and not enough on problem-solving, reasoning, science and social studies. They also suggest that U.S. education focuses too much on teacher qualifications and not enough on teachers being engaging and supportive.

Funded by the National Institutes of Health, educational researchers spent thousands of hours in more than 2,500 first-, third- and fifth-grade classrooms, tracking kids through elementary school. It is among the largest studies done of U.S. classrooms, producing a detailed look at the typical kid's day.

The researchers found a few bright spots — kids use time well, for one. But they found just as many signs that classrooms can be dull, bleak places where kids don't get a lot of teacher feedback or face time.

Among the findings on what teachers and students did and how they interacted:

• Fifth-graders spent 91.2% of class time in their seats listening to a teacher or working alone, and only 7% working in small groups, which foster social skills and critical thinking. Findings were similar in first and third grades.

• In fifth grade, 62% of instructional time was in literacy or math; only 24% was devoted to social studies or science.

• About one in seven (14%) kids had a consistently high-quality "instructional climate" all three years studied. Most classrooms had a fairly healthy "emotional climate," but only 7% of students consistently had classrooms high in both. There was no difference between public and private schools.

Although all teachers surveyed had bachelor's degrees — and 44% had a master's — it didn't mean that their classrooms were productive. The typical teacher scored only 3.6 out of seven points for "richness of instructional methods," and 3.4 for providing "evaluative feedback" to students on their work.

Whether a teacher was highly qualified, had many years of experience or earned more mattered little, says lead researcher Robert Pianta of the University of Virginia.

Of the standard measures studied, "none of them makes a noticeable difference," he said.

Prior research has shown that highly skilled, engaging teachers can eliminate achievement gaps between rich and poor kids. Pianta says his new findings support that conclusion and suggest policymakers should focus more on how individual teachers can improve on these measures.

Kathy Schultz, director of teacher education at the University of Pennsylvania's graduate school of education, says studying how teachers teach is helpful, but ignores the reality of larger mandates such as the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Teachers, she says, are under enormous pressure to increase basic skills.

    Study gives teachers barely passing grade in classroom, UT, 29.3.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-03-29-teacher-study_N.htm

Colleges Hiring Lenders to Field Queries on Aid

March 29, 2007
The New York Times
By JONATHAN D. GLATER

The telephone number looks like any other university extension. And when students call with questions about financial aid, the recorded voice at the other end says, “Thank you for calling Texas Tech University’s Student Financial Center.”

But what is remarkable about the center is not so much that it is actually located hundreds of miles away from Texas Tech’s Lubbock campus. It’s that the people giving advice are not university employees at all — instead they work for Nelnet, a company that made more than $68 million last year off of student loans.

Nelnet’s role staffing the help line — which is not disclosed to callers — is a window into the often hidden relationships between loan companies and the colleges that students rely on for advice about how to finance their schooling. Nelnet is one of several lenders that the university recommends to its students, though it is not among its 10 largest lenders.

But critics say such relationships pose a conflict of interest.

Texas Tech, which defends the arrangement as beneficial to students, is hardly alone. Nelnet says its Texas call center located in Bryan and another in Indianapolis provide advice on behalf of about 10 different colleges; one is Wayne State University in Detroit. Pace University and Mercy College in New York City and its suburbs are among the roughly 20 institutions that use call centers operated by Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest student loan company.

Documents obtained by the New York attorney general’s office show, according to officials, that some contracts between the colleges and the lenders require the call center staffers to identify themselves as part of the university. Loan company officials interviewed all declined to say which colleges use their centers.

Students call college financial aid offices with a variety of questions, such as explanations of bills received or updates on loan applications. But they also call with questions about how to pay for college — putting them in the position of unknowingly getting advice from a representative of a particular company.

Officials at loan companies say their operators follow a script worked out by the colleges and do not steer students to their own products. Colleges and universities also say they use “secret shoppers” to verify that callers are getting accurate information.

Becky Wilson, director of financial aid at Texas Tech, defended the practice of routing student financial aid questions to Nelnet and said that the university was “trying to make the aid process as seamless as possible for students” so they do not have to deal with multiple people. She said that if call center workers identified themselves as Nelnet employees it would cause confusion and added that the university also uses “secret shoppers.”

Students who call with questions that are too specific or complicated get called back from financial aid administrators at the school, she said. She said the university expects to pay Nelnet $200,000 or more this year for handling about 99,000 calls to its financial aid office and 99,000 more calls to its business office.

But Andrew M. Cuomo, New York’s attorney general, said the call centers pose “an inherent conflict of interest” because “a self-interested lender is providing what is purported to be unbiased advice.”

The relationships between loan companies and universities are increasingly coming under attack by federal and state officials as tuition continues to rise and students are accumulating heavy debt loads to pay for college. In 2006, students borrowed about $85 billion, according to the College Board.

Students generally rely on college preferred lender lists when seeking loans rather than looking for the best deal. Last week, Mr. Cuomo announced that he intends to sue one company, Education Finance Partners of San Francisco, for deceptive business practices because it pays “kickbacks” based on loan volume to colleges for steering students its way.

The company said this week that it would “add clear disclosures to its marketing materials” to clarify its relationship with universities. The federal education department is weighing whether to regulate preferred lender lists.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who heads the education committee, has also asked lenders for information about their relationships with colleges.

The call centers seem like a fairly new offering. Universities say they generally pay the loan companies for the centers on a per-call basis. Wayne State began using the company’s center in Indianapolis in 2003. Texas Tech began using Nelnet just last year, after university officials decided their own workers were spending too much time directing callers to the right place. Mercy College has had its contract with Sallie Mae since December 2005, while Pace University’s arrangement with Sallie Mae is about three years old.

Ben Kiser, a spokesman for Nelnet, said that students generally did not ask whom they should borrow from. “We’re primarily taking questions after a lender’s already been selected,” he said. “If they do come up, we will answer them, based on the procedures, process and scripts that have been approved by the school.”

He said the call centers allow colleges to cut costs. “We are seeing a number of schools that are interested,” he said.

Deirdre Moore, interim director of student financial aid at Wayne State, said the contract with Nelnet allowed the college’s financial aid administrators to focus on more important tasks. “They’re answering a lot of the routine questions that we would receive,” Ms. Moore said.

She said she did not worry about the potential conflict of interest for call center operators because she believed she would hear from students if there were a problem. Operators handling calls for Wayne State do not identify themselves as Nelnet employees, Ms. Moore said, though they are not barred from doing so.

A financial aid office has its cycles, with busy periods when students are trying to line up financing, and slow periods once a semester begins. Aid administrators say that drawing on the call centers means a school can deal with peak demand without having to hire additional people.

“We pay Sallie Mae for each call answered,” said Phil McNamara, the Mercy College spokesman. The cost of handling the calls that way is lower than the cost of hiring full-time employees, he said.

After Mr. Cuomo publicized the practice, Mercy College made one change. Students who call the school’s financial aid office now are told that the person answering works for Sallie Mae. Mr. McNamara said the college also plans to review the arrangement. Sallie Mae is one of three companies that Mercy College recommends to students through its preferred lending list for federal loans.

Tom Joyce, a spokesman for Sallie Mae, said that providing the service does not violate any regulations and does not result in biased information to callers.

At Pace University, aid administrators periodically monitor service and check on the information given by Sallie Mae’s representatives, said Christopher T. Cory, its spokesman. He declined to discuss the matter in more detail, citing the investigation by Mr. Cuomo.

Reggie V. Thomas, a 21-year-old senior at Pace, said he knew the financial aid call center was not operated by the university. But he did not know that a student loan company ran it.

“My main concern is whether the students are getting the exact information they would get if they visited the financial aid office, and whether that information is accurate and correct,” said Mr. Thomas, who is executive president of the student government.

Mr. Thomas said he had taken out a loan from Sallie Mae, the operator of Pace’s call center, on the recommendation of a financial aid counselor he met in person. He ended up with a loan carrying an interest rate of 13.5 percent and imposing more than $900 in fees — costs that caught him by surprise. With help from his father, who co-signed the loan, he paid off the debt within months.

One member of Pace’s board of trustees, Prof. Joseph Ryan, chairman of the criminal justice and sociology department, expressed some queasiness about the call centers.

“It sounds like it’s a conflict of interest to me,” Professor Ryan said. “But the background of this to me is, Pace cannot have enough financial aid experts.”

    Colleges Hiring Lenders to Field Queries on Aid, NYT, 29.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/education/29loans.html?hp

Ousted sorority sues DePauw University

USA TODAY
By Mary Beth Marklein

Delta Zeta, the national sorority that was ousted from DePauw University after removing 22 women from active membership, sued the university Wednesday.

Among its demands: that DePauw "affirmatively acknowledge" that Delta Zeta did not base its decisions on appearance or race — sticking points that led to a national uproar. It also wants the sorority reinstated at DePauw.

The lawsuit says administrators at the Greencastle, Ind., campus not only were aware of Delta Zeta's activities as it sought to revive a struggling chapter, but also made "clear and unambiguous promises" to help. Instead, the school severed ties with the sorority.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Indiana, seeks unspecified punitive damages. It says the publicity surrounding the controversy could harm the sorority's ability to expand nationally. Delta Zeta wants the university to apologize and retract false statements.

"The wrong message is out there about Delta Zeta," Cindy Menges, executive director of the sorority, said Tuesday. "I am disappointed that there is not as much interest in the facts as there has been interest in a story that's been created by the public at our expense."

The dispute began in December, when 22 of 34 women in the Delta Zeta chapter at DePauw learned that they would be put on alumnae, or inactive, status and would have to move out of the sorority. That decision came after each woman was interviewed to determine her commitment to recruiting new members. A chapter vote earlier in the semester suggested some were tired of the work required to rebuild the declining membership, the lawsuit says.

The controversy spread nationally after The New York Times ran a story Feb. 25 that said the sorority had a reputation on campus for being "socially awkward" and that those who were asked to leave included every woman who was overweight and the chapter's only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The story also said those asked to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men.

DePauw President Robert Bottoms has said a university investigation concluded that race was not a factor. And several of the women, including senior Michelle Edvenson, 22, one of those put on alumnae status, say appearance was a peripheral issue, though the sorority's image played a role in the membership review process.

Eight of the women are working with Indianapolis lawyer Mark Dinsmore, who said he is negotiating with Delta Zeta lawyers on "a number of issues relating to both the fact and the manner of their placement on alumnae status."

Ken Owen, DePauw's director of media relations, said Delta Zeta's lawsuit "completely lacks merit, and we have every confidence the courts will determine that the university acted lawfully and in the best interest of its students."

"The graceful thing would be for the sorority to accept this and let it lie," said senior Kate Holloway, 22, who quit the sorority just before the women learned their fates.

The lawsuit could have wider implications for fraternities and sororities. Colleges generally have no say over the internal operations of these groups. "For a university to say, 'If you place this person on alumnae status, we're not going to let you operate anymore,' the university is deciding that they get to choose the members," said Kevin O'Neill, an attorney in Washington, D.C., who has been consulting with Delta Zeta officials but did not file the lawsuit.

Communications consultant Rodney Ferguson of Lipman Hearne in Washington, D.C., says DePauw may be within its rights. "A university's role is to make professional judgments as to whether the legal, ethical, and moral line has been breached," he said.

    Ousted sorority sues DePauw University, UT, 28.3.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-03-28-sorority_N.htm

India Attracts Universities From the U.S.

March 26, 2007
The New York Times
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

CHENNAI, India — It was an unusual university entrance interview.

Late one recent evening here in steamy southern India, Vijay Muddana sat in a mercilessly air-conditioned room, leaning forward in his chair and talking to the wall. There, projected on a screen via videoconferencing equipment, were administrators from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where an early morning snowstorm had caused a power failure, delaying the interviews by an hour. The Indians found it funny that even in Pittsburgh, there were power failures.

Mr. Muddana, 21, was among a dozen ambitious young Indians hoping to get a graduate degree in information technology offered jointly by Carnegie Mellon and a small private college here.

The exchange was one of the many ways in which American universities, eager to expand to markets abroad, are training their sights on India. Some 40 percent of the population is under 18, and a scarcity of higher education opportunities is frequently cited as a potential hurdle to economic progress.

The American universities are just testing the waters, because the law here is still vague on how foreign educational institutions can operate. But that may soon change.

[The Bush administration’s envoy for public diplomacy, Karen P. Hughes, is visiting India this week with a half-dozen American university presidents to promote Brand America in Indian education. The United States wants an easing of rules under a draft law on foreign investment in Indian education, which is to be introduced in Parliament in April.]

If the law is approved, foreign institutions would be exempt from strict rules that currently apply to all government-accredited universities in India on fees, staff salaries and curriculums. The government has already proposed setting up an expert committee to review the standards and reputation of foreign universities that want to establish independent campuses here.

The growing American interest in Indian education reflects a confluence of trends. It comes as American universities are trying to expand their global reach in general, and discovering India’s economic rise in particular. It also reflects the need for India to close its gaping demand for higher education.

Among Indians ages 18 to 24, only 7 percent enter a university, according to the National Knowledge Commission, which advises the prime minister’s office on higher education. To roughly double that percentage — effectively bringing it up to par with the rest of Asia — the commission recommends the creation of 1,500 colleges and universities over the next several years. India’s public universities are often woefully underfinanced and strike-prone.

Indians are already voting with their feet: the commission estimates that 160,000 Indians are studying abroad, spending an estimated $4 billion a year. Indians and Chinese make up the largest number of foreign students in the United States.

Madeleine Green, vice president for international initiatives at the American Council on Education, calls India “the next frontier” for American institutions, many of which have already set up base in China.

“The pull factor is the interest of India and the opportunity that India now presents,” she said. “The push is from American institutions saying, ‘There’s a world out there and we need to discover it. It’ll make our grads more competitive.’ It’s part of their push to internationalize.”

At the moment, however, instead of setting up satellite campuses as was done in China, Singapore or Qatar, most American institutions are opting to join hands with existing Indian institutions.

Columbia Business School, for instance, started a student exchange program earlier this year with the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad. The institutions teamed up to write case materials devised to teach American students about doing business in India.

“For us it’s market access; for them it’s access to a bigger business school,” said R. Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia Business School.

Columbia is the latest of several foreign business schools to tie up with the Ahmedabad campus, reflecting what its director, Bakul Dholakia, sees as a growing appetite to train future executives about India. “Companies out there need managers now who have a unique Asian perspective,” he said.

The Americanization of Indian education is following a variety of approaches. Champlain College, based in Burlington, Vt., runs a satellite campus in Mumbai that offers degrees in one of three career-oriented subjects that college administrators have found to be attractive to Indians: business, hospitality industry management and software engineering. A 2005 study commissioned by the government found at least 131 foreign educational institutions operating in India at the time, a vast majority offering vocational courses.

However, Champlain’s degrees are not recognized by the Indian government, something that is still typical here. One government official who looks after private education estimated that at least 100,000 students graduated from entirely unaccredited private institutions. The study found that students did not consider unaccredited college degrees to be a hindrance to getting jobs in the private sector.

California State University, Long Beach, has agreed to help start American-style, four-year degree programs at state-run Lucknow University in northern India. Its vice chancellor, R. P. Singh, said the California institution would help draft the curriculum and train faculty.

Cornell University, whose president is among the American university officials visiting India in recent months, is seeking to expand research collaborations, particularly in agriculture and public health.

Rice University envisions faculty and student exchanges, particularly in technology. “What’s in it for us is opportunities for our students, opportunities for our faculty in terms of research collaboration,” said David Leebron, the university president, who was in India in February. “At this stage we think we are best served by developing partnerships with Indian institutions.”

For its part, Carnegie Mellon offers its degree in partnership with a small private institution here, the Shri Shiv Shankar Nadar College of Engineering. Most of the course work is done at relatively inexpensive rates here in India, followed by six months in Pittsburgh, at the end of which students graduate with a Carnegie Mellon degree.

The arrangement circumvents most of the usual Indian government restrictions. The curriculum is devised in partnership with Carnegie Mellon, and students are chosen jointly by faculty from both schools.

There are no affirmative action requirements for student admissions, as there are in accredited colleges. Fees are not regulated by the state. It is expensive by Indian standards, though nearly all of the students are subsidized by scholarships financed by Shiv Nadar, the college’s founder and chief executive of HCL Technologies, one of India’s leading technology companies.

The applicants on the recent evening in Chennai were eager to please the gatekeepers from Pittsburgh. They addressed them politely with a series of “yes, sirs.” Asked what they could contribute to Carnegie Mellon, some of them became flummoxed. One young man said he wanted to develop software designed for the “global citizen,” by which he meant a way to transfer money across continents using a mobile phone.

Mr. Muddana, who had a bachelor’s degree in information technology and had spent the past eight months as a software developer for an Indian firm, said he saw the program as a cost-effective ticket to an American degree and a chance to work for a few years in the United States.

His father, he said, failed to grasp his ambitions. Why would he quit a secure, well-paying job to go back to school, his father wanted to know. Mr. Muddana said his father taught at a government school in a rural district in neighboring Andhra Pradesh State. He earns today roughly what his son makes fresh out of college. Mr. Muddana said his father was bewildered by his dreams and by how much it would cost to get a master’s degree.

“He’s presently thinking only of the investment,” Mr. Muddana said, “not the outcome.”

    India Attracts Universities From the U.S., NYT, 26.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/world/asia/26india.html?hp

Failing Schools See a Solution in Longer Day

March 26, 2007
The New York Times
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

FALL RIVER, Mass. — States and school districts nationwide are moving to lengthen the day at struggling schools, spurred by grim test results suggesting that more than 10,000 schools are likely to be declared failing under federal law next year.

In Massachusetts, in the forefront of the movement, Gov. Deval L. Patrick is allocating $6.5 million this year for longer days and can barely keep pace with demand: 84 schools have expressed interest.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York has proposed an extended day as one of five options for his state’s troubled schools, part of a $7 billion increase in spending on education over the next four years — apart from the 37 minutes of extra tutoring that children in some city schools already receive four times a week.

And Gov. M. Jodi Rell of Connecticut is proposing to lengthen the day at persistently failing schools as part of a push to raise state spending on education by $1 billion.

“In 15 years, I’d be very surprised if the old school calendar still dominates in urban settings,” said Mark Roosevelt, superintendent of schools in Pittsburgh, which has added 45 minutes a day at eight of its lowest-performing schools and 10 more days to their academic year.

But the movement, which has expanded the day in some schools by as little as 30 minutes or as much as two hours, has many critics: among administrators, who worry about the cost; among teachers, whose unions say they work hard enough as it is, and have sought more pay and renegotiation of contracts; and among parents, who say their children spend enough time in school already.

Still others question the equity of moving toward a system where students at low-performing, often urban, schools get more teaching than students at other schools.

And of all the steps school districts take to try to improve student achievement, lengthening the day is generally the costliest — an extra $1,300 a student annually here in Massachusetts — and difficult to sustain.

The idea of a longer day was first promoted in charter schools — public schools that are tax-supported but independently run. But the surge of interest has been spurred largely by the federal No Child Left Behind law, which requires annual testing of students, with increasingly dire consequences for schools that fall short each year, including possible closing.

Pressed by the demands of the law, school officials who support longer days say that much of the regular day must concentrate on test preparation. With extra hours, they say, they can devote more time to test readiness, if needed, and teach subjects that have increasingly been dropped from the curriculum, like history, art, drama.

“Whether it’s No Child Left Behind or local standards, when you start realizing that we’re really having a hard time raising kids to standards, you see you need more time,” said Christopher Gabrieli of Massachusetts 2020, a nonprofit education advocacy group that supports a longer school day. “As people are starting to really sweat, they’ve increasingly started to think really hard about ‘are we giving them enough time?’ ”

Still, some educators question whether keeping children in school longer will improve their performance. A recent report by the Education Sector, a centrist nonprofit research group, found that unless the time students are engaged in active learning — mastering academic subjects — is increased, adding hours alone may not do much.

Money also has proved a big obstacle. Murfreesboro, Tenn., experimented with a longer day, but abandoned the plan when the financing ran out, said An-Me Chung, a program officer at the C. S. Mott Foundation, which does education research. Typically, she said, lengthening the school day can add about 30 percent to a state’s per-pupil spending on education.

Given that expense, New Mexico is acting surgically. The state is spending $2.3 million to extend the day for about 2,100 children in four districts who failed state achievement tests. The money, $1,000 a student, goes for an extra hour of school a day for those children, time they spend on tutorials tailored to their weaknesses in math or reading.

Karen Kay Harvey, an assistant secretary of education for New Mexico, said that the state could not afford to do more. Adding the equivalent of one extra day of school a year for all students could run from $3 million to $5 million, she said.

Still, in many districts across the country, the trend has taken hold. In Miami, 39 schools that are farthest behind have added an extra hour to the school day, as well as five days to the school year. In California, the small West Fresno district, with some of the lowest test scores in Fresno County, added an hour more of school a day for students in the fourth to eighth grades.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the education committee, supports the idea of longer school days and is proposing $50 million a year, to rise to $150 million by 2012, under No Child Left Behind to train a corps of 40,000 teachers to help schools redesign academic content for those extra hours.

Though the trend could accentuate the differences between poor and middle-class students, with low-income students forced to spend longer hours behind their desks, Ms. Chung noted that middle-class children “basically have their own extended day that their parents have put together for them.” The virtue of the extended day, educators say, is that it forces children who might not otherwise attend voluntary after-school programs to spend time on studies.

In Massachusetts, schools in that state’s pilot program, teachers have received a 30 percent raise for their extra work. But pay is not the only issue for them.

In Lowell, Mass., for example, teachers balked at the district’s original plan to participate, saying they were too tired at the end of the day for extra work and had their own obligations at home.

Lowell parents also opposed the plan, concerned that longer days would be too taxing for children, especially the younger ones. Parents also feared their children would have to walk home in the dark and said that a longer day would cut into family time, said Karla Brooks Baehr, the school superintendent.

The district shelved the plan and developed an alternative proposal that gives students and teachers more freedom to choose the days they will stay late, and offers a range of activities along with core academics, including tutorials and swimming.

The Massachusetts schools that were awarded the state grants have grappled with ensuring that the extra time helps raise achievement. At many, officials say the program has been a success.

At Matthew J. Kuss Middle School here in Fall River, the time has bolstered instruction in reading, math and science as well as opening the way for electives in art and drama, forensics, karate and cooking — “the fun things for kids,” said Nancy Mullen, the principal — that had been pared away as the school’s standing fell.

So far, attendance is up and lateness is down, two areas that helped fuel the state takeover two years ago of Kuss, Massachusetts’s first school designated as chronically failing. “The students are more engaged in school,” Ms. Mullen said.

At the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School in Cambridge, Mass., where all students learn Mandarin, educators doubled the time spent teaching reading in the elementary grades to three hours a day. They used a method called Literacy Collaborative, which weaves lessons in reading and writing into other subjects, like social studies.

One recent morning, Joan Kerwin, a literacy coach, spent a half-hour with a fourth-grade class discussing a composition by one of the students, Kibir Uddin, who wrote about the thrill of receiving an honors certificate, describing the special paper it came on.

“ ‘The bumps looked like gems and rubies,’ ” Ms. Kerwin read from the essay. “He took that emotion,” she explained to the class, “and put it into exact language.”

It was the kind of lesson, teachers said, that would have been impossible with a shorter day.

At Kuss, students who were having trouble learning fractions built a scale model of a house from architectural drawings. Stephanie Baker, who teaches cooking, has posters around her room with math problems drawn from previous years’ state exams that she incorporates into her classes.

“I know I’m working longer hours,” said Ms. Baker, who wore a white toque, as the aroma of teacakes students had baked wafted from her room. “But this has been the most rewarding year I’ve had in 29 years of teaching.”

Many parents in Fall River said they were pleased by the commitment a longer schedule signaled, reasoning that more hours meant more chances for their children to succeed.

Some parents in this working-class community, like John Chaves, father of a seventh-grader, Mindy, said they supported more time at school simply because so few are home earlier to welcome their children. “We’re never home at the time that they’re home, so at least we know where our kids are,” Mr. Chaves said.

Mindy is studying guitar and forensics after school. “Today,” her father said, “she came home saying that men have a bigger forehead than women. She never used to do that.

“I ask, ‘Where are you learning this stuff?’ ” Mr. Chaves continued.

“ ‘Forensic class,’ she tells me. ‘I love it.’ ”

    Failing Schools See a Solution in Longer Day, NYT, 26.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/us/26schoolday.html?hp

A Play on Iraq War Divides a High School

March 24, 2007
The New York Times
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN

WILTON, Conn., March 22 — Student productions at Wilton High School range from splashy musicals like last year’s “West Side Story,” performed in the state-of-the-art, $10 million auditorium, to weightier works like Arthur Miller’s “Crucible,” on stage last fall in the school’s smaller theater.

For the spring semester, students in the advanced theater class took on a bigger challenge: creating an original play about the war in Iraq. They compiled reflections of soldiers and others involved, including a heartbreaking letter from a 2005 Wilton High graduate killed in Iraq last September at age 19, and quickly found their largely sheltered lives somewhat transformed.

“In Wilton, most kids only care about Britney Spears shaving her head or Tyra Banks gaining weight,” said Devon Fontaine, 16, a cast member. “What we wanted was to show kids what was going on overseas.”

But even as 15 student actors were polishing the script and perfecting their accents for a planned April performance, the school principal last week canceled the play, titled “Voices in Conflict,” citing questions of political balance and context.

The principal, Timothy H. Canty, who has tangled with students before over free speech, said in an interview he was worried the play might hurt Wilton families “who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we speak,” and that there was not enough classroom and rehearsal time to ensure it would provide “a legitimate instructional experience for our students.”

“It would be easy to look at this case on first glance and decide this is a question of censorship or academic freedom,” said Mr. Canty, who attended Wilton High himself in the 1970s and has been its principal for three years. “In some minds, I can see how they would react this way. But quite frankly, it’s a false argument.”

At least 10 students involved in the production, however, said that the principal had told them the material was too inflammatory, and that only someone who had actually served in the war could understand the experience. They said that Gabby Alessi-Friedlander, a Wilton junior whose brother is serving in Iraq, had complained about the play, and that the principal barred the class from performing it even after they changed the script to respond to concerns about balance.

“He told us the student body is unprepared to hear about the war from students, and we aren’t prepared to answer questions from the audience and it wasn’t our place to tell them what soldiers were thinking,” said Sarah Anderson, a 17-year-old senior who planned to play the role of a military policewoman.

Bonnie Dickinson, who has been teaching theater at the school for 13 years, said, “If I had just done ‘Grease,’ this would not be happening.”

Frustration over the inelegant finale has quickly spread across campus and through Wilton, and has led to protest online through Facebook and other Web sites.

“To me, it was outrageous,’’ said Jim Anderson, Sarah’s father. “Here these kids are really trying to make a meaningful effort to educate, to illuminate their fellow students, and the administration, of all people, is shutting them down.”

First Amendment lawyers said Mr. Canty had some leeway to limit speech that might be disruptive and to consider the educational merit of what goes on during the school day, when the play was scheduled to be performed. But thornier legal questions arise over students’ contention that they were also thwarted from trying to stage the play at night before a limited audience, and discouraged from doing so even off-campus. Just this week, an Alaska public high school was defending itself before the United States Supreme Court for having suspended a student who unfurled a banner extolling drug use at an off-campus parade.

The scrap over “Voices in Conflict” is the latest in a series of free-speech squabbles at Wilton High, a school of 1,250 students that is consistently one of Connecticut’s top performers and was the alma mater of Elizabeth Neuffer, the Boston Globe correspondent killed in Iraq in 2003.

The current issue of the student newspaper, The Forum, includes an article criticizing the administration for requiring that yearbook quotations come from well-known sources for fear of coded messages. After the Gay Straight Alliance wallpapered stairwells with posters a few years ago, the administration, citing public safety hazards, began insisting that all student posters be approved in advance.

Around the same time, the administration tried to ban bandanas because they could be associated with gangs, prompting hundreds of students to turn up wearing them until officials relented.

“Our school is all about censorship,” said James Presson, 16, a member of the “Voices of Conflict” cast. “People don’t talk about the things that matter.”

After reading a book of first-person accounts of the war, Ms. Dickinson kicked off the spring semester — with the principal’s blessing — by asking her advanced students if they were open to creating a play about Iraq. In an interview, the teacher said the objective was to showcase people close to the same age as the students who were “experiencing very different things in their daily lives and to stand in the shoes of those people and then present them by speaking their words exactly in front of an audience.”

What emerged was a compilation of monologues taken from the book that impressed Ms. Dickinson, “In Conflict: Iraq War Veterans Speak Out on Duty, Loss and the Fight to Stay Alive”; a documentary, “The Ground Truth”; Web logs and other sources. The script consisted of the subjects’ own words, though some license was taken with identity: Lt. Charles Anderson became “Charlene” because, as Seth Koproski, a senior, put it, “we had a lot of women” in the cast.

In March, students said, Gabby, the junior whose brother is serving in the Army in Iraq, said she wanted to join the production, and soon circulated drafts of the script to parents and others in town. A school administrator who is a Vietnam veteran also raised questions about the wisdom of letting students explore such sensitive issues, Mr. Canty said.

In response to concerns that the script was too antiwar, Ms. Dickinson reworked it with the help of an English teacher. The revised version is more reflective and less angry, omitting graphic descriptions of killing, crude language and some things that reflect poorly on the Bush administration, like a comparison of how long it took various countries to get their troops bulletproof vests. A critical reference to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, was cut, along with a line from Cpl. Sean Huze saying of soldiers: “Your purpose is to kill.”

Seven characters were added, including Maj. Tammy Duckworth of the National Guard, a helicopter pilot who lost both legs and returned from the war to run for Congress last fall. The second version gives First Lt. Melissa Stockwell, who lost her left leg from the knee down, a new closing line: “But I’d go back. I wouldn’t want to go back, but I would go.”

On March 13, Mr. Canty met with the class. He told us “no matter what we do, it’s not happening,” said one of the students, Erin Clancy. That night, on a Facebook chat group called “Support the Troops in Iraq,” a poster named GabriellaAF, who several students said was their classmate Gabby, posted a celebratory note saying, “We got the show canceled!!” (Reached by telephone, Gabby’s mother, Barbara Alessi, said she had no knowledge of the play or her daughter’s involvement in it.) In classrooms, teenage centers and at dinner tables around town, the drama students entertained the idea of staging the show at a local church, or perhaps al fresco just outside the school grounds. One possibility was Wilton Presbyterian Church.

“I would want to read the script before having it performed here, but from what I understand from the students who wrote it, they didn’t have a political agenda,” said the Rev. Jane Field, the church’s youth minister.

Mr. Canty said he had never discouraged the students from continuing to work on the play on their own. But Ms. Dickinson said he told her “we may not do the play outside of the four walls of the classroom,” adding, “I can’t have anything to do with it because we’re not allowed to perform the play and I have to stand behind my building principal.”

Parents, even those who are critical of the decision, say the episode is out of character for a school system that is among the attractions of Wilton, a well-off town of 18,000 about an hour’s drive from Manhattan.

“The sad thing was this thing was a missed opportunity for growth from a school that I really have tremendous regard for,” said Emmalisa Lesica, whose son was in the play. Given the age of the performers and their peers who might have seen the show, she noted, “if we ended up in a further state of war, wouldn’t they be the next ones drafted or who choose to go to war? Why wouldn’t you let them know what this is about?”

The latest draft of the script opens with the words of Pvt. Nicholas Madaras, the Wilton graduate who died last September and whose memory the town plans to soon honor by naming a soccer field for him. In a letter he wrote to the local paper last May, Private Madaras said Baqubah, north of Baghdad, sometimes “feels like you are on another planet,” and speaks wistfully about the life he left behind in Wilton.

“I never thought I’d ever say this, but I miss being in high school,” he wrote. “High school is really the foundation for the rest of your life, whether teenagers want to believe it or not.”

Private Madaras’s parents said they had not read the play, and had no desire to meddle in a school matter. But his mother, Shalini Madaras, added, “We always like to think about him being part of us, and people talking about him, I think it’s wonderful.”

    A Play on Iraq War Divides a High School, NYT, 24.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/24/nyregion/24drama.html

After Evicting Members, Sorority Is Itself Evicted

March 13, 2007
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

DePauw University severed ties yesterday with a national sorority that evicted two-thirds of the university’s chapter members last year in what the sorority called an effort to improve its image for recruitment, but which the evicted women described as a purge of the unattractive or the uncool.

“We at DePauw do not like the way our students were treated,” DePauw’s president, Robert G. Bottoms, said in a letter to the Delta Zeta sorority. “We at DePauw believe that the values of our university and those of the national Delta Zeta sorority are incompatible.”

The sorority evicted 23 members of its DePauw chapter in December, and half a dozen other women later quit in protest. The action greatly diminished the chapter’s diversity. The women the sorority allowed to stay were all slender and conventionally pretty. Those evicted included some overweight women, and several minority members were evicted or left the sorority on their own.

In an interview, Dr. Bottoms said that beginning this fall Delta Zeta would no longer be permitted to house students in its Greek-columned residence on the DePauw campus in Greencastle, Ind. Only a handful of undergraduates are currently living in the Delta Zeta house, and four of them are seniors, Dr. Bottoms said, adding that the university would help any women who had been planning to live in the residence next year to find alternative housing.

Delta Zeta has chapters on 165 campuses. Its chapter at DePauw, 50 miles southwest of Indianapolis, was founded in 1909 and is one of Delta Zeta’s oldest.

The sorority’s actions were the subject of an article in The New York Times on Feb. 25 and received widespread news coverage.

Officers at Delta Zeta’s national headquarters in Oxford, Ohio, did not respond to telephone messages yesterday. A statement posted on the sorority’s Web site said: ‘’Delta Zeta national leadership is extremely disappointed that after 98 years, university officials have unilaterally closed the chapter. Sorority officials only considered each woman’s commitment to Delta Zeta’s recruitment plans when it decided which members to evict from the DePauw residence in November. No other factor was considered.” .

In a previous message posted on its Web site this month, the sorority said: “Delta Zeta National apologizes to any of our women at DePauw who felt personally hurt by our actions. It was never our intention to disparage or hurt any of our members during this chapter reorganization process.”

That apology, however, did not bring reconciliation at DePauw.

“It’s like a thief who’s sorry that he got caught, rather than for what he did,” said Rachel Pappas, a junior who left the sorority before the evictions and organized a campus protest about it last month.

In addition to the apology, the sorority posted statements critical of the women forced out of the DePauw chapter and of faculty members who supported them. In the letter sent to Delta Zeta yesterday, Dr. Bottoms cited the sorority’s decision to publicize that criticism as contributing to his decision.

“The arrangement we have with Greek organizations is that they’re guests of ours and we expect them to live up to university standards, and in this case Delta Zeta did not,” Dr. Bottoms said. “This means that sorority can’t exist on our campus as an organization beginning in the fall.”

Robert P. Hershberger, the chairman of DePauw’s modern languages department, who earlier this year circulated a faculty petition criticizing Delta Zeta’s treatment of the women, said yesterday in an interview: “This was the right thing to do. I doubt there will be many people here upset about this.”

    After Evicting Members, Sorority Is Itself Evicted, NYT, 13.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/education/13sorority.html?hp

Troubles Grow for a University Built on Profits

February 11, 2007
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

PHOENIX — The University of Phoenix became the nation’s largest private university by delivering high profits to investors and a solid, albeit low-overhead, education to midcareer workers seeking college degrees.

But its reputation is fraying as prominent educators, students and some of its own former administrators say the relentless pressure for higher profits, at a university that gets more federal student financial aid than any other, has eroded academic quality.

According to federal statistics and government audits, the university relies more on part-time instructors than all but a few other postsecondary institutions, and its accelerated academic schedule races students through course work in about half the time of traditional universities. The university says that its graduation rate, using the federal standard, is 16 percent, which is among the nation’s lowest, according to Department of Education data. But the university has dozens of campuses, and at many, the rate is even lower.

In an interview, William J. Pepicello, the university’s new president, defended its academic quality and said it met the needs of working students who had been largely ignored by traditional colleges.

But many students say they have had infuriating experiences at the university before dropping out, contributing to the poor graduation rate. In recent interviews, current and former students in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington who studied at University of Phoenix campuses in those states or online complained of instructional shortcuts, unqualified professors and recruiting abuses. Many of their comments echoed experiences reported by thousands of other students on consumer Web sites.

The complaints have built through months of turmoil. The president resigned, as did the chief executive and other top officers at the Apollo Group, the university’s parent corporation. A federal court reinstated a lawsuit accusing the university of fraudulently obtaining hundreds of millions of dollars in financial aid. The university denies wrongdoing. Apollo stock fell so far that in November, CNBC featured it on a “Biggest Losers” segment. The stock has since gained back some ground. In November, the Intel Corporation excluded the university from its tuition reimbursement program, saying it lacked top-notch accreditation.

It adds up to a damaging turnaround for an institution that rocketed from makeshift origins here in 1976 to become the nation’s largest private university, with 300,000 students on campuses in 39 states and online. Its fortunes are closely watched because it is the giant of for-profit postsecondary education; it received $1.8 billion in federal student aid in 2004-5.

“Wall Street has put them under inordinate pressure to keep up the profits, and my take on it is that they succumbed to that,” said David W. Breneman, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. “They seem to have really stumbled.”

In the interview, Dr. Pepicello shrugged off the bad news. Many top corporations still pay for employees to attend the university, he said, and the exodus of top officials has resulted from a healthy search for new directions. “We are reinventing ourselves,” Dr. Pepicello said.

The government measures graduation rates as the percentage of first-time undergraduates who obtain a degree within six years. On average across all American universities, the rate is 55 percent. Dr. Pepicello said this was a poor yardstick for comparing other universities with his, which serves mostly older students who started college elsewhere. Alongside the 16 percent rate, the university Web site also publishes a 59 percent graduation rate, but that is based on nonstandard calculations and does not allow comparison with other universities, he said. The official rates at some University of Phoenix campuses are extremely low — 6 percent at the Southern California campus, 4 percent among online students — and he acknowledged extraordinary attrition among younger students.

“We have not done as good a job as we could,” he said, adding that the university was creating tutoring and other services to help keep students.

“The university takes quality in the classroom seriously,” he said. The university brings a low-overhead approach not only to its campuses, most of which are office buildings near freeways, but also to its academic model. About 95 percent of instructors are part-time, according to federal statistics, compared with an average of 47 percent across all universities. Most have full-time day jobs. Courses are written at university headquarters, easing class preparation time for instructors.

The College Board reports the university’s annual tuition and fees as $9,630, about half the average at private four-year colleges and twice that of four-year public colleges.

Students take one course at a time, online or in evening classes, which meet for four hours, once a week, for five or six weeks, depending on degree level. As a result, students spend 20 to 24 hours with an instructor during each course, compared with about 40 hours at a traditional university. The university also requires students to teach one another by working on projects for four or five hours per week in what it calls “learning teams.”

Government auditors in 2000 ruled that this schedule fell short of the minimum time required for federal aid programs, and the university paid a $6 million settlement. But in 2002, the Department of Education relaxed its requirements, and the university’s stripped-down schedule is an attractive feature for many adults eager to obtain a university degree while working. But critics say it leaves courses with little meat.

“Their business degree is an M.B.A. Lite,” said Henry M. Levin, a professor of higher education at Teachers College at Columbia University. “I’ve looked at their course materials. It’s a very low level of instruction.”

In November, the university’s reliance on part-time faculty caused a problem with Intel, hundreds of whose employees it has educated. Alan Fisher, an Intel manager, said the company had decided to pay for employees to attend only highly accredited programs. Although Phoenix is regionally accredited, it lacks approval from the most prestigious accrediting agency for business schools, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.

John J. Fernandes, the association’s president, said the university had never applied. “They’re smart enough to understand their chances of approval would be low,” Mr. Fernandes said. “They have a lot of come-and-go faculty. We like institutions where the faculty is stable and can ensure that students are being educated by somebody who knows what they’re doing.”

Dr. Pepicello defended the effectiveness of the faculty, saying instructors were carefully certified.

Most educators acknowledge that the university has helped traditional institutions recognize the needs of older students.

Some of the university’s detractors suggest that it has always relied too much on part-time faculty and raced too quickly through course material. Others say the university’s academic program was once better but has deteriorated in breakneck expansion — it has opened 50 campuses in a decade. Today, even a cursory Internet search will turn up criticism on sites like ripoffreport.com and uopexperience.com.

“Phoenix claims that 95 percent of their students are satisfied, but the reports we get indicate otherwise,” said James R. Hood, founder of a similar site, consumeraffairs.com.

Many reports follow a similar pattern. Students say they liked recruiters’ descriptions of the classes, but after enrolling concluded that they were learning too little or paying too much. Many who quit say they were left with huge debts.

Robert Wancha, 42, a former National Guard commander who is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in information technology at the university’s Detroit campus, said that in a computer course last fall his instructor, Christopher G. Stanglewicz, had boasted that he had a doctorate but did little teaching, instead assigning students to work in learning teams while he toyed with his computer.

Mr. Stanglewicz, reached at his home, acknowledged that he had covered only a fraction of the syllabus , partly, he said, because the university required him to cram too much information into too few sessions.

“Students get overwhelmed,” he said. Mr. Stanglewicz asserted in the interview that he had earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Kentucky. But the authorities there said his name was not in their records. (Dr. Pepicello said that Mr. Stanglewicz had never told the university that he had a doctorate, and that he was qualified to teach.)

Not all students are critics. Yvonne-Louise Catino, 43, of Bloomington, Minn., who is studying online for a doctorate, said she believed she was getting a rigorous education. In a week, Ms. Catino said, she might read eight journal articles and write several essays. “I love the online environment,” she said, “being able to direct where I want to go.”

But some students said their early enthusiasm had soured.

Stacey Clark, 32, an office manager in East Wenatchee, Wash., enrolled in online courses in April and was delighted to receive A’s in her first courses, she said. Later, Ms. Clark decided her instructors were too disengaged to criticize her work. One returned a 2,500-word essay on performance-enhancing drugs with an A but not one comment, she said.

“You’re not learning from an actual teacher, you’re teaching yourself,” Ms. Clark said.

Many students accuse recruiters of misleading them, and the university’s legal troubles trace back to similar accusations of recruitment abuses. In 2003, two enrollment counselors in California filed a whistle-blower lawsuit in federal court accusing the university of paying them based on how many students they enrolled, a violation of a federal rule.

After the lawsuit was filed, the Department of Education sent inspectors to California and Arizona campuses. The department’s report, which became public in 2004, concluded that the university had provided incentives to recruit unqualified students and “systematically operates in a duplicitous manner.”

The university paid $9.8 million to settle the matter, while admitting no wrongdoing. But the department’s searing portrait of academic abuse aroused skepticism among many educators.

Dr. Breneman was finishing a chapter on the university in a book he helped edit when he read the report in 2004. He said he found it “credible and compelling.”

When the book, “Earnings from Learning: the Rise of For-Profit Universities,” was published last year, it said the university’s academic model was convenient for working students, but included a “cautionary note” saying the recruiting scandal had raised “disturbing questions.”

Those questions are likely to dog the university as it defends itself in the lawsuit, which a district court had dismissed but an appellate court reinstated in September. The university could be forced to repay hundreds of millions of dollars if it loses. It asked the Supreme Court last month to review the appellate ruling, arguing that an adverse outcome in the lawsuit could expose it to “potentially bankrupting liability.”

    Troubles Grow for a University Built on Profits, NYT, 11.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/education/11phoenix.html?hp&ex=1171256400&en=ae4355a2c3e42afd&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Colleges Regroup After Voters Ban Race Preferences

January 26, 2007
The New York Times
By TAMAR LEWIN

With Michigan’s new ban on affirmative action going into effect, and similar ballot initiatives looming in other states, many public universities are scrambling to find race-blind ways to attract more blacks and Hispanics.

At Wayne State University Law School in Detroit, a new admissions policy, without mentioning race, allows officials to consider factors like living on an Indian reservation or in mostly black Detroit, or overcoming discrimination or prejudice.

Others are using many different approaches, like working with mostly minority high schools, using minority students as recruiters, and offering summer prep programs for promising students from struggling high schools. Ohio State University, for example, has started a magnet high school with a focus on math and science, to help prepare potential applicants, and sends educators into poor and low-performing middle and elementary schools to encourage children, and their parents, to start planning for college.

Officials across the country have a sense of urgency about the issue in part because Ward Connerly, the black California businessman behind such initiatives in California and Michigan, is planning a kind of Super Tuesday next fall, with ballot initiatives against racial preferences in several states. He is researching possible campaigns in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming, and expects to announce next month which states he has chosen.

Ann Korschgen, vice provost at the University of Missouri, said in a recent interview, “Just this morning, we had a conversation along the line of how we would continue to ensure diversity at our campus if we could not consider race.”

The issue is already heating up in Colorado. This month, two Republican representatives in Colorado asked the state to examine the University of Colorado’s spending on diversity, after a libertarian group questioned the expenditures.

Mr. Connerly said that a decade ago, when California passed its ban, Proposition 209, he thought the state was ahead of its time, but that now, he believes “the country is poised to make a decision about race, about what its place in American life is going to be — and I really believe the popular vote may be the way to achieve that.”

Both defenders and opponents of affirmative action say the lesson of last fall’s campaign in Michigan — where Proposition 2, banning race and gender preferences in public education, employment and contracting, passed by 58 percent to 42 percent despite strong opposition from government, business, labor, education and religious leaders — is that such initiatives can succeed almost anywhere.

“Certain things become popular as state initiatives, like the ban on gay marriages, and restrictions on affirmative action could become one of those things,” said Terry Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education.

If so, he said, private universities, with their wide discretion in admissions and financial aid, could have a competitive advantage regarding diversity, reshaping the landscape of higher education.

“Private universities can do whatever they want, consistent with federal law and the Supreme Court,” Mr. Hartle said. “Where minority students have a choice between selective public universities that cannot use affirmative action, and selective private universities with strong affirmative action programs, the private universities may seem like the more hospitable places, which would give them an advantage in drawing a diverse student body.”

To many educators, that would be a troubling turnabout.

“You’d think public universities are charged with special responsibility for ensuring access, but it could come to be exactly the opposite, if there are a lot of these state initiatives,” said Evan Caminker, the dean of the University of Michigan Law School, adding, “in terms of public values, it’s a big step backward.”

Mr. Connerly is unbothered: If black and Hispanic students are rare at selective universities, the solution is better academic preparation, not special treatment in admissions. “Every individual should have the same opportunity to compete,” he said. “I don’t worry about the outcomes.”

Legally, affirmative action has been a moving target. In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled in cases involving the University of Michigan that race could be one of many factors in admissions, although admissions offices could not give extra points to minority candidates. Many colleges nationwide then moved to “holistic” review, considering applicants’ ethnicity, but not awarding a set number of points. In states that could face a ballot initiative campaign, though, that standard could fall.

Nationwide, after 30 years of debate, and litigation, over affirmative action, universities have made strikingly little progress toward racially representative student bodies. And recently, with growing awareness that affluent students are vastly overrepresented at selective colleges, the longstanding focus on racial diversity has been joined by a growing concern about economic diversity.

Currently, four states with highly ranked public universities — California, Florida, Michigan and Washington — forbid racial preferences, either because of ballot propositions or decisions by elected officials.

Texas banned affirmative action for seven years. The University of Texas resumed consideration of race after the 2003 United States Supreme Court ruling. “We need every tool we can get,” concluded Dr. Bruce Walker, the university’s director of admissions.

In California and Texas, the first two states to ban racial preferences, underrepresented minorities at the flagship universities declined — even though both states, and Florida, adopted plans giving a percentage of top high school graduates guaranteed admission to state universities.

In Texas, students admitted through the Top 10 percent plan swamped the flagship Austin campus. But the plan, now being rethought by the Legislature, never brought in many minority students. Last fall, with both race-conscious admissions and the Top 10 plan, blacks made up an all-time high of 5 percent of the freshman class, and Hispanics 19 percent.

A decade after the California ban, only 2 percent of this year’s freshmen at the University of California, Los Angeles, are black: a 30-year low. Hispanic representation at U.C.L.A. has dropped, too. At Berkeley, the number of blacks in the freshman class plunged by half the year after the ban, and the number of Hispanics nearly as much.

Systemwide, blacks make up only 3 percent of U.C. freshmen, although about 7 percent of the state’s high school graduates are black. Most top black students choose private institutions over state campuses. Over all, of the top third of all students offered admission to the University of California class of 2005, most enrolled and only 19 percent went instead to selective private colleges. But among blacks in that group, 51 percent chose selective private colleges. Meanwhile, up the coast, Stanford University is enrolling more underrepresented minority students. Among this year’s freshmen, 11 percent are African-American, up from 8 percent in 1995; Hispanic enrollment has risen, too.

“Folks look for a place that’s comfortable,” said Richard Shaw, Stanford’s admissions dean. “They want a sense that there’s kids like them at the institution.”

The University of Michigan, with other state institutions, tried to win a delay of the ban so it would not hit in the middle of this year’s admissions cycle. But the courts rejected this effort, so officials have stopped considering race and gender as factors in admissions, and worry that next year’s entering class will be less diverse. Many officials worry that they will lose top minority candidates to selective private universities.

“We know from colleagues in Texas and California that if we can’t take race into account, we’re at a competitive disadvantage,” said Julie Peterson, a spokeswoman for the University of Michigan, where two-thirds of the applicants are from out of state.

Since most of Michigan is overwhelmingly white, said Mary Sue Coleman, the university’s president, a plan guaranteeing admission to a percentage of top high school graduates would have little impact, and nothing short of affirmative action will maintain the university’s racial diversity.

“Of course, you want to look at family income, and being the first in the family to attend college and those kinds of factors, of course we do that, but it doesn’t get us to a racially diverse student body,” Dr. Coleman said.

At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, a program guaranteeing that low-income students can graduate debt-free helped to increase the percentage of blacks in the freshman class to 12 percent, and to increase both economic diversity and the enrollment of underrepresented minority students. Other states have started similar programs.

In Detroit, Wayne State University Law School recently adopted a new admissions policy. Jonathan Weinberg, the professor assigned last year to draft a contingency policy, looked at other states with race-blind admissions and found that instead of race, they look to “a set of broader diversity concerns that go to socioeconomic status.”

Last month, the faculty adopted his policy, eliminating any mention of race, but broadening the factors the admissions office may consider. Those include being the first in the family to go to college or graduate school; having overcome substantial obstacles, including prejudice and discrimination; being multilingual; and residence abroad, in Detroit or on an Indian reservation.

Frank Wu, the law school’s dean, said Wayne State’s effort to comply with the law could bring a legal challenge.

“There’s a new fight building,” Mr. Wu said, “and that’s going to be whether the mere fact that you’re striving for diversity means you’re somehow trying to get around the ban and find proxies, or pretexts, for race, and that that’s impermissible. It’s ironic, but in some quarters our effort to adopt a new policy to comply with Prop 2 has been interpreted as an effort to circumvent it.”

Roger Clegg, president of the Council for Equal Opportunity, which opposes racial preferences, said policies like Wayne State’s do raise questions.

“I have a real problem when schools adopt what on their face are race-neutral criteria, if they are doing so to reach a predetermined racial and ethnic goal,” Mr. Clegg said. “Both in law and in common sense, the motivation matters.”

At Ohio State University, where admissions are increasingly selective, officials are looking for a long-term answer. “When we saw what was coming down the road, we started looking to other models, but no other model results in as much diversity,” said Mabel Freeman, assistant vice president at Ohio State. “The only long-term solution is to do better in the pipeline and make sure all kids get the best education possible, K-12.”

Colleges Regroup After Voters Ban Race Preferences, NYT, 26.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/26/education/26affirm.html

Dividing boys and girls

into separate classes

a growing trend

in many cities' public schools

Posted 1/25/2007 9:37 PM ET
AP
USA Today

HARTLAND, Wis. (AP) — Lauren Panos was surprised when she walked into her ninth-grade English class in the fall and saw there were no boys.

Her parents had not told her they had enrolled her in a new all-girls class at Arrowhead High School in Hartland, about 25 miles west of Milwaukee. A semester into classes, Panos still isn't sold on the idea.

"All the girls there, they can talk out of turn," the 14-year-old said. "We get really off task and it's really annoying."

More public school systems are looking at separating boys and girls, whether for certain classes or by entire schools, after the federal government opened the door last fall. Supporters say splitting students by sex minimizes distractions, helps them learn better and allows boys and girls to explore subjects they may not otherwise take.

Panos' classmate, Alyson Douglas, 15, said she likes not worrying about boys causing disruptions.

"Guys just make a bigger nuisance in the class," she said.

Panos' and Douglas' school is one of just three public schools in Wisconsin that offers classes for either boys or girls only. But Thursday night, the Milwaukee School Board approved a committee report calling for opening a school with all same-sex classes, perhaps by 2008.

Milwaukee would join several other large cities where public schools already offer single-sex classes. They include New York City — where there are nine single-sex public schools — as well as Chicago, Dallas, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

Plans to open same-sex schools have been announced in Miami, Atlanta and Cleveland.

Nationwide, at least 253 public schools offer single-sex classes and 51 schools are entirely single sex, according to the National Association for Single Sex Public Education. In 1995, just three public schools offered single-sex classes.

Critics of same-sex classrooms argue that proven methods of improving education should be pursued instead of one that divides boys and girls. Separating boys and girls is tantamount to "separate but equal" segregation-era classrooms, they say.

"Too many schools feel they can carry out a social experiment with students' education with really the flimsiest of theories," said Emily Martin, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Women's Rights Project.

Single-sex schools are an "illusionary silver bullet," said Lisa Maatz, director of public policy and government relations for the American Association of University Women. They distract from real problems and do not offer proven solutions such as lower class sizes and sufficient funding, she said.

Many classrooms and schools could make the switch thanks to a change made by the U.S. Department of Education in November.

Previously, single-sex classes had been allowed in only limited cases, such as gym classes and sex education classes. But the new rules allow same-sex education any time schools think it will improve achievement, expand the diversity of courses or meet students' individual needs.

Enrollment must be voluntary and any children excluded from the class must get a "substantially equal" coed class in the same subject, if not a separate single-sex class.

The change could mean a boom in public schools splitting the sexes. Leonard Sax, executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, predicts that if public schools follow the path of private schools, where 7% are single sex, some 5,000 single-sex schools could open in the next 20 years.

It has opened the door for Milwaukee's plan, which had been on the drawing board for three years, said school board member Jeff Spence.

"I would suggest that for many of our kids and families, especially in Milwaukee, it's a question of choice," Spence said. "We have an array of choices in Milwaukee and I just think this should be one additional choice."

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Dividing boys and girls into separate classes a growing trend in many cities' public schools, UT, 25.1.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-01-25-split-schools_x.htm

How Bush education law

has changed our schools

Updated 1/8/2007 9:27 AM ET
USA Today
By Greg Toppo

The walls are speaking these days at Stanton Elementary School in Philadelphia, and they're talking about test scores.

Post-It notes with children's names tell the story of how, in just five years, a federal law with a funny name has changed school for everyone. "We spend most of our days talking about or looking at data," principal Barbara Adderley says.

Test scores run her week.

She meets with kindergarten teachers on Monday, first-grade teachers on Tuesday and so on. The meetings begin with a look at each teacher's "assessment wall," filled with color-coded Post-Its representing each pupil and whether he or she is making steady progress in basic skills. Once students master a skill, the Post-Its move up the wall.

"If they don't move, then we have to talk about what's happening," Adderley says.

What's driving the talk? President Bush's landmark education law, dubbed No Child Left Behind.

A cornerstone of Bush's domestic agenda and one of his few truly bipartisan successes, it took what was once a fairly low-key funding vehicle (it was known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act before Bush borrowed the catchy name from the Children's Defense Fund) and turned it into a vast — and contentious — book of federal mandates.

At its simplest, the law aims to improve the basic skills of the nation's public school children, particularly poor and minority students.

At Stanton, it seems to have made a difference. In 2003, fewer than two in 10 kids here met state reading standards; by 2005, about seven in 10 did.

The law turns 5 years old today.

It faces a tough future as Congress prepares to reauthorize it — a group of 100 education, religion and civil rights leaders today announces an effort calling for "major changes."

Is it improving education nationwide? It's too early to tell — many schools didn't get around to enacting most of its more than 1,000 pages of regulations until two or three years ago. U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings says the law wasn't being fully implemented in all 50 states until 2006.

But one thing is certain: No Child Left Behind has had a major influence on the daily experience of school for millions of kids. Here are five big ways it's changing schools.

It's driving teachers crazy

Here's a pretty safe rule of thumb: Start in the classroom and travel up the educational food chain. The further you travel, the more you'll find that people like the law. Mention it to most teachers and they'll just roll their eyes. Many principals tolerate it. Ask a local superintendent, a state superintendent or a governor and the assessment gets rosier as their suit gets more expensive.

Carmen Meléndez quit her job as a bilingual language arts teacher at an elementary school last spring in Orange County, Fla., after the law prompted her principal to institute 90-minute reading blocks and a scripted curriculum — in the process making individualized instruction impossible. Meléndez also found that she couldn't teach poetry anymore.

"It was insane," she says. "The kids were all jaded. They were tired — they hated school."

Most of the frustration, teachers will tell you, comes from the stress of mandated math and reading tests. The law requires that virtually all children be tested each year starting in third grade — and it doles out growing penalties if schools don't raise scores each year. Naturally, test day in most schools is fraught with tension.

"They're 8 years old, and they're so worried about a passing score," Meléndez says. "I think that's inhumane."

Dianne Campbell, director of testing and accountability in Rockingham County, N.C., told the American School Board Journal in 2003 that administrators discard as many as 20 test booklets on exam days because children vomit on them.

Also, many state rating systems (which often predated No Child Left Behind) now end up celebrating the same schools the federal law slams.

Longstreet Elementary School in Daytona Beach, Fla., has scored high on the state ratings for five years, but Longstreet is one of 21 Volusia County schools due for "corrective action" this year under the law.

"Our parents are thrilled at what happens at our school — and a lot of what happens at our school has nothing to do with No Child Left Behind," says counselor Bill Archer.

Jack Jennings of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington education research group, says some of the testing actually helps drive better instructional strategies and, in that respect, is helpful. But he says teachers tell him they're overwhelmed by the sheer volume of testing, which can last six weeks in some schools.

"I don't think you can go into a teacher meeting in the country without somebody bringing up No Child Left Behind," he says.

After five years, the law has even spawned an online petition that, as of Sunday, had about 22,500 signatures of people urging Congress to repeal it.

Along with his signature, teacher Mark Quig-Hartman of Vallejo, Calif., said: "I am well on my way to becoming an embittered and mediocre teacher who heretofore considered teaching to be a profession, not a job. I once loved what I did. I do not now, nor do my students; school has become a rather grim and joyless place for all."

Teachers' unions have often been the law's loudest critics. One top National Education Association official even entertained the NEA's 2004 conference in Washington by appearing onstage with an acoustic guitar and singing a protest song with this unforgettable hook: "If we have to test their butts off, there'll be no child's behind left."

And if you think it's just teachers who complain, think again: 2006 saw even the law's most ardent supporters complaining, but for a very different reason: They say states and school districts game the system by lowering their standards.

Because the law allows each state to set its own pass/fail bar on skills tests, "proficient" means something different depending on which state you live in. The percentage of Missouri fourth-graders at or above "proficient" in English is only 35%, but 89% of Mississippi fourth-graders meet that state's standards. In math, only 39% of Maine fourth-graders are proficient or better; in North Carolina, 92% are.

Philadelphia Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas jokes that to really improve scores in his city, he could make classes smaller and modernize buildings. "Or we can give everyone the Illinois test," he says.

It's narrowing what many schools teach

If nothing else, the law's first five years have proved the maxim "What gets tested gets taught."

The law's annual testing requirements in math and reading have led many schools to pump up the amount of time they spend teaching these two staples — often at the expense of other subjects, such as history, art or science.

Jennings found that 71% of districts are reducing time on other subjects in elementary school.

"What we're getting under (the law) is a very strong emphasis on building skills at the expense of history and literature and science," says researcher Thomas Toch of the Education Sector, a Washington think tank.

Other critics say the law has created a "complexity gap." Children in lower grades have made improvements — some impressive — in basic skills, but the improvements vanish in middle school and beyond, when kids are tested on more complex conceptual thinking.

Brown University researcher Martin West this fall compared federal data from 2000 and 2004, and found that since No Child Left Behind, elementary schools have spent, on average, 23 fewer minutes a week on science and 17 fewer minutes on history. He also found that in states that test history and science each spring, teachers spend about half an hour more a week on each subject.

He also found, oddly, that after a large jump in the 1990s, schools actually spend a few minutes less a week on math — but they still spend more than twice as much time on math than on either history or science.

And they spend more than twice as much time on reading and language as on math.

"Schools really do respond to the incentives that are provided to them," West says. "That places a huge premium on getting the incentives correct."

But he and others aren't quite ready to say the law is dumbing down school.

Researcher Jane Hannaway of the Urban Institute theorizes that improved reading skills may help children understand other topics, even if they're spending less class time on them.

She recently looked at Texas fourth-graders' standardized test scores and found that they had some of the nation's highest marks in science — even though they don't tackle science until fifth grade. One possible theory? The children in Texas were simply able to read the test questions better.

'Invisible' students get attention

Even opponents of No Child Left Behind grudgingly concede that, five years out, the law has revolutionized how schools look at poor, minority and disabled children in big cities, who often find themselves struggling academically. It forces schools to look at test score data in a whole new light, breaking out the scores into 35 or more "subgroups."

If even one group fails to make "Adequate Yearly Progress," or AYP, in a year, the whole school is labeled as "in need of improvement."

Perhaps most significant, the law has given a handful of big-city superintendents the political leverage to make radical changes — they can now make the case that "federal requirements" make them necessary.

In Philadelphia, public schools CEO Paul Vallas invoked the law when, in one school year, 2002-03, he replaced all of the city's elementary and middle school math and language arts textbooks and hired Kaplan, the test-prep company, to write a standardized core curriculum.

He pumped up full-day kindergarten and preschool — Philly students are now 50% more likely to have attended preschool than before the law — and instituted extended-day math and reading programs for struggling students. "No Child Left Behind gave us the cover to do it," he says.

In the past three years, he also has dismissed 750 teachers who didn't meet minimum standards the law put in place.

"We would have never been able to do that without the federal (Sword of) Damocles hanging over our head," he says.

Superintendents in New York City, Chicago, San Diego and elsewhere have made similar — and sometimes bigger — changes under the cover of No Child Left Behind.

Spellings says the law has had similar effects nationwide. "It has built an appetite to pay attention to kids who have been overlooked previously," she says.

A few observers, such as Mike Petrilli, a former top Bush administration official, say the law has been felt most keenly by suburban school districts, where for years low achievers weren't a priority because high-achieving kids could bring up the district average.

Petrilli, who now works for the Fordham Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, says the idea of breaking out poor and minority kids' scores was "really revolutionary" in most suburbs.

It has prompted many suburban districts in places such as Montclair, N.J.; Shaker Heights, Ohio; and Evanston, Ill., to form a co-op that shares ways to help once-neglected minority kids.

"There's general agreement that (the law) has created more of a sense of urgency," says education blogger and Virginia State Board of Education member Andrew Rotherham.

What that looks like in individual schools varies, but in many, "urgency" is not pretty.

"It really has brought the Hounds of Hell down on the schools of Prince William County," says Betsie Fobes, a recently retired eighth-grade algebra and pre-algebra teacher at Parkside Middle School in Manassas, Va. "This AYP business is just killing us — absolutely killing us."

Parkside, which has seen a large Latino influx, didn't meet its goals two years in a row — so now teachers must attend twice-weekly meetings, often focused on testing. They've built in a tutorial period, and even secretaries do their share of tutoring.

"The entire school is revolving pretty much around these kids who fit into these subgroups," Fobes says.

It's making the school day longer

If a restaurant takes 12 eggs and makes a lousy omelette, will adding another two eggs make it better?

If a school can't teach a child to read in seven hours, will eight do the trick?

Under No Child Left Behind, the answer is: Probably yes.

The law requires schools that don't make adequate yearly progress to offer free transfers to a better-performing public school.

If results don't improve the next year, the school must begin offering free after-school tutoring — in many cases with classes taught by the school's own teachers with whom the kids were failing during the school day.

William Bennett, Ronald Reagan's education secretary, invoked the egg metaphor, and as it turns out, a lot of families — and teachers — are willing to try the omelette. In the 2004-05 school year, 1.4 million students were eligible for the tutoring, and about 17% took advantage of it.

Spellings says the tutoring is often provided by different teachers from the ones a kid sees during the regular day. Perhaps more important, she says, the law is forcing large districts such as Los Angeles to figure out how to keep kids from needing tutoring in the first place.

"They're … sitting there thinking, 'What the heck? How can we have so many kids who can't get to grade level in the course of the school day? What needs to happen in the school day different?' "

It's changing how reading is taught

Forget everything else No Child Left Behind stands for. If it does nothing else, advocates say, it will have improved poor kids' reading in unprecedented ways. A few say it already has.

The law gives schools $1 billion a year to spend on reading and focuses it, laser-like, on 5,600 schools that serve the nation's poorest 1.8 million kids. It starts with kids as soon as they enter school and, so far, has trained 103,000 teachers on "scientifically based" reading strategies heavy in phonics, step-by-step lessons and practice, practice, practice.

And because many schools build their reading programs around what primary grades do, it could affect millions more students' reading skills.

How could it fail? Easily, say critics such as Susan Ohanian. She points to overly scripted reading curricula and a curious little reading test called DIBELS, which makes it easy to rate children's reading skills, in part by asking them to look at nonsense words; it then rates them on their ability to read the words aloud — very quickly.

"I have never seen anything like this," says Ohanian, a former New York teacher who blogs about education in general and No Child Left Behind in particular. She bemoans the loss of teacher autonomy and says DIBELS is one of its worst symptoms.

"I don't dispute that it's quick and easy and it's a tool — and if you just used it that way, I probably wouldn't have a problem with it," she says. But she adds: "They're using DIBELS to hold kids back in kindergarten. And that's where it becomes really evil. Some kids are just not ready for that skills stuff."

How Bush education law has changed our schools, UT, 8.1.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-01-07-no-child_x.htm