Parker Goyer has certainly tasted her share of success even if she is just 23-years-old.

Following her graduation from Duke, Goyer received a fellowship from the Robertson Scholars Program, a merit scholarship program that seeks to encourage social entrepreneurship and to increase collaboration between Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill. Goyer was the only non-Robertson Scholar to be selected for the one year fellowship.

That same year, the 2007 graduate would go on to see her benchmark concept, the Coach for College Program, come to fruition. Securing nearly half-a-million dollars in funding, Goyer led a group of college student-athletes to Vietnam to deliver the first ever edition of the program to 200 middle school-aged children.

Yet, when it comes to recognition for a job well-done, the first-year student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education recently hit new heights even for her. On Saturday, November 22nd, the Coach for College founder learned she was one of 32 American students chosen to receive a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship.

Special Moment
The selection for what is arguably “the most famous academic award available to American college graduates” was something the native of Birmingham, Ala., truly coveted. She had been selected a finalist last year but had not been chosen to be one of the final 32 students to receive a scholarship that averages upwards of $50,000 per year of study.

“I’ve known about the Rhodes for a long time,” she acknowledges. “I’m not actually sure when I first heard about it but I do remember my mom telling me about the biographies of some of the winners when I was younger.”

When the former Division I student-athlete began reading more about the scholarship program, she discovered that the four characteristics of prior Rhodes recipients, academic achievement,
service to others, leadership, and physical vigor, were all characteristics she sought for herself.

“They were ideals that I wanted to strive for, regardless of whether they were associated with a scholarship or not,” explains Goyer. “I felt that doing so would ultimately position me to make the greatest impact on the world.”

A Young Lady of Numerous Accomplishments
Though most well-known for her unique service program, Coach for College, the path to the Rhodes reveals a lengthy list of academic accomplishments. After all, one is not chosen from among 769 deserving applicants from more than 200 colleges and universities throughout the country for a Rhodes without having exceptional academic credentials.

Goyer was a repeat member of the Dean’s List with Distinction while at Duke and graduated Summa Cum Laude. During her undergraduate years, Goyer was also an Honorable Mention/Finalist for the Faculty Scholar Award and received the Karl E. Zener Award for Outstanding Performance of an Undergraduate Major in Psychology.

In addition to her being named a Robertson Fellow, the newly-selected Rhodes Scholar received the Carolina Panthers/Foundation for the Carolinas merit scholarship as a senior at Duke for graduate study and has already earned the Harvard Graduate School of Education Leadership in Education Award as well as the Ivy League school’s highest academic honor, a Presidential Scholarship .

Graduating with a degree in Psychology with a Concentration in Neuroscience and a minor in Physics, Goyer can also list a number of research experiences and publications. They include being chosen for a Neuroscience 2007 Press Book submission abstract; multiple submissions to Duke University publications (“The Duke Mind” and the Duke Center for International Studies Newsletter); a featured article in the Journal of Prospective Health Care; and a collaborative publication in the November 2008 issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Duke Role Models
When it came to role models for the prestigious award, the 23-year-old certainly could point to a number of fellow Duke graduates. The school has produced 41 prior winners including 21 in the last 15 years. Several had a key impact on Goyer.

“Over the last two years I have been fortunate to interact directly with a number of Rhodes Scholars,” she states. As for direct role models, she pointed to John Tye, the co-founder of the service-learning organization LEAPS, Eric Greitens, a Navy Seal and White House Fellow, Billy Hwang, the founder of the non-profit Innoworks, and Pooja Kumar, who was selected for the Rhodes as a second year student at Harvard Medical School.

Their influence on Goyer was profound.

“I had read and heard about many of the past Rhodes winners from Duke and they seemed like very nice, thoughtful, and interesting people. One whom I met last fall spoke of the lifelong friendships the Rhodes community provides. His glowing account of the experience he had with his fellow Rhodes Scholars at Oxford made me eager to want to join their ranks so that I too could cultivate such relationships.”

Recognition for Division I Student Athletes
While much has been made in recent years of the less than stellar graduation rates for Division I athletes at some institutions, Goyer’s selection was proof-positive that there is more to the story than the more publicized results. In fact, the former Duke tennis player was joined by Florida State football player Myron Rolle as 2008 Atlantic Coast Conference athletes to be selected to study at Oxford.

Ever-mindful that the scholarship represents opportunity as much as it does recognition, Goyer said she hopes to utilize the Oxford experience to further develop the Coach for College program. She hopes to develop the program into a truly global initiative, expanding it to other countries while incorporating other American universities into the mix.

“One of the reasons why I wanted to go to Oxford was to study comparative international education to learn more about the different education systems, academic curricula, personnel of the different countries so I could see which ones would be a good fit for the Coach for College program.”

While still looking forward, the driven young lady did pause, if only for a brief moment, to reflect on her accomplishment.

“I just feel so lucky, and thrilled to now have the opportunity to study at Oxford. This is definitely the biggest thing that has ever happened to me.”

Photo of Mryon Rolle and Parker Goyer courtesy of Amy M. Stone.

While most college students can find the time to study abroad, such an opportunity is generally not in the cards for Division I student-athletes. In addition to their studies and the pursuit of a degree, student-athletes competing at high-profile colleges also have to make a year-round commitment to their respective sports.

Such was the case for Parker Goyer, Birmingham, Ala., now in her first year of study at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. While studying at prestigious Duke University, Goyer was a member of the Duke tennis team that reached the Final Four indoors and the NCAA quarterfinals twice.

But the year-round commitment to school and to athletics left Goyer little opportunity to travel abroad or to partake in community service. Recognizing that there must be other student-athletes with similar sentiments, Goyer came up with a bold plan, creating the Coach for College program.

We briefly discussed the impetus for the program in our post yesterday. Today, to give interested readers the chance to get an in-depth look at the concept as well as Goyer’s future plans to expand Coach for College to other schools and regions of the world, we present a Q & A with the program founder.

Can you give some concrete examples of the lessons you sought to teach youngsters in Vietnam that you believe helped them develop some of the academic, life and other skills needed to successfully attend a college or university?

In addition to providing youngsters with fitness and sports-specific instruction and infrastructure, coaches taught youth through five academic modules that focused on the application of sport to academic subjects. These modules were entitled Sports and Health (Biology of Sport), Sports and Science (Physics of Sport), Sports and English, Sports and Leadership, and Sports and Education (Psychology of Sport).

First, the program helped equip youth with some of the intangible skills from sports which are translatable into other domains. The overarching idea is that skills like perseverance, determination, setting and achieving goals, and overcoming setbacks, all of which can be learned through sports, are the keys to success in education as well.

The second way the program sought to prepare youth for college was by providing them information about college, both in America and Vietnam, from the “experts” (current college students in the two countries). This information was provided through a 30 minute class on Higher Education at the end of every daily camp session, reinforcing the main goal of the program.

For youth in Vietnam to go to college, they must pass the university entrance exam. In order to be in a position to pass the exam, they must do well in their subjects in school, particularly the ones they hope to study in college. Thus the third way the program sought to prepare the youth for college was by teaching traditional academic subjects with examples from sports. Studies in neuroscience have shown that getting people excited enhances learning, even if the excitement is not strictly related to the material being learned. Hence by connecting academics, which is not always enjoyed by youth, with something they view as fun, like sports, we felt that we would be able to get the kids excited when learning traditional academic subjects, excitement which could eventually turn into passion for the academic subjects themselves. Once they became engaged in learning these subjects, the kids would hopefully be more motivated to learn these subjects during the school year and get good grades in them. Furthermore, excitement for academic subjects often leads to an increased desire to stay in school.

The fourth way the program sought to prepare youth for university was by providing them with ample opportunities to interact with a variety of role models. In many ways, because they were from similar cultural, geographical, and socioeconomic backgrounds (69% grew up in low income, rural areas), had faced similar obstacles (such as lack of money to pay for college), and had achieved the educational goals the program aspires for the youth to attain, the Vietnamese college students were perfect role models for the youth in the program and were well positioned to maximally impact the youth in a positive direction. The Vietnamese high school students functioned as “next step role models” whom the youth can emulate on their path to higher education. The American student-athletes showed the youth how to translate lessons learned from sports into success in the classroom; they were able to draw from their own experience to show the youth how the same skills needed to go far in sports can be used to go far in education. For each of these role models, youth can learn from their example and apply it to their own lives.

What have been two of the most important individual lessons you have taken from the enormous challenges associated with creating the Coach for College Program?

First, that anything is possible. A lot of people were skeptical at first and thought that I was too young, that this was too big of an idea, and didn’t know if I could pull it off. I think I was able to succeed by setting concrete goals, identifying key supporters early on, and using their advice and support to make steady progress towards my goals, one step at a time.

Second, my experience in setting up the Coach for College program reinforced the value of sports in transmitting key life skills. I found myself drawing upon some of the same skills – persistence, work ethic, setting goals, overcoming setbacks, etc. — that I had used to make progress as a tennis player. At the NCAA National Student-Athlete Leadership Conference last May, I tried to convey to the student-athletes there that they all had similar skills, simply by virtue of their experience with competitive sports, and could utilize these to make a difference in their local and global communities.

Who do you think got more out of the program last summer – the students from America who were involved or the youngsters that you worked with?

Usually, in these types of civic engagement programs, people will say that the American students benefit the most. I really tried to devise the program in such a way that the youth and coaches (American student-athletes and Vietnamese high school and college students) would each derive significant benefits. Each group filled out surveys at the end of the program, and based on the information they provided, each group seemed to obtain the benefits that I had intended for them. Personally, my primary goal is to help the middle school youth, and I intended the benefits to the coaches to come as a natural by-product of their participation in the program.

We have read where you want to involve more American colleges and bring students to additional countries. What progress have you made thus far towards that goal and what is in the works for the future?

The goal is to utilize Duke and UNC student-athletes to continue the program at the Hoa An Secondary School year after year, so that Vietnamese students can participate in the program during their middle school years, become a coach in the program as a high school student, and receive support to continue onto college, where they can again participate as a coach in the program during the summers. Coach for College will also seek to raise money for scholarships that will allow program participants to attend high school and college. In the summer of 2009, a program will again be held at the Hoa An Secondary School. After the recommendations for improvement from those involved with this summer’s pilot program have been implemented, it is hoped that the next program can include more student-athletes from Duke and UNC and impact more youth from the Hoa An Community. Currently, the 2009 program is being financed by a $175,000 International Sports Programming Initiative Grant from the U.S. Department of State, along with $85,000 from Duke University ($75,000 from the Office of the Provost and $10,000 from the Athletic Department).

In the summer of 2009 programs may also be set up at other middle schools in Vietnam, involving student-athletes from other rival American universities, such as Virginia Tech and Virginia and Oklahoma and Texas. I have been talking to student-athletes at Virginia Tech and Oklahoma about developing programs with their student-athletes and student-athletes from a rival school (UVA for Virginia Tech and Texas or Oklahoma State for OU). I also gave two 20 minute presentations to 400+ student-athletes and administrators from universities across the country at the NCAA National Student-Athlete Leadership Development Conference in May of 2008. At this same conference I had a table set up at the career expo, and 100 student-athletes signed up to help bring the program to their schools. Things are farthest along with Virginia Tech. My liaison there has already met with several key administrators and I already have a site picked out for the second program, in Vietnam’s Ben Tre province, which I visited last March during an advance planning trip for the program.

For long term plans, as additional sites are included, the program will provide “gap year internships” to recently graduated college student-athletes who participated in the program. They will serve as U.S. based site coordinators who will help with the administration of the program. As additional sites are included, the program will also allow the summer program’s host country coaches and participants who have graduated from college to help with the administration of the program as in-country site coordinators.

The sports targeted in this program are standard and follow universal rules. They can also be played, enjoyed, and understood by a wide variety of people, regardless of their native language or cultural background. Therefore modules designed applying sport to subjects such as science, language, and leadership can easily, after being refined and efficacy assessed, become a standard curriculum for the Coach for College program. This will hopefully allow for replication throughout the Phung Hiep District, the Hau Giang Province, and eventually throughout all of Vietnam. If the program proves to be successful in Vietnam, it may also be useful in other countries, with necessary adjustments for culture.

The efficacy of the program in achieving the desired objectives will be assessed over time utilizing research methodology developed in conjunction with professors at Can Tho University. The results of the research will be used to improve and refine the program so that it has maximum benefit for everyone involved but particularly for the middle school students it is designed to aid.

Based on the success of the pilot program, Coach for College would like to partner with professional athletes, sports related companies such as Nike, and the local government of the Phung Hiep District in providing a sports court (with a set/standardized design and cost) for all lower secondary schools in the District by matching 50% of the funds to build sports courts at each of the District’s other 13 schools. The building of the sports courts would coincide with the standardization of the schools by the government. Under this plan, an all sports court would be built for a school at the same time the government moves to bring the school’s infrastructure up to the standard level (since the same materials used to make improvements to the school’s infrastructure could also be used to build the sports court). The proposed court construction program would be for the Phung Hiep District only as a pilot, with potential expansion to the Mo Cay District, then others through the provincial level (beginning with the Hau Giang province in particular) based on the success of the program. In addition, utilizing professional athletes to provide funding for the material costs of one or more sports courts can help raise the profile of the program, provide resources for the construction of further courts, and create a list of sponsors who will feel personally connected to the Coach for College program and the partner middle schools it serves.

The all-sports court built next to partner middle schools in combination with the summer camps can be used to facilitate the development of sports leagues during the academic year, consisting initially of teams of students from the same school and eventually of teams from different schools which compete against each other in a commune, district, or province wide sports league. The sports leagues can be designed in conjunction with international and United States sports experts. If these sports leagues are successful, they may be eventually transferred to the university and college level, as in the United States. There is great potential for this as sports leagues of any kind outside of state-sponsored professional teams do not exist in Vietnam. There is also considerable room for entrepreneurial development of junior and community sports leagues in both rural and urban areas, facilitated by the American and especially the Vietnamese summer camp coaches.

In the coming years, other universities will be asked to become a part of the Coach for College Network, spearheaded by Duke University with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, by inviting them to send student-athletes to participate in the Coach for College program. Universities which are athletic rivals will be invited to sponsor Coach for College programs at new sites, utilizing the existing conference structure present in intercollegiate athletics. Conferences can sponsor programs in particular regions of the globe, with partner rival universities working at the district or provincial level.

In the future, Coach for College will seek to raise money to pay the high school ($225 per year per student) and college ($1218 per year per student) fees for youth who have participated in the summer camps, who excel academically, and who exhibit the sportsmanlike qualities of cooperation and leadership skills and motivation to stay in school.

Eventually Coach for College will be linked to Peacework’s Village Network to integrate the program into a larger community development context. Peacework most often begins its initiatives in rural villages via assistance to schools in the form of infrastructure improvements and educational enhancement. Peacework then matches these communities with universities who engage in a variety of disciplines such as agriculture, engineering, social work, education, medicine, and business to systematically meet that community’s comprehensive development needs. This cooperation would lead to a rollout of the Coach for College program in Peacework partner communities around the world. In turn, should Coach for College begin in a new site outside of Peacework’s network of partner communities, Coach for College and its beneficiary schools could feasibly become an entry point for larger community development via the Peacework Village Network.

If you were to select one person (family member, teacher, coach, professor) as your primary role model in life thus far who would you select and why?

I’ve always been very much an individual and have sought, for the most part, to do things differently from others, as a means of trying to create my own unique impact. A quote I’ve always liked is “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson). Thus I wouldn’t say I’ve ever really had a role model but there are definitely people I admire — Wendy Kopp, the founder and CEO of Teach for America, Paul Farmer, who founded Partners in Health while a student at Harvard Medical School, “Greg Mortenson, who builds schools in remote parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan (described in the book Three Cups of Tea). I try to pick and choose from the experiences of different people like that to guide my own thinking. That said, I’ve been blessed to have had dedicated mentors throughout my life — my AP U.S. History Teacher and AP Latin teacher in high school, several professors in college, particularly within the fields of neuroscience and education, and most recently, several administrators who have been involved in helping me launch the Coach for College program, such as the provost at Duke and former Chancellor of UNC-Chapel Hill. The importance of such mentor figures in my own life influenced me to make mentor-ship a key feature of the Coach for College program.

Next up, Parker Goyer earns a Rhodes Scholarship.

When asked about her involvement in Division I athletics at a high-profile school, Parker Goyer could point to many key lessons from the world of sports: persistence, work ethic, setting goals, and overcoming setbacks. She also could point to the year-round commitment necessary to compete at such a high level and the subsequent time constraints that participation had on her ability to utilize these important skills while being of service to others.

For Goyer the latter was a big issue. Inspired by the likes of Wendy Kopp, the founder and CEO of Teach for America and Greg Mortenson, a one-time mountain climber who has dedicated his life to building schools in remote parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan, Goyer chafed at the lack of opportunities student-athletes had to be of service to others.

Recognizing that there must be other collegians with similar sentiments, Goyer came up with a bold plan, one that would allow student-athletes to utilize their skills and talents to help serve young people in countries less-developed than her own.

Coach for College
Now in her first year at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the 2007 graduate of Duke University conceived of the “Coach for College” program while visiting Vietnam and Belize the summer following her graduation. While visiting those countries, Goyer saw first hand an underdeveloped educational system and countless young people who simply did not have a cadre of role models to help lead them.

The former Duke tennis player saw an opportunity, a true win-win in the proverbial sense. If she could create a program that would allow American student athletes to put their athletic lessons to work in real life settings, the youngsters in some of the world’s poorer countries would not only have access to some key role models, those youngsters would have the chance to learn some valuable skills as well.

“A major guiding principle of the Coach for College program is that student-athletes have great traits they develop through sports,” explains Goyer. “But they don’t always apply these traits which they perfect on the playing field in other settings.”

“I wanted American student-athletes to realize that, by virtue of being highly-skilled sports players in some of the best higher education institutions in the world, they have tremendous power to make a difference.”

Program Launched in Summer of 2008
With a goal of utilizing sports to teach key life lessons, Goyer envisioned a group of college athletes giving up some of their summer time to help the youngsters in underdeveloped countries learn “critical thinking skills” and promote “excitement about academics.” Putting her organizational, goal-setting and perseverance skills to the test, Goyer secured more than $480,000 to fund the first two years of her concept.

The monies came from two Atlantic Coast Conference rival colleges, Duke and the University of North Carolina, as well as the National Collegiate Athletics Association, the U.S. State Department, and a number of other individual and corporate donors. While the need for funds was significant, the worthiness of the concept clearly resonated with Duke University leadership.

“One of my priorities as provost has been to increase the ability of undergraduates to apply the knowledge they have gained through classes in becoming deeply engaged in their local and global communities,” acknowledged Duke Provost Peter Lange to the staff at Duke Today. “Student-athletes are often unable to benefit from these opportunities the university offers due to their training schedules.”

He also noted that Goyer’s program, Coach for College, “gives student-athletes the chance to become civically engaged via the shared cultural passion of sports in ways compatible with their athletic commitments.”

With funding secured, this past summer student-athletes from both Duke and UNC made their way to rural Vietnam for the first ever “Coach for College” sessions. Student-athletes from Duke included football, lacrosse, soccer, tennis, and track and field competitors while the contingent from UNC consisted of golfers, gymnasts, rowers, runners, wrestlers, tennis and volleyball players. In addition, bilingual students from Can Tho University also led the training that involved the games of badminton, basketball, soccer, tennis, and volleyball.

A key component of the program included the building of a five-in-one sports court, with lines for the sports to be taught in the program. Constructed on the grounds of the middle school, local workers built it using money from the funds Goyer had raised. The permanent construction meant that the Vietnamese children could continue, during their school year, to play the sports they had been introduced to by the Coach for College program that summer.

Working alongside their Vietnamese counterparts, the American student-athletes conducted two three-week units featuring a number of sports clinics and classroom lessons to 200 children ages 11-15. The group also managed to blend in Vietnamese high school students who benefited from the program but in turn served as next step role models for the younger children.

The basic lessons taught within the sports clinics were reinforced by academic offerings that featured the application of sports to Health/Biology, Physics, English, Leadership, and Education/Psychology. The program, free to interested children, provided a wealth of prizes/gifts based upon outcomes in team-based sports and academic competitions as well as each student’s completion of the various academic modules.

The Translatable Goals of Athletics
Wise beyond her years, Goyer created a program that offered lessons for both groups, the American students who accompanied her and the youngsters in Vietnam that participated in the clinics. Both groups saw first hand that teamwork, sacrifice, hard work, and determination often form the basis for success in many other settings.

“The overarching idea is that skills like perseverance, determination, setting and achieving goals, and overcoming setbacks, all of which can be learned through sports, are the keys to success in education as well,” notes Goyer. But as for the lessons for her fellow athletes, the Coach for College founder was unequivocal as to what came first for her.

“Personally, my primary goal is to help the middle school youth, and I intended the benefits to the coaches, both the American student-athletes and Vietnamese college students, to come as a natural by-product of their participation in the program.”

Still, Goyer attempted to work on the highest plane imaginable. More than simply providing Vietnamese youngsters with a cadre of role models, Goyer sought to inspire these 11-15-year-olds to consider higher education. To further that notion, the Coach for College concluded every daily camp session with a 30 minute class on the topic.

A Bright Future
Perhaps even more importantly, the goal-setting Duke graduate has established other possible plateaus for her concept. Her vision is to see the program “partner with professional athletes” as well as “sports-related companies such as Nike.”

In addition, Goyer is set to invite other “universities which are athletic rivals to sponsor Coach for College programs at new sites.” The plan includes “utilizing the existing conference structure present in intercollegiate athletics” with the idea that each conference could perhaps sponsor a program in one particular region of the globe.

Once upon a time, Division I student-athletes may have had little to no chance to travel abroad or engage in meaningful service to others. But thanks to one young woman with a vision and a thorough understanding of the lessons that athletics can offer, student-athletes with a service mind set now have a concrete model to follow.

Next up, an in-depth interview with Parker Goyer.

Over the past few months we have taken a look at some of the more popular school choice options, in particular the career academy and charter school concepts. Today we take a look at yet another worthy option, that of single-sex schools.

The concept of single-sex public education has been receiving enormous interest in recent years. As but one example, recent concerns about college student completion rates in Boston has folks in that city calling for the development of single-sex choice options for students.

While there is a general sentiment that single-sex education has been of benefit to young ladies, there tends to be an assumption that the impact is not as positive for young men. Single-sex school experts disagree, insisting that “the gender-separate format can boost grades and test scores for both girls and boys.”

Data from the UK, particularly the work of researchers at Cambridge University regarding Morley High School in Leeds and the work of Graham Able of Dulwich College, is consistent with the notion that the format can work well for both boys and girls.

The “Boy Crisis”
At the heart of the single-sex school matter is the current performance of young men in the school setting. The Boys Project, designed to help young males develop their capabilities and reach their full potential reveals some very troubling data (PDF) emerging regarding young men.

• Young men’s literacy rates are declining, rendering them more likely to get D’s and F’s and less likely to be valedictorians or on the honor roll.
• Young men’s overall lack of academic success in school means they are more likely to be suspended or expelled.
• The combination of these events means that young men are also disengaging in greater numbers making them more likely to drop out of school.
• As for those who make it through the K-12 system, the number of young men attending college has stagnated while the number of young women attending college has soared since the 1970s.

As a collective group, these facts serve as the basis for what many experts are calling the “boy crisis.” Hoping to accomplish what the Girls Project has done for young women, the Boys Project seeks to increase the academic skills of young men so as to be successful in college. As part of the message, the Boys Project site features a great deal of information related to single-sex schooling.

Single-Sex Education
Research has determined, perhaps not all that surprisingly, that there are clear gender differences in how girls and boys learn. But such a statement tends to be immediately modified into yet another assertion, “all girls learn one way and all boys learn another way.”

Advocates of single-sex education insist that nothing could be further from the truth. Proponents of single-sex education acknowledge that there is great diversity among girls and among boys. One resource site, SingleSexSchools.org notes, “Some boys would rather read a book than play football” and “that some girls would rather play football than play with Barbies.”

In fact, in simplest terms, these basic stereotypes are often pervasive in coeducational school settings and therefore form the basis for why mixed settings may not work well for all youngsters. As but one example, in most coed public high schools a boy can be either a “geek” or a “jock,” but seldom both, while even fewer descriptors seem available for a young man who does not fit one category or the other.

However, proponents of single-sex classrooms and schools acknowledge that improvement will not happen by segregating students alone. One cannot simply put girls in one room and boys in another and expect that greater academic success will automatically be forthcoming. Instead, single-sex schools demand extensive teacher preparation to ensure that the format works in a positive manner.

Teaching in a Single-Sex School
Dr. Leonard Sax has authored two well-known texts on the subject of single-sex schooling. His first, Why Gender Matters, is considered a basic primer on the topic, while his second, Boys Adrift, offers his key summary of the current status, Five Factors Driving the Decline of Boys.

The doctor insists that educators must understand some very basic facts. First, the “brains of girls and boys develop along different trajectories.” Sax notes that some differences are genetic and therefore present at birth but many other differences are shaped during the childhood years.

But the doctor insists we must forget our gender stereotypes, those that have us thinking that “boys are competitive” but “girls are collaborative.” Instead research demonstrates that the differences in brain development in each sex leads to certain tendencies. For girls, the language area of the brain develops before the areas of the brain used for spatial relations. On the other hand, for boys it tends to be just the opposite.

If school curricula are not designed so as to address these fundamental differences, then Sax insists that such classrooms will produce boys who cannot write well and girls who believe they are “dumb at math.”

Yet another major difference comes from how the brain is wired. For girls, the same area of the brain that processes language is utilized to process emotion. The result according to Sax is that it is “easy for most girls to talk about their emotions.”

For boys, different brain regions are involved; the areas of the brain used for talking are separated from the regions involved in feeling. Sax notes the toughest question for boys to answer is: “Tell me how you feel.”

Perhaps the most striking difference is the effect of stress on boys and girls. Here the stereotype tends to fit as Sax notes that “stress enhances learning in males” but it “impairs learning in females.”

Sax makes no bones about today’s current school setting and the inherent problems that have been created. He writes:

“Since the mid-1970’s, educators have made a virtue of ignoring gender differences. The assumption was that by teaching girls and boys the same subjects in the same way at the same age, gender gaps in achievement would be eradicated.

“That approach has failed. Gender gaps in some areas have widened in the past three decades. The proportion of girls studying subjects such as physics and computer science has dropped in half. Boys are less likely to study subjects such as foreign languages, history, and music than they were three decades ago. The ironic result of three decades of gender blindness has been an intensifying of gender stereotypes.”

Question of Legality
Single-sex schools and single-sex classes were in theory legalized under the provisions in the No Child Left Behind Act. Under those provisions, single-sex schools or single-sex classrooms in particular subjects can be offered as long as there are clear counterparts that include offerings for each sex as well as a coeducational choice.

However, there are some who insist that move is unconstitutional. Cornell University Law Professor Gary Simson has authored a piece asking just such a question.

And just two weeks ago, lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union challenged single-sex classes at Hankins Middle School in Theodore, Alabama. The ACLU insists that such classes violate federal laws banning gender discrimination in the public schools.

Worthy of Consideration in a Broad Context
In addition to the question of legality, there are a number of critics of the concept. Some appear to be a bit dated but there are questions being raised in many circlesThe Trouble With Single-Sex Schools - The Atlantic (April 1998), California Study: Single-Sex Schools No Cure-All, and Single-sex schools: A good idea gone wrong?.

However, we noted earlier that folks in Boston have begun discussing the notion of single-sex schools. In a Globe editorial, Give Single-Sex Schools a Try, the Boston Globe revealed for us one of the simplest of truths.

“Boston’s high dropout rate and its racial, gender, and ethnic achievement gaps are strong arguments for different education approaches that have shown promise elsewhere.”

While Massachusetts presently has laws on the books preventing such an option, the Globe goes on to state that the Legislature should repeal those laws. In doing so the Globe editorial staff recognizes the key fundamental, such schools should be available to children if those schools could help certain students learn better.

Like charter schools and career academies, single-sex schools or single-sex classes represent educational options for students. No one concept is a panacea or silver bullet for our educational ills.

But in a day and age when all data points to the fact students would do better with basic forms of school choice, single-sex options represent one more potential path for educational officials to consider.

Flickr photo courtesy of Danbri.

The Digital Youth Project has released the results of an extensive study that offers a very thorough and revealing look at what our youngsters are doing online. Featuring four principal investigators, Peter Lyman, Mizuko (Mimi) Ito, Michael Carter, and Barrie Thorne, the study not only creates some useful category descriptors that will help any adult analyze online behaviors, it takes an in-depth look at the implications these behaviors have for parents as well as those who work in education.

First dividing online behavior into two basic arenas, “peer-driven” and “interest-driven,” the researchers go on to create three sub categories that help define specific behaviors. They range from “hanging out” (socializing) to “messing around” (tinkering, perhaps to the level of becoming a local technology or media expert) to “geeking out” (experiencing internet-inspired inquisitiveness).

Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing offers a superb snapshot of the key findings. The report “conclusions are sane, compassionate, and compelling,” notes Doctorow, “in a nutshell, the ‘serious’ stuff we all hope kids will do online (researching papers and so on) are only possible within a framework of ‘hanging out, messing around and geeking out’.”

He also goes on to summarize the most important point for parents and educators when it comes to the issue of time online. “That is to say, all the ‘time-wasting’ social stuff kids do online are key to their explorations and education online.”

For teachers, the section on geeking out is a must read though we wish that the Youth Project might have selected a different phrase to describe teen online behaviors related to learning. There is absolutely no similarity to the use of the term in the Youth Project report matching the traditional definition that is used in the urban setting.

Some Great Stories
Within the report there are many stories that parents and educators will want to hear. There is the tale of Zelan, a 16-year-old youth driven by economic necessity, tinkering and fixing a neighbor’s broken PlayStation 2 so as to have better access to games. Then there is the story of Mac Man, a 17-year-old boy, who after learning that some teachers were about to throw away their old computers took them off their hands. Mac Man not only fixed them, he started a computer club with the throwaway items.

And though we might cringe if it happened to be our child, we can at least chuckle at the story of Toni, a 25-year-old who emigrated from the Dominican Republic as a teen. Even though he was entirely dependent on libraries and schools for his computer access through high school, the young man “set up a small business selling Playboy pictures that he printed from library computers to his classmates.”

While such entrepreneurial tales represent a very small segment of the youth studied, they nonetheless articulate the concrete examples of the step from simply “hanging out” online to that of “messing around.” What makes these stories all the more compelling is the fact that most transcend socioeconomic barriers.

The report notes, “These are not privileged youth who are growing up in the Silicon Valley households of start-up capitalists. Instead, they are working-class kids who embody the street smarts of how to hustle for money” and were “able to translate their interest in tinkering and messing around into financial ventures that gave them a taste of what it might be like to pursue their own self-directed careers.”

Geeking Out
As we noted earlier, educators would do well to spend some time with the section on “geeking out.” The report describes the behavior as “the ability to engage with media and technology in an intense, autonomous, and interest-driven way.”

The concept is extremely important to kids that have access to the latest technology and a high-speed Internet conenction. In essence, the Internet can provide “access to an immense amount of information related to the particular interests” of a youngster. The intense commitment to or engagement with media or technology demands participation in “communities that traffic in these forms of expertise.” The report notes a “mode of learning that is peer-driven, but focused on gaining deep knowledge and expertise in specific areas of interest.”

Therefore, for our youth to geek out, they must not only have ongoing access to digital media, they must have a form of social network to help them facilitate their technology use. That network can come from family and friends but it can also come from other peers in on- and offline networking spaces. Therefore, geeking out “requires the time, space, and resources to experiment and follow interests in a self-directed way.”

In addition, the report notes that such behavior requires “access to specialized communities of expertise. Contrary to popular images of the socially isolated geek, almost all geeking out practices we observed are highly social and engaged, although not necessarily expressed as friendship-driven social practices.”

Impact on Education
It is interesting to note the specific learning properties that come as a result of interest-based communities. For the folks at Digital Youth, “Participation in the digital age means more than being able to access ‘serious’ online information and culture; it also means the ability to participate in social and recreational activities online.”

As a means to that end, public institutions can be important sites for enabling participation in these activities and enhancing their scope. Accordingly, educators should take careful note of the report suggestions.

“Social and recreational online activities are jumping-off points for experimenting with digital media creation and self-expression. Rather than seeing socializing and play as hostile to learning, educational programs could be positioned to step in and support moments when youth are motivated to move from friendship-driven to more interest-driven forms of new media use. This requires a cultural shift and a certain openness to experimentation and social exploration that is generally not characteristic of educational institutions.”

As but another aspect of the entire process, “fluent and expert use of new media requires more than simple, task-specific access to technology.” Therefore, the open-ended nature of the practice of geeking out, though extremely challenging for schools to implement, more accurately reflects the real world where it is extremely difficult to quantify and parcel up learning into distinct packages.

Another critical component is the feedback loop and how it changes from the traditional school format.

“Unlike what young people experience in school, where they are graded by a teacher in a position of authority, feedback in interest-driven groups is from peers and audiences who have a personal interest in their work and opinions. Among fellow creators and community members, the context is one of peer-based reciprocity, where participants can gain status and reputation but do not hold evaluative authority over one another.”

In these settings our youth are engaging in the use of specialized ‘elite’ vocabularies from either the gaming or social networking world. For example, in the online profile arena there is an “important literacy skill on both the friendship- and interest-driven sides” that can ultimately mobilize a genre of “popularity and coolness” as well as a certain level of geek credibility

In the gaming world where both teens and adults can establish their identity, there is the category defined by elite gamer status. In each of these arenas, “the focus of learning and engagement is not defined by institutional accountabilities but rather emerges from kids’ interests and everyday social communication.”

Adults could “still have an important role to play” but in such a setting “it is not a conventionally authoritative one. Unlike instructors in formal educational settings, however, these adults are passionate hobbyists and creators, and youth see them as experienced peers, not as people who have authority over them.”

In Summary
The report notes the similarities between community norms and what educators might call “learning goals” but it clearly denotes a new position for the adult who serves as an educator. Simply stated, schools are not known for allowing “plenty of unstructured time for kids to tinker and explore without being dominated by direct instruction.”

Instead of classroom teachers, there would be lab teachers or leaders who would have a different responsibility, one that does not focus on assessing kids’ for competence. Instead, these adults would be “co-conspirators” practicing a “pedagogy of collegiality.”

The report takes the thought one step further to produce a whole new possible vision for public education, one that is full of incredible possibilities.

“Rather than thinking of public education as a burden that schools must shoulder on their own, what would it mean to think of public education as a responsibility of a more distributed network of people and institutions? And rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, what would it mean to think of education as a process of guiding kids’ participation in public life more generally, a public life that includes social, recreational, and civic engagement?”

“And finally, what would it mean to enlist help in this endeavor from an engaged and diverse set of publics that are broader than what we traditionally think of as educational and civic institutions? In addition to publics that are dominated by adult interests, these publics should include those that are relevant and accessible to kids now, where they can find role models, recognition, friends, and collaborators who are co-participants in the journey of growing up in a digital age.”

Flickr photos courtesy of Eskimoblood, jsc, and Eduardo Hulshof.

Poor college completion rates - suggested solutions even worse.

The results of a first-of-its-kind study recently graced the front pages of the Boston Globe. In Hub Grads Come Up Short in College, James Vaznis revealed an all too similar refrain regarding college completion rates.

Of the members of the graduating class from Boston high schools for the year 2000 who had gone on to higher education, nearly two-thirds of the class had not earned a college diploma seven years after they had begun collegiate studies.

The findings were particularly troublesome for a city that has touted its steadily increasing college enrollment rates over the last few years. In simplest terms, Boston does see more high school graduates enrolled in college than does the nation as a whole, but the college completion rate for those students is actually lower than the national average.

City of Prestigious Institutions
The news hit the city, often dubbed the ‘”Center of American Higher Education,” extremely hard. The Globe editorial staff penned a companion piece the same day entitled, Getting in Isn’t Enough.

Stating it was time “to take a long and deep look into the gulf between ‘getting in’ and ‘getting through college’,” the editorial revealed some incredibly dismal numbers.

Consider:

• students attending two-year community colleges had a 12 percent graduation rate.
• students attending four-year public state colleges had approximately a 33 percent graduation rate.
• students at four-year, private colleges managed the best rate at 56 percent.

Another revealing statistic, not evident in the editorial but on display in Vaznis’ article, referred to the completion status calculation more fully. It seems that not all of the 675 students who were deemed to have graduated had actually earned a bachelor’s degree. Also included in the completion rate were students who had earned either a certificate or an associate’s degree.

Thomas M. Menino, the Mayor of Boston, responded by announcing a major initiative. It set forth a goal of increasing the college graduation rate by 50 percent for this year’s high school seniors. In addition, the Mayor went on to suggest a goal of doubling the rate a second time for those students who are currently high school sophomores.

“We want to make sure all our kids in Boston get a good education and graduate from college,” Menino is quoted by the Globe. “It’s not just about getting into college but how to stay in college.”

As but another step that has been uttered time and again across America in recent years, officials indicated it was time the city school system did a better job of preparing its high school students for success after graduation. That was followed by the traditional hue and cry to raise K-12 education standards.

And last but not least, the traditional basis for pushing all students towards earning a bachelor’s degree was postured once again.

“A graduate of a four-year college will make almost $1 million more than a high school graduate over a lifetime,” Neil Sullivan, executive director of the Boston Private Industry Council, told the Globe. “We need to help students every step of the way earn the prize: a college degree.”

The Wrong Focus
The state of public education has focused on the K-12 system in recent years. During that time frame, higher education has earned a free pass. In fact, the general consensus from most folks is that America’s colleges and universities represent the best of the educational system in our country.

However, Mark Schneider, the vice president for new educational initiatives at the American Institutes for Research, offers a very contrasting viewpoint. In The Costs of Failure Factories in American Higher Education, Schneider asks, “If there is virtually universal agreement that American high schools are failing, how do our colleges and universities measure up against such a low benchmark?”

Turns out not very well.

It can be difficult comparing data but Schneider does his best to compare apples to apples. However, he does note one specific advantage for higher education: colleges generally use a six year window as the norm for completing the four years of study while high school calculations are based on a four year timeframe.

“The median high school graduation rate, for example, is 77 percent,” writes Schneider, “but the median post-secondary graduation rate is more than twenty-five points lower. While American high schools graduate about three-fourths of their students in four years, American colleges graduate only about half of their students in six.”

Schneider indicates that there are also significant differences by type of institution. But the key notion is a simple one: “The low high school graduation rates that have long been decried as a failure of America’s education system are mirrored in even lower college graduation rates.”

In addition, the long-standing differences in high school graduation rates based on race and ethnicity have led to expressions such as “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” But while public education K-12 is often labeled in such a manner, it must be duly noted that colleges and universities also see large gaps in post-secondary completion rates when comparing whites to blacks and Hispanics.

College Does Not Work for Many Students
One positive is that the poor completion rates are finally catching people’s attention. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently launched a new initiative that seeks to sort through the poor completion rates of college bound students, particularly those who have chosen the community college route.

In the Globe article, there is at least some acknowledgment of the “enormous barriers facing urban high school graduates.” Vaznis points out that many of the individuals being discussed within the study are the very first members of their respective families to actually attend college.

The writer notes further that the study did not specifically address reasons for the low graduation rates. But he speculates, quite soundly, that “these students often have financial problems, some are raising children, and others are held back by a need to retake high school courses in college because they lack basic skills.”

In regards to the issue of college preparedness, a short time ago we discussed the words of Marty Nemko, a man dubbed the “The Ralph Nader of Education.” At that time we offered what Nemko calls his ‘killer statistic.’

“For those aspiring college students who finished in the bottom 40 percent of their high school classes, but went on to attempt to secure a four-year degree right out of high school, roughly two-thirds had studied for the better part of eight and a half years without obtaining a diploma.”

In simplest terms, those students who lack the ability to handle the rigor associated with college are unsuccessful when they give college a try.

Nemko adds that “only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science.”

Yet four-year colleges admit and accept funds “from hundreds of thousands of such students each year.” However, according to the data we have just reviewed, those same schools fail to see these students through the process of completing their degree program.

Nemko pulls no punches with his summary assessments.

“Colleges and universities are businesses, and students are a cost item, while research is a profit center.

“As a result, many institutions tend to educate students in the cheapest way possible: large lecture classes, with necessary small classes staffed by rock-bottom-cost graduate students. At many colleges, only a small percentage of the typical student’s classroom hours will have been spent with fewer than 30 students taught by a professor.”

And as for the quality of instruction, well:

“The more prestigious the institution, the more likely that faculty members are hired and promoted much more for their research than for their teaching. Professors who bring in big research dollars are almost always rewarded more highly than a fine teacher who doesn’t bring in the research bucks.”

Square Pegs, Round Holes
Ultimately we have the worst of all potential situations: students who do not have the academic ability to handle the level of rigor that college must demand combined with ill-equipped institutions of higher education that seem incapable of helping these students succeed.

That issue is then exacerbated by education officials who continue to insist that all we must do is simply raise standards further and that by doing so, somehow the square peg, round hole malady facing us will disappear.

Unfortunately, those same officials also insist that the only path to success in life is by way of a college education. It is the same nonsense that brought forth the No Child Left Behind Act and the oxymoron, proficiency for all.

The notion that college is for everyone really just pushes NCLB to the K-16 arena. It is the fundamental belief that every child regardless of innate ability must be placed on a ‘bachelor’s degree or bust’ path, followed by the assumption that every student is capable of such academic rigor.

This is a false and damaging assumption. A bachelor’s degree for every student is no more viable than setting forth a goal of a masters or a PhD for every student. Yet, would we ever in our right minds suggest that such a standard is possible?

It is time that those in charge came to their senses and acknowledged that other approaches to learning are possible. It is time to recognize that hands on vocational schooling and working apprenticeships can be just as viable for helping students learn as the traditional academic teaching tools of reading and writing.

If only our educational experts could grasp that our country needs skilled workers as well as college graduates they might embark on a different path, one that creates multiple educational opportunities for our youngsters based on a goal of helping all students succeed.

What we do not need is more high school or college drop outs. But instead of examining the real issue, a one size fits all approach to education, we opt to tinker with standards and expectations, then set goals that are beyond the reach of many students.

Unless we take a look at providing forms of education that utilize methods of instruction that do not rely on teaching through reading and writing, then Mayor Menino’s goals, however worthy, will simply result in a familiar refrain.

And another summary study with an all-too similar title, Grads Come Up Short in College.

Flickr photos courtesy of Cliff1066 and Benjamin Lyons.

It has been awhile since we offered one of our mini-tours of web-based reading material of note. But in recent weeks there has been no shortage of intriguing materials available to readers.

Ending Adolescence
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the founder of the Center for Health Transformation has penned a piece for Business Week, Let’s End Adolescence. The subheading tells you the key highlights, “Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says young people need to shift more quickly from childhood to adulthood.” The article is extremely timely as it matched the recent announcement out of New Hampshire that the state was considering a bold new plan to allow students to graduate from high school after the tenth grade.

In commenting on the bold New Hampshire plan, Marc Tucker, the co-chair of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Worker and president of the National Center for Education and the Economy in Washington, added a significant piece to the Gingrich discussion. Tucker spoke very highly of the NH plan, suggesting that high school is nothing more than a mandatory pit stop for many American teenagers.

Deliberate Practice
Shortly after we wrote about the concept of deliberate practice, the online version of the Guardian newspaper, the guardian.co.uk offered an extract of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest work, Outliers: The Story Of Success. Set for publication later this month, the latest work from the author of ‘The Tipping Point’ and ‘Blink’ takes an extended look at some of the world’s most talented and successful people (the Beatles, Mozart, Rockefeller, Bill Gates).

Gladwell matches the growing sentiment that the success of these individuals is owed to something much more than what is often dubbed as pure genius. According to Gladwell, such success comes from the notion of ambition, deliberate practice, timing and circumstance.

The LA Times offers an interesting assessment of the book stating it “is about how culture and community are greater determinants of individual success than talent or even will” and that the book will hit the market “two weeks after a man who embodies the term has been elected president of the United States.”

YouTube in a Powerpoint Presentation
Over at Digital Inspiration, presenters will find some straightforward advice regarding the implementation of video into their Powerpoint presentation. Amit Agarwal explains how one can embed YouTube videos directly into PowerPoint and be able to play them even when there is no access to an internet connection. Agarwal explains how to save any YouTube video as an AVI file utilizing an application like Zamzar.com or MediaConverter.org.

Agarwal also offers a brief overview of the process of “preparing an elaborate presentation inside Google Docs,” one that includes several YouTube clips, then importing that presentation into PowerPoint. It is some very good material for teachers looking to incorporate YouTube materials into the classroom, especially when internet access is available but school filtering systems currently prevent internet access to YouTube.

A Professor Packs it In
Finally, over at the Chronicle of Higher Education is an interesting piece written by a college professor using the fictitious name John Smith. I’m Leaving is pure and simple, a blistering assessment on the current status of higher education from an insider’s view.

Smith begins with an assessment of his own graduate program. “I left disappointed and ambivalent about the process. I took some classes with engaged, brilliant and dedicated professors, but I also attended more than a few seminars with detached scholars who thought of students as distractions from their labs and research. They were famous, but they could not teach, even their own research.”

The professor doesn’t get any softer and later adds harsh assessments of both his teaching colleagues and students. Of professors, Smith states, “Far too many of my colleagues are dialing in – showing up late, popping in videos during class, assigning group projects, or sitting in a circle and asking students how they feel.”

As for the students, he writes, “Higher education for too many undergraduates at too many liberal arts colleges has become a puffy sofa nestled with down pillows.”

In summation, Smith insists it is time to move on to another line of work. It is a stark and damning portrayal. And a must read.

Over the past couple of weeks we have seen two extremely provocative articles regarding the social and intellectual divide that has gripped America in recent years. Both come as we await the inauguration of president-elect Barack Obama, the man who began his campaign back in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention with the momentous line, we are “one state, the United States of America.”

Taken together, the two pieces demonstrate the enormous challenges Obama faces. From them, we can clearly see that the process of uniting America will be a far greater challenge for the next president than fixing the economy.

Red Sex, Blue Sex
Over at the New Yorker, Margaret Talbot wrote a fascinating piece called Red Sex, Blue Sex - Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant? The article began with a look at how liberals and conservatives reacted to Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old unmarried, pregnant daughter.

The overall viewpoint regarding Bristol Palin varied significantly depending on which side of the political aisle you were on. Talbot notes, “Many liberals were shocked, not by the revelation but by the reaction to it. They expected the news to dismay the evangelical voters that John McCain was courting with his choice of Palin.”

Instead, members of the Republican party “seemed unfazed, or even buoyed, by the news.” According to Talbot, one Republican delegate from Louisiana told CBS News, “Like so many other American families who are in the same situation, I think it’s great that she instilled in her daughter the values to have the child and not to sneak off someplace and have an abortion.”

Talbot goes on to note the fundamental differences between the two parties when it comes to such matters. “Social liberals in the country’s ‘blue states’ tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teenagers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news.”

As for conservatives, the view is quite different. “Social conservatives in ‘red states’ generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teenager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.”

Talbot notes the work of others on this enormous chasm and offers a startling revelation. “Religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teenagers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents—seventy-four per cent—say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage.”

Yet, according to data, “evangelical teenagers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews.” At the same time, she reports “that evangelical Protestant teenagers are significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception.”

Talbot discusses the outcomes of abstinence-pledge movements and critical data that compares children who live with both biological parents with those who do not. She also details “The Education of Shelby Knox,” the story of a teenager from a Southern Baptist family in Lubbock, Texas who had taken an abstinence pledge and the work of two family-law scholars who are writing a book on ‘red families’ and ‘blue families’.

Red Intellect, Blue Intellect
The second article, from Chris Hedges, is entitled America the Illiterate. Interestingly, when his article appeared on the site Alternet, Hedges piece was entitled Forget Red vs. Blue — It’s the Educated vs. People Easily Fooled by Propaganda.

“We live in two Americas,’ stated Hedges. “One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth.

“The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture.”

Of the latter, Hedges is extremely pointed. The other America “cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and cliches.

“It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.”

Hedges cites the troubling literacy statistics that summarize our country: over 42 million American adults cannot read and another 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level.

Hedges summarizes, “Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate.”

The impact Hedges on our current political landscape is substantial. “The illiterate rarely vote,’ states Hedges, “and when they do vote they do so without the ability to make decisions based on textual information.”

Accordingly, our illiteracy means that “we prefer happy illusions.” The writer adds, “It works because so much of the American electorate, including those who should know better, blindly cast ballots for slogans, smiles, the cheerful family tableaux, narratives and the perceived sincerity and the attractiveness of candidates.

“We confuse how we feel with knowledge,” writes Hedges. And therefore, our “political leaders in our post-literate society no longer need to be competent, sincere or honest.”

Hedges adds some very revealing data from the Princeton Review. The agency has “analyzed the transcripts of the Gore-Bush debates, the Clinton-Bush-Perot debates of 1992, the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960 and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858.”

Not too surprisingly, the standard vocabulary of Gore-Bush and Clinton-Bush-Perot debates falls a couple of shelves short of the Kennedy-Nixon battles (early middle school versus early high school) and as many as five or six levels below that of Lincoln-Douglas (late high school, early college).

As part of the illiterate trend, Hedges points to another gradual change that is taking place across the country, “The change from a print-based to an image-based society.” He is not too kind to those who learn visually insisting they are being easily manipulated in today’s world.

Challenges for Obama
Though the president-elect has made it his pledge to bring our divided nation together, these two articles demonstrate the enormous prevailing divide that Obama will need to address.

Hedges is not kind to the president-elect. He first stipulates that Obama will be unable to halt the current devastating economic crisis facing America. That assertion pales next to his other, that the president-elect “used hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds to appeal to and manipulate” the nation’s “illiteracy and irrationalism to his advantage.”

This of course soundly contrasts with the viewpoint that Obama was the candidate of and for the intellectuals. Yet Hedges is correct in his assessment of a deeper rift, one that transcends the simplistic red state/blue state divide that tends to be the focus of political pundits.

During his campaign, Obama insisted he was the one candidate capable of uniting a disparate America. Our next president has set forth some other lofty goals, jump-starting the troubled economy, introducing universal health care, improving education and bringing tax relief to the middle class. As a means to those ends, the president-elect will likely need to bridge the significant social and intellectual divides that pervade our country today.

By virtue of being the first ever African-American to be elected to the highest office, Obama has placed himself firmly in the history books for ever. If he can somehow actually get us to function as ‘one state, the United States of America,’ Obama will leave a legacy that will rival that of the greatest to ever sit in the Oval Office.

Flickr photos courtesy of oceandesetoiles, H. Michael Karshis, atennies94, and js wright.

State to allow 10th graders to graduate and continue academics at the community or technical level.

Tough Choices or Tough Times, the 2006 report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Worker, set forth some very bold steps for improving American education. The plans set forth within the document earned enormous praise from a vast number of educational experts.

As but one example, Michael Kirst, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, offered this assessment:

“Tough Choices or Tough Times provides a bold and specific road map for transforming all levels of education—preschool through postsecondary education—to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing global economy. It calls for massive fundamental change in education structure, curriculum, teacher compensation, and assessment, as well as in the roles of virtually all our education institutions.”

Within the document, Step One of the vision asks America to think courageously.

“A number of other countries assume that their students are ready for college — really ready for college — when they are 16 years old. So let’s start out assuming that we can match or even exceed their performance if we are doing everything right.”

As a means to reaching that specific assertion, the report goes on to suggest the creation of a set of Board Examinations. In an attempt to match the expectations of other countries, the first Board Exam would be given at the end of 10th grade.

The exams would be designed to test students in a set of core subjects based upon a syllabus provided by the Board. The critical point of the exams will be to discern whether or not a student “has learned from the course what he or she was supposed to learn.”

Taking the exams would not be a do or die, pass/fail concept. The report states:

“Students could challenge these Board Exams as soon as they were ready, and they could keep challenging them all their lives, if necessary. No one would fail. If they did not succeed, they would just try again.”

The commission report insists that 95 percent of students will meet the new standard once it is implemented. Students who score well enough on the tenth grade exams would then be guaranteed the right to go to their community college where they could “begin a program leading to a two year technical degree or a two-year program designed to enable the student to transfer later into a four-year state college.”

New Hampshire on Board
A little more than two years after the report was released, New Hampshire has announced it will begin implementing all aspects of Step One of the Tough Choices document.

On October 30th, New Hampshire education officials revealed the state would begin the lengthy process, beginning with the preparation of a rigorous new set of exams that will be available to its high school sophomores. In keeping with the report’s suggestions, tenth graders who can demonstrate proficiency on those exams will be deemed prepared to attend either the state’s community college or technical college system.

The move essentially means that students will be eligible to test out of their last two years of high school should they desire to do so. State officials expect this ability to complete school earlier will provide built in incentives for students. Ultimately, the belief is that those incentives will lead to higher competency in the core school subject areas at much earlier ages.

Giving students a chance to finish their education sooner also has the state expecting a potential reduction in dropout rates. More importantly, much of the current funding used to educate 11th and 12th graders could be freed up for other educational options.

On the flip side, those students who wish to attend a four year college will continue for the traditional four year high school program. Upon finishing these final two years, students would take a different set of exams, tests deemed more difficult than those that will be given to the sophomores, to determine attendance at four year schools.

Reinventing High Schools
Marc Tucker, the co-chair of the commission and president of the National Center for Education and the Economy in Washington, offers a very harsh assessment of the current high school program.

Tucker stipulates that most American teenagers slide through high school, calling it a mandatory pit stop. However, it has become more of a place to simply hang out and socialize with peers.

Therefore, the new move is one that will aggressively address the longstanding concern that high school often serves as nothing more than a holding tank for a large number of adolescents.

In addition, since half of all students who do opt for college attend a community college, Tucker notes that it only makes sense to let those students start earlier. According to Tucker, allowing students to begin at an earlier age could create savings of as much as $60 billion a year nationally.

However, as one might expect, concerns have already emerged. One key issue being raised centers upon test scores of students who are but 16 years-of-age. There are concerns that this is too young to determine the future of a child.

Those questioning the process insist that students who attend a technical school will generally earn far less over their lifetime than those who go on to attend a four year college and earn a bachelors degree.

These same individuals insist that such a structure will exacerbate America’s educational disparity between the haves and the have nots.

As we celebrate our veterans on this, their special day, we offer readers this beautiful tribute from Terry Kelly.

The story:

“On November 11, 1999, Mr. Kelly was in a Shoppers Drug Mart store in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

“At 10:55 AM, an announcement came over the store’s PA asking customers who would still be on the premises at 11:00 AM to give two minutes of silence in respect to the veterans who have sacrificed so much for us.

“All customers, with the exception of a man who was accompanied by his young child, showed their respect.

“Terry’s anger towards the father for trying to engage the store’s clerk in conversation and for setting a bad example for his child was later channeled into a beautiful piece of work called, A Pittance of Time.”