Last June, the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana University released the findings of the 2009 High School Survey of Student Engagement.  The report appears here.  The lead concern is the high frequency of boredom for the 42,000 9th-12th-graders surveyed. 

-----66 percent of them claimed to be bored every single day in school

-----17 percent claimed to be bored in every single class

-----81 percent of the bored ones attributed their experience to "uninteresting material"

-----42 percent considered the material not relevant

The breakdown of workload echoed their disengagement.

-----50 percent of respondents spent 1 hour or less per week "Reading/studying for class"

-----39 percent spent 1 hour or less per week on written homework

-----54 percent spent 1 hour or less per week "Reading for self"

When asked about the importance of different activities

-----34 per...

Yesterday the NY Daily News reported an interesting and annoying item. Eight members of Congress from New York State and one high-ranking member of the Obama Administration are collecting sweet little pension paychecks from the State of New York every year. Before heading to DC, you see, they worked in New York state government, and they’re older than 55, and they now work outside the state’s pension system. Here’s a rundown of the payments, with party affiliation:

• Paul Tonko (D)--$64K
• Pete King (R)--$40K
• Maurice Hinchey (D)--$36K
• Jerrold Nadler (D)--$20K
• Eliot Engel (D)--$15K
• Jose Serrano (D)--$14K
• Nita Lowey (D)--$10K
• Louise Slaughter (D)--$9K
• John McHugh, Secretary of the Army -- $30K

Those dollars sit on top of the $174,000 base pay that Members of Congress pull in. It’s called double-dipping—retiring from one public position, taking pension payouts, and working in a...

Over the years, I’ve spent some time reviewing items on reading-comprehension tests, evaluating the passages selected as texts and checking the following eight or ten questions for accuracy, validity, etc. It can be a draining activity, scanning rather dry and often remote informational text, then spotting ambiguities or confusions in the questions that must be corrected.

One thing, I’ve found, lightens the load: a little knowledge about the passage material. Just a little bit helps a lot. Indeed, the difference between no knowledge and a little knowledge means much more than the difference between a little knowledge and abundant knowledge.

That’s my experience, and it corresponds with long-time arguments made by E. D. Hirsch and others about the importance of “domain knowledge” to reading comprehension. A recent essay in The American Prospect (magazine motto: “Liberal Intelligence”) a...

Editorial prose is rarely poetic or poignant, but today in the NY Times appears a pleasing exception that touches the world of Chronicle readers. The item ruminates briefly upon a rite of passage for parents and children, the trips to college campuses to drop off 19-year-olds for freshman year. Here are the final two paragraphs which risk a bit of sententiousness, but to me they come off well:

"For the next couple of weeks, a lot of Americans will be thinking about time, saying things like, 'I can’t believe you’re going off to college.' The time-thinkers will be the parents and relatives, not the kids, who can believe it and have in fact been ready for it for a good while.

"It will come as a surprise to them when they realize the separateness of their old life. Suddenly, they’ll see that one of the things they know—really know—is how childhood felt, how it felt to be anchored in that...

This weekend, C-SPAN had an hour with Phil Terzian, literary editor of the Weekly Standard and author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.  You can listen to it here, and enjoy in particular his reminiscence at the beginning of serving as speechwriter for Secretary of State Vance many years back.  He notes, too, that a monument to Eisenhower in DC is planned, and Frank Gehry will be the architect.  Terzian notes that Eisenhower would be uncomfortable with the project, for "he was a man of tremendous humility."

Here's another book that just came out, Generation iY: Our Last Chance to Save Their Future by Tim Elmore.  (I give the book an endorsement.) Among its many insights into the rising generation are the list of paradoxes Elmore lays out that identify some of the inscrutable aspects of the young (inscrutable, that is, to the elders).  They include ...

In the recent issue of Education Next, I have a reminiscence of months spent at the National Endowment for the Arts working on arts education policy matters. It lays out a basic point about how arts offerings are to survive in a time of tightened budgets, STEM shortages, and NCLB focus on math, reading, and science. 

Many advocates believe that the best way to maintain music, theater, visual arts, and dance in the school day is to align the arts with social benefits. When students take arts courses, they argue, they undergo behavioral changes that improve their prospects and make for a better society. The arts teach tolerance, they say, sensitivity to others and ambitions for the Good. They also reach those youngsters on the edge of disaster, the tough or depressed or victimized or delinquent ones who find high-school classes boring or hostile or restrictive. As NEA chairman Rocco...

"I don't know if I can write that well without a computer . . ."

That's what one of the students worries about in the documentary film Disconnected.  Her concern immediately explains why this documentary is a great exercise for students coming to college and charged with, among other things, examining the habits of their adolescence.

The documentary follows three students at Carleton College in Minnesota undergoing a drastic experiment.  For three weeks, they pledge to disconnect from all computers.  No laptop for school work and no laptop for social life.  You can imagine the difficulties that follow, and all kinds of unexpected problems pop up as well, such as the incredulous response they get from various campus personnel when they appear without the "digital crutch," for instance, when one of them in the library asks where the card catalog is.

It's whimsical, yes, but with a...

Here’s an important story in the New York Times about the academic benefits of digital tools, with the headline “Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality.” And here is a story in Science Daily with a similar theme under the title “College Undergrads Study Ineffectively on Computers, Study Finds: Students Transfer Bad Study Habits from Paper to Screen.”

Both pieces report the findings of studies indicating that, so far, laptops and other devices fall well short of the promises of digital learning. In the Science Daily story, researchers found that when students use computers, they don’t improve their study habits (and their academic performance). Instead, they transfer bad habits to the new tools. This is an important finding because it casts doubt on one of the central claims made for digitalizing schools and classrooms. People advocate it because they say that...

Several years ago at a summer conference in New England, an acquaintance sat down next to me at lunch and let slip an extraordinary fact. He was an assistant professor at a top school, and the department had turned him down for tenure. He was challenging the decision and piling up evidence in support, one of them being notes taken during the tenure meeting by a tenured colleague and turned over to him.

Another time, a distinguished professor came to my university and in his lecture on faculty-graduate student relations cited from a confidential letter of recommendation written by another professor and released (so far as we could tell) without his permission.

In 2005, in Vol. 13 of the journal Symploke, Joseph Urgo penned an essay under the title “Collegiality and Academic Community.” Part of it reflects upon Urgo’s time as English department chairman at a public university, with one...

In my first post on the episode at Hamilton College, I made a mistake in casting it as “Paquette and Urgo.” The pairing focused the issue on two people instead of on the specific facts of the case, or rather, on the interpretation of them.

The problem with highlighting names is that it encourages questions into background and history and politics of the ideological and campus kinds. With Paquette having a lengthy adversarial relationship with several Hamilton College professors and administrators, each moment of conflict implies a train of earlier moments sometimes complicating the merits of the immediate occasion, but also sometimes clarifying them. Indeed, I have received private correspondence from people more or less close to the case rightly asking for fuller “context” for the barring of Paquette from search committees.

That would be hard for me to provide sufficiently, so I have ...