Joanne Jacobs's Open Salon Blog

Plumbers pay, philosophers default

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:11:18 -0500

Should you borrow to pay for college? How much will you be able to repay? To estimate their return on investment, students should listen to investors in bonds backed by student loans, suggests the Wall Street Journal. It’s a $242 billion market.

Hedge fund manager Daniel Ades of Kawa Capital Management won’t invest in bonds backed by loans made to 2010 and 2011 graduates, “because we can’t quantify the risk,” he told the Journal.

Investors like Mr. Ades have a unique view on the future for America’s job-seekers. Their investments depend on accurately predicting young people’s ability to repay their loans, which means they obsess about everything from employment rates by profession to the long-term earning potential of young graduates.

Historically, investors have assumed 25% to 30% of student loans bundled into their bonds will default. But today they are baking in between 30% and 40% default rates among the current crop of graduates, said Chris Haid, a director in asset backed trading at Barclays Capital. Even those assumptions are a best guess and defaults could ultimately go higher if unemployment rises, Mr. Haid said.

Not surprisingly, failure to graduate sharply raises the likelihood of default. So does the failure to finish on time.

Investors in bonds backed by student loans hate to see perpetual academics in their portfolio, chronically changing majors or stopping and starting school, adding years of tuition to their debt load.

“When you see a guy in a loan made in 2005 that is still in school, you throw that away,” said investor Rubin Bahar, of Eagle Asset Management.

In the current economy, the return on investment can be better for two years at a technical or community college than a four-year degree and three years of law school. A technical degree from a public two-year college delivers relatively high wages for a low cost, according to Mr. Ades. The median annual community college tuition is $2,963 a year the College Board estimates.

“We’re in a skills based economy and what we need is more computer programmers, more [nurses],” he said. “It’s less glamorous but it’s what we need.”

A technical college degree is worth as much as a bachelor’s degree, concludes Thumbtack, which surveyed business people — contractors, photographers, performers and others — who advertise their services on the site. The hourly rate for technical college graduates is $55 an hour. Bachelor’s graduates also average $55 an hour. (“Technical college” includes for-profit career colleges and technical degrees earned at community colleges.)

Electricians, plumbers, auto mechanics and HVAC techs trained at community colleges and technical colleges make good money and can’t be outsourced, notes Glenn Reynolds in Popular Mechanics.

Ultimately, the return on investment depends on the student's abilities, motivations and career plans. The A student who plans to major in petroleum engineering can afford to borrow more than the B- student with an interest in sociology, theater or almost any major ending in "studies."

Learning by playing video games

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 14:09:24 -0400

Can students learn by playing video games? Designing video games? A New York City public school called Quest to Learn, the brainchild of game designer Katie Salen, is exploring the possibilities. From New York Times Magazine:

Quest to Learn is organized specifically around the idea that digital games are central to the lives of today’s children and also increasingly, as their speed and capability grow, powerful tools for intellectual exploration. Salen, a professor of design and technology at Parsons the New School for Design, also directs a research-based organization called Institute of Play, which examines the connections between games and learning. Working with Robert Torres, a learning scientist who is a former school principal, and a small team of curriculum and game designers, Salen spent two years planning Quest to Learn in conjunction with the education-reform group New Visions for Public Schools.

Quest to Learn enrolls 145 sixth and seventh graders — all admitted by lottery — and eventually will grow to include a high school. Currently, the school employs 11 teachers and three game designers. Foundation money pays for the technology and staff.

Students work to qualify as “pre-novice,” “novice,” “apprentice,” “senior” and “master.”

The principles are similar to those used in problem-based learning, a more established educational method in which students collaborate to tackle broad, open-ended problems, with a teacher providing guidance though not necessarily a lot of instruction. But at Quest to Learn, the problems have been expertly aerated with fantasy.

Once it has been worked over by game designers, a lesson doesn’t look like a lesson anymore. It is now a quest. And while students at the school are put through the usual rigors of studying pre-algebra, basic physics, ancient civilizations and writing, they do it inside interdisciplinary classes with names like Codeworlds — a hybrid of math and English class — where the quests blend skills from different subject areas. Students have been called upon to balance the budget and brainstorm business ideas for an imaginary community called Creepytown, for example, and to design architectural blueprints for a village of bumbling little creatures called the Troggles.

There are elements of the school’s curriculum that look familiar — nightly independent reading assignments, weekly reading-comprehension packets and plenty of work with pencils and paper — and others that don’t. Quest to Learn students record podcasts, film and edit videos, play video games, blog avidly and occasionally receive video messages from aliens.

Students also design their own games, developing, in theory, “math, writing, art, computer programming, deductive reasoning and critical thinking skills.”

After one year, Quest to Learn students earned average scores on state reading and math exams. Work is underway on “new assessment measures . . . to look at progress in areas like systems thinking, teamwork and time management.”

Yes, it sounds faddish -- will students learn history or science? -- but let's see how it plays out, so to speak.

Also in the Times, Deborah Solomon asks Education Secretary Arne Duncan about computers in the schools in what Ed Sector’s Chad Aldeman calls the worst questions ever.

NY schools get bad news on proficiency

Wed, 4 Aug 2010 14:08:57 -0400

After years of rising test scores, New York education leaders concluded the state has been defining proficiency down. It takes a higher score this year for a student to qualify as proficient, which equates to doing grade-level work. This year’s lower pass rates have been a shock to schools, reports the New York Times.

In New York City, the proficiency rate in English fell from 69 percent to 42 percent; math proficiency fell from 82 percent to 54 percent. Principals have been earning bonuses for raising scores; teacher evaluations are based partially on test scores. To adjust for the sharp drop in scores, schools will be graded on a curve this year, with 25 percent to receive A’s, 35 percent B’s, 25 percent C’s, 10 percent D’s and 5 percent F’s.

At some schools, the drop was breathtaking. At Public School 85 in the Bronx, known as the Great Expectations School, there was a literal reversal in fortune, with proficiency on the third-grade math test flipping from 81 percent to 18 percent. At the main campus of the Harlem Promise Academy, one of the city’s top-ranked charter schools, proficiency in third-grade math dropped from 100 percent to 56 percent.

. . . The charter school run by the local teachers’ union, the UFT Charter School, showed one of the most severe declines, to 13 percent of eighth graders proficient in math, from 79 percent.

The racial achievement gap widened as many black and Hispanic students, just passing under the old system, now fall below proficient.

Many more third through eighth graders will have to attend summer school in 2011 to be promoted to the next grade.

In schools where children were scoring well above grade level, though, the passing rate did not change much. At Public School 172 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, for example, last year’s 100 percent on the third-grade math test inched down to 99 percent, and the fourth-grade English passing rate slipped to 96 percent, from 99 percent.

Students answered about the same number of questions correctly this year, but the score required for a passing grade went up.

Top-ranked P.S. 155 will try harder, the principal, Linda Singer, told the Times. “We are ordering a grammar book ASAP; that was a weakness,” she added. “We are going to push in professional development for teaching that is different for each child.”

In short, the bad news could be good news for students who aren’t working at grade level but could be.

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Teaching creativity

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 05:07:46 -0400

While IQ scores rise over time, creativity scores are declining in the U.S., write Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in Newsweek. It’s not clear why, though Bronson and Merryman think passive TV watching and video game playing may be crowding out creative play.

Other nations are trying to encourage students to think creatively and solve problems, while U.S. schools often concentrate on teaching basic skills. Creativity is seen as something that happens in art class. Here’s where the article got interesting for me:

The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening — ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

. . . Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way.

Problem solving requires using both sides of the brain, switching rapidly between convergent to divergent thinking, Bronson and Merryman write. The solver considers known facts and strategies, then scans “remote memories that could be vaguely relevant,” searching for “unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.” The brain locks on to a possible answer — aha! — then evaluates whether it’s worth pursing.

(Yesterday, my husband, an electrical engineer who holds many patents, told me his advice to a friend who’s working for an inventor with a divergent idea. “Try to impress the investors with your competence so they’ll recommend you for a job when this fails.”)

Creativity training helps students learn to solve problems, say researchers at the University of Oklahoma, the University of Georgia, and Taiwan’s National Chengchi University.

The National Inventors Hall of Fame School, a new public middle school in Akron that admits students by lottery, teaches problem solving as part of its STEM mission. Fifth graders were given four weeks to design proposals for reducing noise in the library, which has windows looking out on a public space.

Working in small teams, the fifth graders first engaged in what creativity theorist Donald Treffinger describes as fact-finding. How does sound travel through materials? What materials reduce noise the most? Then, problem-finding — anticipating all potential pitfalls so their designs are more likely to work. Next, idea-finding: generate as many ideas as possible. Drapes, plants, or large kites hung from the ceiling would all baffle sound. Or, instead of reducing the sound, maybe mask it by playing the sound of a gentle waterfall? A proposal for double-paned glass evolved into an idea to fill the space between panes with water. Next, solution-finding: which ideas were the most effective, cheapest, and aesthetically pleasing? Fiberglass absorbed sound the best but wouldn’t be safe. Would an aquarium with fish be easier than water-filled panes?

Then teams developed a plan of action. They built scale models and chose fabric samples. They realized they’d need to persuade a janitor to care for the plants and fish during vacation. Teams persuaded others to support them — sometimes so well, teams decided to combine projects. Finally, they presented designs to teachers, parents, and Jim West, inventor of the electric microphone.

Teachers had designed the project to meet Ohio’s curriculum standards. That was reflected in the school’s first-year test scores, which placed it third among Akron schools.

Sixth-grader Brandon Smith’s Hamster Cleaner 3000 made the finals of a local TV stations’ Coolest Creations contest, after competing at the Invention Convention at the Cleveland Great Lakes Science Center.

Not everyone needs Algebra 2

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 11:04:19 -0400

Will We Ever Learn? ask Robert Lerman of the Urban Institue and Arnold Packer of SCANS in Education Week. That is, will we ever learn to stop forcing a one-size-fits-all college-prep curriculum on all students.

Many high schools require Algebra 2, they write, but “Northeastern University sociologist Michael Handel has found that only 9 percent of people in the workforce ever use this knowledge, and that fewer than 20 percent of managerial, professional, or technical workers report using any Algebra 2 material.”

Part of the reason high schools fail so many kids is that educators can’t get free of the notion that all students—regardless of their career aspirations—need the same basic preparation. States are piling on academic courses, removing the arts, and downplaying career and technical education to make way for a double portion of math. Meanwhile, career-focused programs, such as Wisconsin’s youth apprenticeships and well-designed career academies, are engaging students and raising their post-high-school earnings, especially among hard-to-reach, at-risk male students.

Research shows what employers want:

Successful workers communicate effectively, orally and in writing, and have social and behavioral skills that make them responsible and good at teamwork. They are creative and techno-savvy, have a good command of fractions and basic statistics, and can apply relatively simple math to real-world problems such as those concerning financial or health literacy. Employers never mention polynomial factoring . . .

The proposed common core standards ignore career readiness in favor of college-prep, they write. “We need rigorous but basic academics, homing in on skills that will be used, and not short-shrifting the ’soft skill’ behaviors that lead to success in college and careers.”

I’m not sure how schools could get rigorous about “soft skill” behaviors. But I see very little in most high schools to engage career-minded students.

The Hechinger Institute for Education and the Media has hired me to start a new blog, Community College Spotlight, that will focus on the most important and most neglected part of our higher education system. This is where the kids who slept through Algebra 2 find the courses they need to learn fractions and train for a job.