17206: AI-Powered Marketing Bullshit.

 

University of Illinois Chicago offers a Master of Science in Marketing, whereby graduates can “craft AI-powered marketing campaigns.”

 

Based on the advertisement image, it’s possible to achieve such masterful feats solo with a laptop on a rooftop. The instructors are probably AI chatbots too.

 

BTW, graduates, your chances of landing and retaining a job in Adland are slim to nil.

14424: Mickey D’s Can SuperSize Your English Skills.

Why did Archways To Opportunity choose a Black girl to represent the 6500+ employees needing improvement with English skills? Or maybe the workers improved their English Muffin skills, dealing with Egg McMuffin® breakfast sandwiches.

13924: Science & Fiction.

Chicago Early Learning is undoubtedly doing good for the community and society at large—but its advertising could benefit from additional schooling. Why is the young scientist depicted above conducting chemistry experiments unsupervised and out on the street? Doesn’t she deserve a basic lab environment?

11748: The Backpack Black Hole.

The Backpack Black Hole is something even Stephen Hawking would support. You should too. Donate today.

11589: I See White People.

From The New York Post…

‘America is good at teaching… white kids’

By Richard Johnson

M. Night Shyamalan, who directed “The Sixth Sense,” focused on education for his recently published book, “I Got Schooled.”

At the apartment of former CNN anchor Campbell Brown, who founded the Parents’ Transparency Project, Shyamalan spoke to a group that included Grace Hightower, Katie Couric, Alexandra Pelosi, Gilt Groupe founder Kevin Ryan, Newark Schools chief Cami Anderson and Success Academy Charter Schools founder Eva Moskowitz.

“In America, we’re actually educating our kids very well… but just the white kids,” Shyamalan said. “If you pull out schools in which 85 percent of students qualify for a free meal, which are predominantly African-American and Hispanic, the data show that the rest of the kids are being taught better in America than anywhere else in the world. Countries like Finland teach their white kids well, and we teach our white kids better.”

10167: Criticizing Diddy Warbucks.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Diddy’s son isn’t the problem, inequality is

By Clarence Page

Seldom has anybody’s scholarship kicked up so much controversy.

Critics are outraged that UCLA, strapped for cash in California’s budget crisis, awarded a $54,000 merit-based athletic scholarship to Justin Combs, son of hip-hop impresario Sean “Diddy” Combs, who hardly needs the cash.

You don’t have to live in the Golden State to understand the outrage. Soaring college costs, battered state budgets and shrinking opportunities for rising income are a national crisis.

But, as they say in hip-hop culture, let’s be real.

Justin’s scholarship money doesn’t come from taxpayer funds, UCLA says, and wouldn’t even tickle the state’s projected $16 billion deficit if it did.

And picking on Diddy’s fortune or his son’s hard-earned achievements distracts us from the issue burning at the core of the discontent: How do we make higher education more affordable for young strivers who don’t have wealthy parents?

No question that Diddy is rich. In April he topped Forbes’ latest of the wealthiest moguls in hip-hop with an estimated net worth of $550 million, which makes Justin’s scholarship sound like pocket change. On the youngster’s 16th birthday in 2010, daddy gave him a $360,000 Maybach, which is to cars what Beverly Hills is to neighborhoods.

Yet Justin, to his credit, defies the slacker-rich-kid stereotype. He finished his senior year at Iona Preparatory School in New Rochelle, N.Y., with a reported 3.75 GPA and football scholarship offers from at least four colleges.

That’s why he tweeted last week to all the haters out there: “Regardless what the circumstances are, I put that work in!!!! PERIOD.”

Indeed, it appears that he did. While a good ethical argument can be made for directing scholarship money to students based on their economic need, another also can be made for motivating students toward excellence with rewards that are based on their own achievement, regardless of their family’s wealth or lack of it.

In the best of times, colleges have enough money to offer both. These are not the best of times. With that in mind, we can only hope Diddy will become a generous football dad, creating new scholarships in his son’s honor to show his appreciation. Just a suggestion.

After all, I suspect the rage over Diddy and Son largely has been inflamed by the way daddy Diddy symbolizes our society’s unresolved issues of income inequality, class divisions and culture wars. The rap music mogul embodies the “1 percent” that Occupy Wall Street protests and the hip-hop industry that outrages cultural conservatives.

Yet, the real source of our national frustration is less glamorous and more widespread. Upward mobility in America is not what it used to be. It’s easier to climb the socioeconomic ladder in many parts of Europe than it is in the U.S., according to recent reports from Brookings Institution, Pew Research Center and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

In other words, today’s aspiring youths on average have an easier time moving up the socioeconomic ladder in many parts of traditionally class-conscious Europe than here in the home of the American dream.

Without some schooling beyond high school, it is becoming increasingly difficult to enter the middle class or stay in it. Yet Washington has been gridlocked in budget fights or simply brain-dead about new ideas that can lead to comprehensive remedies.

The partisan fight over student loan interest rates, for example, is expected to lead to short-term solutions. Raising interest rates would be too unpopular for lawmakers to allow in an election year, even though student loan debt already is breaking records.

While lawmakers argue, hundreds of thousands of low-income students will lose their Pell Grants as of July 1. That’s because of a little-noticed congressional decision to save $11 billion over 10 years by reducing or eliminating aid to the most effective program for helping low-income students move up the educational ladder.

As we see doors closing on opportunities for advancement, Diddy and his kid’s scholarship are only visible symbols of our frustration. We can’t all be leaders of hip-hop or other industries, but we all deserve to have a chance to try. That used to be the American dream. We hate to see it go, but it’s slipping away.

9901: The Black365 Knowledge Bowl.

The Los Angeles Times reported on a community effort that will hopefully not draw a copyright infringement complaint from Mickey D’s 365Black.

Black history competition aims to celebrate youths’ academic prowess

The Black365 Knowledge Bowl Competition, a ‘Jeopardy’-style contest in the Antelope Valley, quizzes high school students. The founder grew up with a limited view of paths open to young African Americans.

By Ann M. Simmons, Los Angeles Times

Growing up in the Antelope Valley, Jamaal Brown aspired to be a professional basketball player.

“I thought African Americans could only be athletes, gang members, entertainers and drug dealers,” he said, referring to media stereotypes that convinced him his career paths were limited.

But when minor surgery for a heart condition foiled his pro ball ambitions, Brown turned to books and, in doing so, devoured information about black history. Valedictorian for his Lancaster High School class, he won a scholarship to Cal State Long Beach, one of eight universities that recruited him.

Armed with a degree in business management and information systems, he launched the Black365 Knowledge Bowl Competition last year, a “Jeopardy”-style contest that quizzes high school students on black history.

On Saturday, students from northern Los Angeles County’s Antelope Valley High School, Knight High School and SOAR (Students on the Academic Rise) High School and from South L.A.’s Animo Locke II college preparatory charter high school will gather in Palmdale to challenge each other on their knowledge of black history.

“I wanted to do the best that I could do to ensure that no young person grew up as short-sighted as I was,” said Brown, 29, who also created a 365 Days of Black Facts Calendar, which showcases positive accomplishments of people of African descent.

“I wanted to create an institution where our community could celebrate our youth more than just for their athletic prowess ... but for their academic prowess.”

Categories include Famous Quotations, African Flags, Black Inventors, Great African Leaders and Political Prisoners.

A sampling: name the first African nation to gain independence (the answer is Ghana); identify the author of this quote, “You have to be taught to be second class, you’re not born that way” (that would be actress, singer and civil rights activist Lena Horne).

Although black knowledge bowls are not new — historically black colleges, advocacy groups and other institutions have sponsored such annual events — Tony Lawson, Animo Locke’s team coordinator, said Brown’s creation focuses on aspects of the black American experience not typically included in the California school curriculum.

“It forces students to step beyond their normal duties,” said Lawson, who teaches history.

Winners receive a trophy as well as cash to go toward education expenses, Brown said. Rewards for runners-up include medals, mall gift cards and black history books. Sponsors of the bowl — which include the United Christian Fellowship in Palmdale, where the event will be held — made cash donations ranging from $50 to more than $250, according to Brown.

But prizes aren’t important to Jennifer Williams, captain of the SOAR team, winners of the inaugural competition.

“It’s not about the money,” said Williams, 17, who with her teammates spent eight hours each weekend cramming for the quiz and used their 30-minute lunch break twice a week to drill. “For me it’s more about gaining the knowledge.”

Team member Alexis Hithe agreed. “I want to know where I came from,” she said. “And I feel that I can’t get ahead in life if I don’t know my roots, and black history is my roots.”

Both Williams and Hithe said they had saved their $100 winnings from last year.

For Brown, currently a counselor at Antelope Valley Youth Build, a community development program that helps youths from low-income communities, a critical goal of the competition is to promote a positive image of African American young people.

“Our community needs ways in which we can uplift and celebrate our youth,” said Brown.

Jessica Nesbitt, 17, Animo Locke’s team captain, said everyone would go away victorious if they succeeded in showing the community that “black kids are intelligent and talented.”

“Just because we might live next door to gang-bangers, I hope they learn that there’s more to us than that,” she said.

9741: BHM 2012—Colgate.

Smile! Colgate-Palmolive presents the annual contribution to UNCF.

8778: Heroic Black Woman.

Look, up in the sky—it’s a Black version of the school-bound superheroine!

8623: Not UNCF.

From The Los Angeles Times…

‘Whites-only’ isn’t diversity

A Texas scholarship that excludes nonwhites betrays ignorance of the point of minority aid: an attempt to counter centuries of white privilege.

If there are scholarships and loan programs and government contracts set aside for blacks and Latinos, can there be similar set-asides for whites?

That’s one of the questions raised by a small organization in Texas that has decided to offer white men $500 college scholarships. “In a country that proclaims equality for all,” says the Former Majority Assn. for Equality, “we provide monetary aid to those that have found the scholarship application process difficult because they do not fit into certain categories or any ethnic group.”

Aware that a whites-only policy would inspire questions about racism, the organization insists: “We do not advocate white supremacy, nor do we enable any individual that does. We do not accept donations from organizations affiliated with any sort of white supremacy or hate group.”

We accept the organization’s assurances that it is not motivated by racism. But we still find the idea of whites-only scholarships offensive (even if they are legal), and the organization’s underlying understanding of race is even more so.

That understanding is sometimes called the “symmetrical view” of race. It holds that whites and minorities are similarly situated and that programs that exclusively benefit whites are as legitimate as those that serve minorities. Sometimes, as with the Texas scholarship, there is an additional argument that changing demographics have reduced the advantage of being white in this society.

This symmetrical view ignores history. Scholarships and other arrangements that favor racial minorities are generally an attempt to counter the effects of centuries of white privilege. And despite what some people might believe, those effects haven’t gone away. This country has done much to overcome its history of racism, but gaping disparities in education and wealth persist. Scholarships and other programs seeking to close those gaps naturally will focus on blacks and Latinos.

Many Americans cringe at the phrase “whites only,” and for good reason. Historically the exclusion of nonwhites was inextricably tied to notions of white supremacy. The time hasn’t arrived when “whites only,” or any policy predicated on it, can be regarded as just another patch in the quilt of diversity.

We don’t begrudge any young men scholarship aid from the Former Majority Assn. for Equality. But we wish the organization would offer its largesse on a nonracial basis.

8549: Help Potentially Wanted.

Can’t help but think the headline of this recruitment ad was influenced by a lousy job market and a conservative legal department. The advertiser could have gone with typical messages like:

Start a career in special education

Realize your potential in special education

Find your dream job in special education

Opportunities await in special education

Instead, they opted for Vacancies Anticipated.

8338: Smoking Guns, Exclusive Studies.

Studying the news with a MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• A new study shows smoking could vanish by the middle of the 21st century. The research was based on declining smoking figures in Britain, despite steady rates in America. Hey, Big Tobacco will probably just shift their marketing efforts toward Africa—and dramatically crank up menthol cigarette production.

• A new study of admissions at highly selective colleges shows legacy applicants—students with family members connected to the institution—have significant advantages in the acceptance process. In short, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. However, places like Harvard and Yale don’t come close to matching Madison Avenue when it comes to exclusivity and nepotism.

7914: Back To School Racial Classes.

It looks like blondes qualify more than Blacks for back-to-school grants.

7753: Cosby Performs At Essence Fest.

From The Times-Picayune…

Bill Cosby gives Essence Fest visitors his old-school views on teen pregnancy, gun violence

By Katy Reckdahl, The Times-Picayune

Before partying and dancing their way through Saturday night, many Essence Festival visitors spent the day listening to panelists talk about weighty education topics. At times, they packed a 5,000-seat auditorium in the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.

Comedian Bill Cosby, who drew the biggest crowd of the afternoon, took on teen pregnancy, gun violence and cussing rappers before concluding with remarks about schools.

Like Cosby, local speakers such as parent advocate Karran Harper Royal and Andre Perry, the CEO of the University of New Orleans’ charter schools, also emphasized that successful schools find ways to address the challenges students face outside the classroom.

Perry mentioned a high-achieving student who moved 30 times between birth and graduation.

“We need to see how they cope with stress so that we can teach other students those coping skills,” he said.

As usual, Cosby’s old-school admonitions to parents drew huge applause, as he talked about a man whose 14-year-old daughter had just gone through a pregnancy scare.

Cosby’s advice: Sit down and talk with teenagers who you know are sexually active. “Lay it out to them: ‘You’re out here humping without a rubber, and she’s humping without the pill or a diaphragm,’” he said.

If she gets pregnant, she’s stopping herself “in the middle of the road of life,” he said.

Cosby advised his listeners to talk not only to their children but also to cousins, nieces, nephews and neighbors. “Get into people’s business,” he said. “You’re a taxpayer and you’re tired of picking up the tab for someone’s sexual moments.”

Essence magazine news editor Wendy Wilson asked Cosby about statistics showing that violence — mostly gun violence — is now the leading cause of death for black youths age 10 to 24, killing an average of 16 people a day.

People would “riot in the streets” if that many black children were killed each day by white lynch mobs who pulled them out of their houses and hanged them in the public square, Cosby said.

Ultimately, he holds parents culpable. “Whose fault is it that gun is in your child’s room?” he asked. “Look under the mattress. Say, ‘I’m raising you. This is my job, to raise you.’”

Young black males do have to contend with police profiling, Cosby said. But he quoted Earl Lloyd, the first black player in the National Basketball Association, who said that his mother would question him closely when he came home about where he had been and with whom. “She’d tell him, ‘If you’re not in the picture, you can’t be framed.’”

Cosby recalled speaking at a Newark, N.J., high school that graduated 255 students out of a ninth-grade class that started with750. As he looked at the graduates, he said, he noticed that about 80percent were female. Of the top 13 honor students in the class, only one was male.

All children must be able to envision themselves venturing into the world, graduating from college and earning a living, Cosby said as he mimicked singer James Brown: “Get up. Stay on the scene. Be a studying machine.”

7748: France’s Grande Plans For Diversity.

From The New York Times…

Top French Schools, Asked to Diversify, Fear for Standards

By Steven Erlanger

PARIS — France is embarking on a grand experiment — how to diversify the overwhelmingly white “grandes écoles,” the elite universities that have produced French leaders in every walk of life — and Rizane el-Yazidi is one of the pioneers.

The daughter of protective North African parents in the tough northeastern suburb of Bondy, Ms. Yazidi is enrolled in a trial program aimed at helping smart children of the poor overcome the huge cultural disadvantages that have often spelled failure in the crucial school entrance exams.

“For now we’re still a small group, but when there will be more of us, it’ll become real progress,” said Ms. Yazidi, 20. But she is nervous, too. “We’re lucky, but it’s a great risk for us,” she said. “We might never make it” to a top school.

Because entrance to the best grandes écoles effectively guarantees top jobs for life, the government is prodding the schools to set a goal of increasing the percentage of scholarship students to 30 percent — more than three times the current ratio at the most selective schools. But the effort is being met with concerns from the grandes écoles, who fear it could dilute standards, and is stirring anger among the French at large, who fear it runs counter to a French ideal of a meritocracy blind to race, religion and ethnicity.

France imagines itself a country of “republican virtue,” a meritocracy run by a well-trained elite that emerges from a fiercely competitive educational system. At its apex are the grandes écoles, about 220 schools of varying specialties. And at the very top of this pyramid are a handful of famous institutions that accept a few thousand students a year among them, all of whom pass extremely competitive examinations to enter.

“In France, families celebrate acceptance at a grande école more than graduation itself,” said Richard Descoings, who runs the most liberal of them, the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, known as Sciences Po. “Once you pass the exam at 18 or 19, for the rest of your life, you belong.”

The result, critics say, is a self-perpetuating elite of the wealthy and white, who provide their own children the social skills, financial support and cultural knowledge to pass the entrance exams, known as the concours, which are normally taken after an extra two years of intensive study in expensive preparatory schools after high school.

The problem is not simply the narrow base of the elite, but its self-satisfaction. “France has so many problems with innovation,” Mr. Descoings said. Those who pass the tests “are extremely smart and clever, but the question is: Are you creative? Are you willing to put yourself at risk? Lead a battle?” These are qualities rarely tested in exams.

But the schools fear that the government will undermine excellence in the name of social engineering and say the process has to begin further down the educational ladder. The state, they say, should seek out poor students with potential and help them to enter preparatory schools. Of the 2.3 million students in French higher education, about 15 percent attend grandes écoles or preparatory schools. But half of those in preparatory schools will fall short and go to standard universities.

In 2001, Mr. Descoings, 52, who cheerfully admits that he failed the concours twice before passing, began his own outreach program to better prepare less-advantaged students for Sciences Po. Last year, the school accepted 126 scholarship students out of a class of 1,300, and two-thirds of them have at least one non-French parent, he said. But that is a far cry from 30 percent.

One of them, Houria Khemiss, 22, is about to graduate from Sciences Po in law. The daughter of Algerian parents growing up in impoverished St.-Denis in the Paris suburbs, she was pushed by a high school teacher to the special preparatory program. She wants to become a judge, “because then you have a direct impact on people’s lives.” Many at Sciences Po will become the leaders of France, she said, “and because we are there it gives them another point of view.”

Oualid Fakkir, 23, who is graduating with a master’s in finance, said, “It’s very dangerous for France to close its eyes and say, ‘Equality. We have the best values in the world.’ It’s not enough. There has to also be equality of chances.”

But other elite grandes écoles are more specialized than Sciences Po, concentrating on engineering, business management, public administration and science, and they are more concerned about the government’s program.

Pierre Tapie, 52, is the head of the business school ESSEC and chairman of the Conférence des Grandes Écoles, which represents 222 schools.

While he shares the government’s objective of diversity, he said, there is a long educational track before the concours. “We cannot be the scapegoat of any demagogic decision because we are the finest and most famous part of the whole system,” he said. Gen. Xavier Michel, 56, runs École Polytechnique, one of the world’s finest engineering schools and still overseen by the Ministry of Defense. Known as X, the school is extraordinarily competitive, and its students do basic training and parade wearing the bicorne, a cocked hat dating from Napoleon, who put the school under the military in 1804.

“The fundamental principle for us is that students have the capability to do the work here, which is very difficult,” with a lot of math, physics and science, very little of it based on cultural knowledge, General Michel said. Even now, he said, the school takes only 500 students a year, barely 10 percent of its specially educated applicants. “We don’t want to bring students into school who risk failing,” he said. “You can get lost very quickly.”

Read the full story here.

7640: The Obama Effect.

From The New York Daily News…

Poll finds black students are more optimistic than their peers, possibly due to ‘Obama effect’

The Associated Press

CHICAGO - Bria Fleming has been through a lot in the last year, including her mother’s hospitalization and job loss and a fire in their home. It’d be enough to get most 18-year-olds down.

But the black high school student is surprisingly optimistic about the future and her chances for a better life — an attitude common among her African-American peers, according to a new nationwide survey of high school students.

“I know kids who’ve been through less and maybe they can’t handle it,” said Fleming, who will head to Florida A&M University in the fall in hopes of eventually becoming a veterinarian. “But my mom always tells me, ‘Work hard, stay positive and you’ll make it.’”

A poll released Thursday by Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., found that 70 percent of black students ages 15 to 18 thought their standard of living would be better than their parents, compared with just 36 percent of white students.

Overall, 39 percent of respondents thought they would have a higher living standard.

Those numbers and the level of optimism among black students appeared to be closely tied to their enthusiasm for President Barack Obama, making for what some called the “Obama effect.”

Asked about the president’s performance, more than two-thirds of black students rated his performance as “good” or “very good,” compared with 23 percent of white students. Overall, about a quarter of the students who were surveyed rated the president highly.

DeQuan Foster, a 15-year-old high school sophomore in Newark, N.J., agreed that having someone who looks like him leading the country has strongly influenced his belief in the future and what he can personally achieve.

“You’re always told anything is possible — but when you see it, you believe it. It makes me want to try twice as hard,” said Foster, who’s active in the theater and his local Boys & Girls Club and hopes to start his own entertainment company after college.

It’s an attitude that mirrored the findings of a recent Harvard Institute of Politics survey of 18- to 29-year-olds, and that could have ramifications on November’s midterm elections, said John Della Volpe, the institute’s polling director.

“Young African Americans have this serious afterglow that is not as strong with whites and Hispanics,” Della Volpe said. “And that’s despite (African American youth) having more serious economic concerns.”

The Hamilton College survey involved 818 high school sophomores, juniors and seniors from across the country who were surveyed last month. The poll, funded by the school’s Levitt Center for Public Affairs, has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 3.5 percentage points.

Stephen Wu, the Hamilton economist who oversaw the poll, said he was surprised by the stark difference in optimism among races and that black students’ attitudes appeared to be so tied to their view of the president.

But many students — even in Chicago, the Obama family’s home outside Washington — said they witness the divide all the time.

“It always comes back to Obama,” said Deja Bailey, a 15-year-old African American student who attends the city’s prestigious Walter Payton High School. Even her own friends can’t agree. She said one of them carries a scrapbook about the president and frequently argues with others who say he’s doing a “horrible” job.

The latter attitude also frustrates Foster, the black teen in New Jersey, who wishes his peers had more patience — and more hope.

“Everyone isn’t going to support every decision the man makes. That’s life,” he said. “It’s the same with parents. You may not agree with everything they do, but they have your best interest at heart.”

But others, such as Harry Tsang, a 19-year-old college freshman in Orlando, Fla., said they’re done being patient. Worried about the deficit and government involvement in matters such as health care, the former Obama supporter has started volunteering for Florida Republican Marco Rubio, who’s running for the U.S. Senate.

Tsang, a native of Hong Kong, acknowledges that he was once drawn to the president’s charisma and his message of change.

“It was more about him than the issues. It turns out, it’s not the way I think,” said Tsang, who also joined the Florida Federation of Teenage Republicans, which has seen its membership double to 800 students since Obama was elected.

Harnessing youthful energy was an Obama tactic that led young voters to support him by a 2-to-1 margin.

“Whoever gets that volunteer energy is likely to prevail in the midterm election,” said Paul Loeb, author of the newly updated book “Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in Challenging Times,” which looks at young people’s political engagement.

Of course, a number of Obama’s young white supporters have remained loyal.

Matthew Bischoff, a high school senior from Gilroy, Calif., still has a newspaper from the day after Obama’s election pinned to his bedroom wall, though even he’s not so sure about his level of optimism.

“If I were to wrap this answer simply, I’d have to give an unhelpful, ‘I cannot say,’” Bischoff said. “I find the future that stares me in the face as I prepare to graduate and move onto college too veiled behind change to give a solid answer.”

Bischoff, who turns 18 in September, does plan to vote in the November midterm election.

But he may be among the minority.

The Harvard Institute of Politics survey released last month found that among 18- to 29-year-olds surveyed, a third of whites and just 18 percent of Hispanics planned to vote in the midterm election.

That compares with 41 percent of African Americans who said the same.

“So I think they become an even more important cohort than they were, frankly, in 2008,” said Della Volpe, the Harvard polling director.

That’s as young voters. When it comes to their future, and their standard of living, others hope the optimism truly will equate to a better life for young African Americans.

Among them is Dr. William McDade, a surgeon and an associate dean at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine who recruits and retains minority students.

“My hope is that this optimism can turn to realism,” he said, “so that students can learn how to overcome the barriers they might encounter.”

7569: Urban Prep Academy Is Perfect.

From The Chicago Tribune…

On to college…

If nothing else made you feel good last week, you had to smile at the news out of Urban Prep Academy for Young Men, a charter school in Englewood.

Every one of the 107 students in Urban Prep’s first senior class has been accepted to a four-year college.

That’s a remarkable achievement, especially considering that the overall college acceptance rate for Chicago public school graduates is 52.5 percent. And that number doesn’t include the many students who start high school but don’t finish it.

Urban Prep’s acceptance rate would be the envy of any school, public or private. But consider this: When these seniors entered Urban Prep as freshmen, only four percent read at grade level. And 82 percent of the school’s students come from low-income families.

Urban Prep helped the kids make up ground by implementing a tough, college-prep curriculum that required double periods of English. All told, Urban Prep students spend 72,000 more minutes in the classroom than their peers at regular CPS schools.

We’ve been harping on that for a long time. Fact is, Urban Prep should be the norm, not the exception. Most Chicago public school students spend far too little time in the classroom.

Urban Prep hasn’t necessarily turned miracles. The average ACT score for its students is lower than the systemwide average for Chicago Public Schools. The kids qualified for college based on a lot more: their grade point averages, tough course loads, extra activities, etc. And because they had a single focus: going to college. Even before the first day of freshman year at Urban Prep, students go on a field trip to Northwestern University. The message is clear: This is your future.

Tim King, the school’s founder and CEO, recognizes that he can’t simply bid these students adieu. The college graduation rate for African-American men isn’t good. The school’s counselors will support these young men through their college careers.

Let’s hope that in four years Urban Prep can hold a welcome home event and show off 107 college degrees.

We wouldn’t bet against that. Nice going, gentlemen. You should be proud.

7536: Diversity And Diplomas.

From Newsweek…

Minority Report
American universities are accepting more minorities than ever. Graduating them is another matter.

By Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert | NEWSWEEK

Barry Mills, the president of Bowdoin College, was justifiably proud of Bowdoin’s efforts to recruit minority students. Since 2003 the small, elite liberal-arts school in Brunswick, Maine, has boosted the proportion of so-called underrepresented minority students (blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans, about 30 percent of the U.S. population) in entering freshman classes from 8 percent to 13 percent. “It is our responsibility, given our place in the world, to reach out and attract students to come to our kinds of places,” he told a NEWSWEEK reporter. But Bowdoin has not done quite as well when it comes to actually graduating minorities. While nine out of 10 white students routinely get their diplomas within six years, only seven out of 10 black students made it to graduation day in several recent classes.

The picture of diversity—black, white, and brown students cavorting or studying together out on the quad—is a stock shot in college catalogs. The picture on graduation day is a good deal more monochromatic. “If you look at who enters college, it now looks like America,” says Hilary Pennington, director of postsecondary programs for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has closely studied enrollment patterns in higher education. “But if you look at who walks across the stage for a diploma, it’s still largely the white, upper-income population.”

The United States once had the highest graduation rate of any nation. Now it stands 10th. For the first time in American history, there is the risk that the rising generation will be less well educated than the previous one. The graduation rate among 25- to 34-year-olds is no better than the rate for the 55- to 64-year-olds who were going to college more than 30 years ago. Studies show that more and more poor and nonwhite students aspire to graduate from college—but their graduation rates fall far short of their dreams. The graduation rates for blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans lag far behind the graduation rates for whites and Asians. As the minority population grows in the United States, low college-graduation rates become a threat to national prosperity.

The problem is pronounced at public universities. In 2007 (the last year for which Education Trust, a nonprofit advocacy group, has comparative statistics) the University of Wisconsin-Madison—one of the top five or so “public Ivies”—graduated 81 percent of its white students within six years, but only 56 percent of its blacks. At less-selective state schools, the numbers get worse. During the same time frame, the University of Northern Iowa graduated 67 percent of its white students, but only 39 percent of its blacks. Community colleges have low graduation rates generally—but rock-bottom rates for minorities. A recent review of California community colleges found that while a third of the Asian students picked up their degrees, only 15 percent of African-Americans did so as well.

Private colleges and universities generally do better, partly because they offer smaller classes and more personal attention. But when it comes to a significant graduation gap, Bowdoin has company. Nearby Colby College logged an 18-point difference between white and black graduates in 2007 and 25 points in 2006. Middlebury College in Vermont, another topnotch school, had a 19-point gap in 2007 and a 22-point gap in 2006. The most selective private schools—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—show almost no gap between black and white graduation rates. But that may have more to do with their ability to cherry-pick the best students. According to data gathered by Harvard Law School professor Lani Guinier, the most selective schools are more likely to choose blacks who have at least one immigrant parent from Africa or the Caribbean than black students who are descendants of American slaves. According to Guinier’s data, the latter perform less well academically.

“Higher education has been able to duck this issue for years, particularly the more selective schools, by saying the onus is on the individual student,” says Pennington of the Gates Foundation. “If they fail, it’s their fault.” Some critics blame affirmative action—students admitted with lower test scores and grades from shaky high schools often struggle at elite schools. But a bigger problem may be that poor high schools often send their students to colleges for which they are, in educators’ jargon, “undermatched”: they could get into more elite, richer schools, but instead go to community colleges and low-rated state schools that lack the resources to help them. Some schools out for profit cynically jack up tuitions and count on student loans and federal aid to foot the bill—knowing full well that the students won’t make it. “Colleges know that a lot of kids they take will end up in remedial classes, for which they’ll get no college credit and then they’ll flunk out,” says Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust. “The school gets to keep the money, but the kid leaves with loads of debt and no degree and no ability to get a better job. Colleges are not holding up their end.”

A college education is getting ever more expensive. Since 1982 tuitions have been rising at roughly twice the rate of inflation. University administrators insist that most of those hikes are matched by increased scholarship grants or loans, but the recession has slashed private endowments and cut into state spending on higher education. In 2008 the net cost of attending a four-year public university—after financial aid—equaled 28 percent of median family income, while a four-year private university cost 76 percent of median family income. More and more scholarships are based on merit, not need. Poorer students are not always the best-informed consumers. Often they wind up deeply in debt or simply unable to pay after a year or two and must drop out.

There once was a time when universities took a perverse pride in their attrition rates. Professors would begin the year by saying, “Look to the right and look to the left. One of you is not going to be here by the end of the year.” But such a Darwinian spirit is beginning to give way as at least a few colleges face up to the graduation gap. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the gap has been roughly halved over the last three years. The university has poured resources into peer counseling to help students from inner-city schools adjust to the rigor and faster pace of a university classroom—and also to help minority students overcome the stereotype that they are less qualified. Wisconsin has a “laserlike focus” on building up student skills in the first three months, according to vice provost Damon Williams.

State and federal governments could sharpen that focus everywhere by broadly publishing minority graduation rates. (For now students and counselors must find their way to the Web site of the Educational Trust, which compares data obtained from schools by the federal government.) For years private colleges such as Princeton and MIT have had success bringing minorities onto campus in the summer before freshman year to give them a head start on college-level courses. The newer trend is to start recruiting poor and nonwhite students as early as the seventh grade, using innovative tools like hip-hop competitions to identify kids with sophisticated verbal finesse. Such programs can be expensive, of course, but cheap compared with the millions already invested in scholarships and grants for kids who have little chance to graduate without special support.

With effort and money, the graduation gap can be closed. Washington and Lee is a small, selective school with a preppy feel in Lexington, Va. Its student body is less than 5 percent black and less than 2 percent Latino. While the school usually graduated about 90 percent of its whites, the graduation rate of its blacks and Latinos had dipped to 63 percent by 2007. “We went through a dramatic shift,” says Dawn Watkins, the vice president for student affairs. The school aggressively pushed mentoring of minorities by other students and “partnering” with parents at a special pre-enrollment session. The school had its first-ever black homecoming. Last spring the school graduated the same proportion of minorities as it did whites. If the United States wants to keep up in the global economic race, it will have to pay systematic attention to graduating minorities, not just enrolling them.

7284: Alaska Schools Not Making The Grade.

From The New York Times…

Alaska’s Rural Schools Fight Off Extinction

By William Yardley

NIKOLSKI, Alaska — This distant dot in the Aleutian Islands needed just 10 students for its school to dodge a fatal cut from the state budget. It reached across Alaska and beyond but could find only nine.

Built by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1939, the little Nikolski School will not be the last in Alaska to close. Four others have closed this fall and at least 30 more are at risk because of dwindling enrollment; one school in remote southeast Alaska survived only by advertising on Craigslist for families with school-aged children.
“We lose one or two every year,” said Eddy Jeans, the director of school finance for the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development.

As Alaska celebrates its 50th anniversary of statehood amid new political prominence and urban aspirations, it is confronting a legacy of loss in rural communities that are unlike any others in the United States.

Some of these communities, like Nikolski, are linked to the earliest human settlements in North America, yet are now buckling beneath the accumulated conflict of old versus new. Alaska Natives are increasingly leaving villages for cities. Young women, in particular, have departed, and birth rates, once disproportionately higher in villages, have dropped. Jobs for the young people who remain are declining. Village elders have fewer peers who share their dialects. Heating fuel, gasoline and groceries can be expensive and medical services minimal.

The annual statewide student counting period, completed last month, is a census of the exodus. After several decades of growth, the overall rural population has declined about 4 percent since 2000 and much more in many regions. In the Aleutians, the population is down 19 percent, to about 4,500. About 20 percent of Alaska’s 680,000 people live in rural areas.

Rural school districts, desperate to make the cut, are known to move students between schools to prop up enrollment during the counting period, while some have sought out families willing to relocate from other states.

“We were desperate,” said Gordon Chew, whose wife runs the school in Tenakee Springs, where two families with a total of six children relocated earlier this year in response to an advertisement on Craigslist. “That saved us.” The decline of rural schools is at the heart of a broader debate in Alaska over the treatment of native communities, which dominate the state’s rural population.

Here in the Aleutians, native Unangans, or Aleuts, are linked to people who traveled the Bering land bridge from Asia more than 10,000 years ago. They survived off the sea, making skiffs from seal skin and building houses from sod for shelter against the endless ocean gales. They endured violence and religious conversion by Russian explorers and, during World War II, forced evacuation by the American military.
Now they face budget cuts and the pressures of modern Alaska.

“If you put it in the calculus we use today to determine public policy, places like Nikolski probably have a difficult time measuring up,” said Byron Mallott, a Tlingit leader who has advised several Alaska governors on native issues. “But look at Nikolski in the context of Alaska, look at it in the context of America. These are the native homelands, and we ought to recognize that and not forget that.”

Read the full story here.

5864: New School Idea For Old School Issue.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Radical idea: Open the doors of affluent suburban schools to Chicago students

By Richard D. Kahlenberg

Sen. James Meeks’ (D-Chicago) proposed student boycott of Chicago public schools next month has sparked furious controversy. Should students miss their first day of class for the worthy goal of promoting equity in public school spending? Leaders such as Mayor Richard Daley and Chicago Public Schools Chief Arne Duncan are worried about the disruption involved as Meeks seeks to enroll Chicago students at New Trier High School in Winnetka.

Missing from the discussion is a bigger point: The main reason New Trier’s students achieve and graduate at much higher levels isn’t per-pupil expenditure; it’s differences in the socioeconomic status of the student bodies in Chicago and New Trier.

Decades of research have found that the biggest determinant of academic achievement is the socioeconomic status of the family a child comes from and the second biggest determinant is the socioeconomic status of the school she attends. The main problem with Chicago schools isn’t that too little is spent on students but that the school district has overwhelming concentrations of poverty.

In the 2005-06 school year, Chicago public schools spent $10,409 per pupil, much less than New Trier ($16,856), but slightly more than several high-performing suburban school districts, including ones in Naperville ($9,881) and Geneva ($9,807). The key difference is that while 84.9 percent of Chicago students come from low-income homes, New Trier has a low-income population of 1.9 percent, Naperville has 5 percent and Geneva 2.4percent.

What Chicago students need even more than higher per capita spending is what New Trier, Naperville and Geneva schools provide: middle-class environments. It’s an advantage to have peers who are academically engaged and expect to go to college; parents who actively volunteer in the classroom and hold school officials accountable; and highly qualified teachers who have high expectations. On average, all these ingredients to good schools are far more likely to be found in middle-class than poor schools.

Low-income students in the 4th grade who are given a chance to attend more affluent schools are two years ahead in math of low-income students in high- poverty schools, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Indeed, low-income students in affluent schools outperform middle-class students in high-poverty schools. More important, research has long found that while black students don’t do better sitting next to whites per se, low-income students of all races do better in middle-class environments.

What is to be done? To provide genuine equality of educational opportunity, Sen. Meeks shouldn’t be seeking merely equal funding—a 21st Century version of “separate but equal.” Instead, a reasonable number of low-income students in failing Chicago schools should be given the opportunity to attend high-performing schools in Chicago’s affluent suburbs.

This may sound like a radical idea, but long-standing interdistrict public school choice programs exist in several metropolitan areas—including Boston, St. Louis, Hartford, Conn., Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Rochester, N.Y., and Indianapolis. Typically, low-income students who transfer into these programs achieve at high levels and are more likely to graduate and go on to college.

Even Chicago has experienced successful urban-suburban integration through the historic, court-ordered Gautreaux housing programs, which gave low-income minority families a chance to live in the suburbs. Gautreaux students rose to the occasion and performed significantly better when given the chance to attend good middle-class schools. Meeks would do well to push for a new school-based version of Gautreaux allowing low-income Chicago students a chance to attend good middle-class suburban schools. Overwhelming evidence suggests that equal spending just isn't enough.

Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, is the author of “All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools through Public School Choice.”