TAIL TRACK. Barring signal troubles, links to any posts of substance ought to work.

AN UNCONVENTIONAL ECONOMICS MAJOR. Arnold Kling's suggestions at Econ Log. No industrial organization?

AS OLD AS HILLARY. David Letterman just cracked another pantsuit joke.

GETTING THE MISSION RIGHT. Another post that I started some time ago was a reaction to last September's State of the University address, which continued the theme I noted, favorably, in the 2006 address.

So much depends on our ability to establish and maintain a clear identity: student recruitment … alumni affiliation … corporate and private investment … the ability to attract top faculty … even the workplace value of an NIU degree. All of these imperatives depend on our ability to establish a clear institutional identity in the marketplace.

The Northern Star summary of the speech is still available online. The major focus of the speech, and of much behind the scenes work on campus this year, has been on strategic planning.

Task force efforts culminated in June 2007 with issuance of a report that identified four strategic imperatives to guide NIU’s planning efforts: 1) Preserve, strengthen and extend NIU’s teaching and learning environment; 2) Develop a strategy for investing in multidisciplinary scholarship and artistic clusters that complements NIU’s focus on individual scholarly and artistic achievement; 3) Strengthen and extend NIU’s global/regional impact; and 4) Make NIU an institution of ‘first choice’ for faculty, students and staff.

A weekend editorial in the DeKalb Daily Chronicle suggests challenges, as well as reasons for optimism, in that strategic plan.

Whereas last spring's commencement occurred less than a month after an event that served to divide the university from the community, this year's commencement took place as the university had begun to return the community's embrace.

Last May, four NIU students had been charged, one with murder and the others with aggravated battery, following events that led to the death of Luis Noriega outside a DeKalb bar. Many in the community generalized and lumped all students - NIU students in particular - into the category of the criminally undisciplined. Unfair to be sure, but prejudice is never fair. Fear and distrust crowd out what is fair.

That fatal beating took place in the wake of a year of frat-boy yobbery. "University of 'first choice'" is meaningless without reference to the kinds of individuals: the ambitious, the party animals, the time-servers? who are ranking their choices. We had a different kind of trouble this year.

This spring's commencement, held in the wake of the Feb. 14 shootings that took the lives of five NIU students, occurred as those on campus were making demonstrable steps to say “Thank you” to a community that had reached out to hug them back in February. Hugs are just plain better when you're hugged in return.

The memorial issue of the alumni magazine includes some observations that ought be part of Northern Illinois's, or any university's strategic plan, whether there is excess demand for perceived prestige, or not. The preface notes,

In 1895, at the cornerstone-laying ceremony for the new Northern Illinois State Normal School, Governor John Peter Altgeld set out the core values of the school that was to become Northern Illinois University. “Above all things,” he said, “we want this institution to stand on the basic principle that all people are born equal, and that only industry, intelligence, and effort shall lead to preferment.”

That's a far cry from "all have won, and all must be given prizes."

The president of the alumni association sees in our fallen students a representative sample of the people we serve.

They were five very special individualswhose collective face embodied what NIU has stood for over its long, rich history. First-generation college students, veterans, and hard-working kids from middle class families seeking a better life through higher education—that’s who they represented.

Far from the positional arms-race anxieties among the well-heeled, it still matters that higher education equip its charges to hold their own with the graduates of the more famous or more selective if not necessarily more rigorous institutions. Industry, intelligence, effort.

THAT EXCESS DEMAND FOR CREDENTIALS. I've been working on this post for some time. In March, a graduate of Yale and Wharton who turns students away from Stonehill College suggests that fevered applicants get a grip. The "easy for you to say" is left to the reader as an exercise. The column makes some valid points.

Curiously, there is not enough pressure for the right reason: finding the school that is the right fit. Today, students can receive a top-notch education at any number of the 2,629 U.S. colleges and universities. If an applicant simply focused on the top 10% of those institutions, they would select from a pool of 260 schools. Given the relatively fixed supply of seats in prestige colleges, there are other ways to view this world.

On many campuses today, students can learn from a professor who holds a Ph.D. from an Ivy League or similar top research institution. Thirty years ago, in most cases, students had to attend one of a small set of colleges to accomplish that feat. But the supply of U.S. Ph.D.s has grown from 32,946 in 1976 to 45,596 in 2006, according to the Survey of Earned Doctorates.

So why are parents pushing their children so hard for admission to an elite college? Regrettably, admission to a first-choice college has become a referendum on Baby Boomer parenting skills, and the popular rear-windshield decal is often seen as the ultimate prize in our "winner take all" society.

Yet, I remain hopeful that we can correct our collective shortsightedness. Let's start by revisiting why we send our children to college in the first place. Certainly, our desires for their better economic future play a predominant role. But college still claims a larger public purpose, which includes preparing critical thinkers to engage productively with the wider world.

Parents and students would be wise to examine the missions of the schools they are considering (even the second-choice ones), and the way that the institutions are living their missions. They will find that such public purpose is not the monopoly of a handful of "brand-name" elite colleges, but instead pervades a community of scholars that extends to campus after campus, from coast to coast.

A Greg Easterbrook article in The Atlantic elaborates, concluding with the suggestion that the status obsessed also get a life.

Surely it is impossible to do away with the trials of the college-application process altogether. But college admissions would be less nerve-racking, and hang less ominously over the high school years, if it were better understood that a large number of colleges and universities can now provide students with an excellent education, sending them onward to healthy incomes and appealing careers. Harvard is marvelous, but you don't have to go there to get your foot in the door of life.

Advice notwithstanding, a New York Times article reported that the excess demand for the Gotta-Get-Ins was no April Fool.

The already crazed competition for admission to the nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges became even more intense this year, with many logging record low acceptance rates.

Perhaps the universities could learn something about load management from the airlines, or perhaps from treating their economists properly.

“We love the people we admitted, but we also love a very large number of the people who we were not able to admit,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard College.

Some colleges said they placed more students on their waiting lists than in recent years, in part because of uncertainty over how many admitted students would decide to enroll. Harvard and Princeton stopped accepting students through early admission this academic year; that meant that more than 1,500 students who would have been admitted in December were likely to have applied to many elite schools in the regular round.

Many factors contributed to the tightening of the competition at the most selective colleges, admissions deans and high school counselors said, among them demographics. The number of high school graduates in the nation has grown each year over the last decade and a half, though demographers project that the figure will peak this year or next, which might reduce the competition a little.

Other factors were the ease of online applications, expanded financial aid packages, aggressive recruiting of a broader range of young people, and ambitious students’ applying to ever more colleges.

By May, the New York Times was reporting that the overbooking algorithms had broken down, with the Gotta-Get-Ins digging deeper into the wait list.

Although colleges turn to wait lists to fill out their classes, it is unusual for the most selective to go so deep, college officials say.

For high-school students graduating in an unusually large class and for colleges trying to shape a freshman class, this has been an unusually challenging year, with the changes in early-admissions programs and the broad expansion of financial aid at many elite universities.

Right up until the May 1 deadline for students to respond to admissions offers, colleges have been unsure what to expect.

“Our class is coming in exactly the way we wanted it to, fitting into the plan we had to get to a class of 1,240,” said Janet Rapelye, dean of admission at Princeton, which, like Harvard and the University of Virginia, eliminated early admissions this year.

Ms. Rapelye said that with such a big change in policy, it was difficult to predict results, so “we deliberately aimed to have a slightly smaller group.”

The Los Angeles Daily News reports on overbooking and bumping in California.

"There is one great myth about going to college today - that is that there are only a handful of good schools," said Katherine Harrington, dean of admission and financial aid at the University of Southern California.

"There are more than 3,000 colleges and universities in the country and many, many, many of them provide an excellent education," she said.

"This notion that someone's life will be ruined if they don't get into the top 20 or 50 universities in the country is just not correct and we choose as a matter of practice not to do anything that encourages that notion."

Harrington, who saw 36,000 applications this year for 2,600 available slots, said avoiding the waiting-list process also makes things easier for her office, which gets to skip having to sift through applicants again.

Even as waiting lists swelled this week, several top colleges across the country announced that they would be receiving more students from their waiting lists.

The swap could cause a domino effect that might get [El Camino Real valedictorian Nielson] Weng admitted into one of the five schools that have kept him on hold. Stanford is his top choice, with California Institute of Technology a close second.

Until then, Weng said he'll work to get into one of his dream schools by gathering transcripts, awards and letters of recommendation.

"When people ask me where I am going to school, I say Berkeley, but I know they were expecting me to go to an Ivy League school," he said.

Still Weng, who has tentatively accepted an offer from the University of California at Berkeley, said the waiting game is growing tiresome.

Now that Massachusetts is proposing to tax what its Guardians of Public Morals deem to be idle assets in endowments, can "denied boarding compensation" be far behind?

TODAY'S RAILROAD READING. This week's Destination:Freedom has a great deal of substance. I commend in particular this interview with fellow O Scale King John Stilgoe and this squib about Norfolk Southern working with the Fitchburg Railroad. At one time, railroad policy makers envisioned Norfolk and Western absorbing Erie Lackawanna, Delaware and Hudson, and Boston and Maine as a way of introducing a second carrier into Penn Central country. That combination failed thanks to Boston and Maine reluctance as well as Hurricane Agnes erasing much of Erie Lackawanna and some of Delaware and Hudson. Now Norfolk Southern will get the old Troy and Greenfield through the Hoosac Tunnel and much of what remains of the Conn River. The conversation between John and Living on Earth's Bruce Gellerman is instructive.I'm very serious about where this country is going.

My book "Train Time" deals with the problems of trucks moving from Mexico to Canada, not stopping in the United States except to fuel, clogging up interstate highways in the Midwest and high plains that never used to see this traffic, and essentially making people wonder, ordinary tax payers wonder, why this cargo isn't on the Kansas City Southern, when you can run a freight train at 90 miles an hour, as happens frequently west of the Mississippi, it feels kind of sad to be sitting in a vehicle on a publicly-built highway where the speed limit's 65 or 70. And once people see freight trains moving at 70 or 75 miles an hour, they start wondering why there can't be a passenger train.

I haven't communicated with John for some time, and when we do converse, it's usually about things O Scale. All the same, we're thinking along similar lines.

West of St. Louis a lot of the nation's freight railroads are now adding a third track, because there's so many freight trains moving that they have to get the faster trains around the slower ones. Once we get the freight railroads back to the condition they were about 1950, I think Amtrak will have a golden opportunity to prove itself.

That might be asking for a complete change of attitude at Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern, and for better supervision and dispatching on the Chessie. On the other hand, in 1950 there were still a few 75 minute Hiawathas dispatched behind an A or F7 deputizing for a pair of E7s. To quote from a Broadway musical of about 30 years ago, one could also reach New York in sixteen hours, a lot can happen in sixteen hours.

My students figured out there was overnight mail service, first class mail, between New York and Chicago, for the price of a first class stamp. Nowadays you'd have to pay a lot of money to get something overnighted. But the real key is that meant there was very frequent fast mail service between places like New York City and Harrisburg, Pittsburg, Cleveland. We've forgotten all of this.

And Emergency Fast Package Service.

You could order a refrigerator, for example in the evening, and it would be delivered to your house at noontime the next day. You could do that in 1929. You can't do it today.

I wonder if some of those real estate inquiries the book (which I must add to the stack of things to review) refers to are looking at the interurban rights of way.

I CAN CALL THE SEMESTER DONE. The three graduation ceremonies (the weather would have permitted one big one in Huskie Stadium, Wisconsin style, although the platform party would not have a chance to go to the ice bucket between events) are done, degrees conferred, bottles and kegs opened. Liberal Arts graduated a marvelous singer.

Some of the academic weblogs I've visited include the usual carping about tight grading deadlines. That's a matter of course here. Grades for Thursday exams are due by 10 am Monday. It's not unknown for students to receive a diploma cover and have to sort adverse consequences out later.

This year, for the first time in I don't remember how long, all of my exams were on Monday and all of my marks were in the hands of Registration and Records by close of business Friday. Next year, we're supposed to have online grade filing, which I hope means being able to enter the information once and have it available on Blackboard and to Registration at the same time.

THE NEXT INTELLECTUAL CHALLENGE. Some cutting and soldering and fettling is in order.


Click the image for a larger view. Note the divided eccentric.

NORFOLK SKATE? In the matter of the Norfolk State firing of biologist Steven Aird, the Inside Higher Ed column now includes statements from Professor Aird, a dean at Norfolk State, and a graduate of the biology program. Joanne Jacobs has the story, and the bull session at her place is, shall we say, not complementary to Norfolk State. Casting Out Nines summarizes the tradeoffs of the case. Observation of the Day honors go to the dean at Anonymous Community.

And as a left-leaning sort, I like the idea that a kid without the money to 'go away' to college has access to the same academic rigor as the kid with rich parents. A former colleague of mine used to say that algebra is a civil right, and I agreed with him. To offer the less-well-off a diluted product offends my egalitarian sensibilities. If we're serious about access, it has to be access to academic rigor. Otherwise we're just babysitting. The rigor should be fair and impartial, and we need to explore the right mix of support services, tutoring, and the like to help students succeed, but that's okay. At the end of the day, the best service we can do is to provide a truly higher education, even if it takes some doing.

THE POSITIONAL ARMS RACE. Inside Higher Ed begins to analyze the NCAA financial statement.

College leaders and sports officials often argue that it is a mistake to require sports programs to be self-supporting, as that can only increase the pressure on them to cut corners to win if they believe winning teams will be more profitable. But it is also true that in tougher economic times, as higher education is surely entering, questions of what colleges spend on sports — particularly out of funds that could conceivably go to other institutional purposes — are likely only to grow louder.

The new report suggests that sports program budgets are growing quickly, as are institutional subsidies. For the 119 universities that compete in the NCAA’s top competitive level, the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly known as Division I-A), total revenues grew by 25.5 percent from 2004 to 2006, slightly faster than the 23 percent growth in expenses. But in the more important category — generated revenues, those actually earned by athletics departments, excluding other institutional support — rose by only 16 percent over the two-year period.

In the 2006 fiscal year, the latest of three examined in the study, only 19 of the 119 Football Bowl Subdivision institutions had positive net revenue, while for the rest, expenses exceeded generated revenues. (For the entire three-year period, only 16 athletics department turned a net profit.)

The article does not address the central economic puzzle, which is whether making what appear to be uneconomic investments in college sport is actually the dominant strategy. I will return to this point once I've had a chance to review the report, which, now grades are in, is a possibility.

INSTEAD OF GOING TO HARVARD, THEY ALL GO TO YALE. Greg Mankiw relays another threat point, should Harvard be subject to a Massachusetts bill of attainder. "Harvard can decide to no longer accept the children of Massachusetts residents." Meanwhile, life is likely to go on as usual at ZooMass.

PATE DE CITY COUNCIL. As Charlie Sykes puts it, a blow against the nanny state.

The alderman whom Mayor Daley derisively calls Joe "Foie Gras" Moore (49th) now knows how the geese and ducks feel.

Two years after the City Council banned the liver delicacy made by jamming a steel pipe down a bird’s esophagus, Daley essentially did the same to Moore on the City Council floor.

Like father, like son, as the balance of the article, and the honking from the barnyard, indicate.

Perhaps the urgency is to obtain the French vote for the 2016 Olympics. One wonders about the wisdom of securing this prize, possible expansion of the Hiawatha line and use of Huskie Stadium for play-in football notwithstanding. A British reader recommends this Guardian article that characterizes the London Olympics as a "financial black hole."

ON THURSDAY CAN EXAM WEEK BE PRAISED. The final final examinations for the spring semester are being graded. It appears as if we will make it to graduation day. This evening, I served as master of ceremonies for the DeKalb County Challenge Stock Market Game^(TM) awards. Once again, the winning team demonstrated that you can see a lot just by looking, although simply picking the businesses along Sycamore Road with full parking lots is not as successful a strategy during a market correction. One cluster of students was preparing to write an examination in the Sandburg auditorium, perhaps the last of the classes that had to move to other quarters at midsemester. We end the semester, however, noting two Fulbright fellowships.

While Northern Illinois University student Matt Konfirst is analyzing Antarctic core samples in Germany, fellow NIU student Shari Meggs will be teaching the English language to students in Hong Kong.

Good going.

WHO DO I TIME-SLIP? Consider this Easily Distracted vision of the next-generation small liberal arts college of about 2,000 students.

Regular faculty would not hold permanent tenure. The standard term of employment would be eight years, which would be divided into two cycles of three teaching years with a fourth fully compensated sabbatical year for all members of the regular faculty. Contract renewal would be the normal expectation following the eighth year, but faculty might not be retained either for reasons of performance or because of significant changes in the needed competencies within the core curriculum. For this reason, all faculty would be urged to remain professionally viable as practicioners outside the college’s environment, whether as academics or in some other context, and this would be the major purpose of the generous sabbatical support.

The college will commit substantial resources, including travel funds and subsidy of professional memberships, to encouraging core faculty to maintain their professional identities outside the college’s purview.

Assessment of faculty performance at contract renewal would focus on both teaching and evidence of continued interest in intellectual exporation and general activities as “public intellectuals” . It would not center on scholarly productivity as it is traditionally understood (though certainly scholarly publication would be regarded as a meaningful contribution to the public and communicative responsibilities of the faculty).

Normal faculty load would be 2/3, with the fifth course being a variable number of fourth-year supervisions, usually 2 or 3.

I have tenure, but I'm only eligible for sabbatical at seven year intervals. I earned a good evaluation for research last year, but aspire to land further work in journals economists read. And today I turned in marks for three fourth-year supervisions and a master's thesis supervision. I still owe marks for 80 examinations, which will be ready in the next day or two.

The dean at Anonymous Community has observations about what goes on elsewhere in the academic food chain.

And thus concludes Wednesday, with exams again taking place as scheduled.

SHE'S FINISHED. David Letterman just cracked a joke about Senator Clinton shopping for discount pantsuits.

WHERE THE EXCESS CAPACITY IS. Norfolk State University attempts to temper tough love with retention, with the expected results.

Because so many students come from disadvantaged backgrounds and never received a good high school education, they are already behind, he said, and attendance is essential. Norfolk State would appear to endorse this point of view, and official university policy states that a student who doesn’t attend at least 80 percent of class sessions may be failed.

But biologist Steven Aird failed to make tenure, and the article suggests his willingness to fail students was the reason.

The problem, Aird said, is that very few Norfolk State students meet even that standard. In the classes for which he was criticized by the dean for his grading — classes in which he awarded D’s or F’s to about 90 percent of students — Aird has attendance records indicating that the average student attended class only 66 percent of the time. Based on such a figure, he said, “the expected mean grade would have been an F,” and yet he was denied tenure for giving such grades.

Other professors at Norfolk State, generally requesting anonymity, confirmed that following the 80 percent attendance rule would result frequently in failing a substantial share — in many cases a majority — of their students.

Professors said attendance rates are considerably lower than at many institutions — although most institutions serve students with better preparation.

One reason that this does not happen (outside Aird’s classes) is that many professors at Norfolk State say that there is a clear expectation from administrators — in particular from Dean Sandra J. DeLoatch, the dean whose recommendation turned the tide against Aird’s tenure bid — that 70 percent of students should pass.

The article has provoked a wide-ranging discussion in the comments section, including a differing perspective on the Atlantic print article noted here.

The column has been Instalanched. George Leef at Phi Beta Cons summarizes.

American colleges and universities want to keep the classrooms full of paying customers, and many of them reach far down into the barrel of high-school graduates to do that. Lots of those students are very ill-prepared and unmotivated. They're used to a K-12 environment that isn't demanding and excuses weak performance as a matter of course.

When in college, if they run into someone like Professor Aird, most of them continue with their old habits and find themselves earning D and F grades. How do they react? Most of them do what the political Left encourages: instead of adjusting to the world, expect the world to adjust to you. Complain that the professor is too hard, unfair, unreasonable, out of touch, etc. Anything except improving your performance to meet the standards for a good grade.

Professor Aird offered a similar perspective to his students in January.

"You can only develop skills and self-confidence when your professors maintain appropriately rigorous standards in the classroom and insist that you attain appropriate competencies. You cannot genuinely succeed if your professors pander to you. You will simply fail at the next stage in life, where the cost of failure is much greater.”

What is Norfolk State's job and graduate school placement record? This article notes that Norfolk State's enrollment has been falling, this despite the echo baby-boom and the universal college bubble. Careful readers will note that it is also despite heavy doses of access-assessment-remediation-retention.

TOE THE PARTY LINE, OR ELSE. At the University of Toledo, one form of identity politics cannot be held superior to another. A columnist in the Toledo Free Press, writing, she thought, as a private citizen, observed,

As a Black woman who happens to be an alumnus of the University of Toledo's Graduate School, an employee and business owner, I take great umbrage at the notion that those choosing the homosexual lifestyle are "civil rights victims." Here's why. I cannot wake up tomorrow and not be a Black woman. I am genetically and biologically a Black woman and very pleased to be so as my Creator intended. Daily, thousands of homosexuals make a life decision to leave the gay lifestyle ...

Leave the psychology aside and focus on the identity politics. She continues,

The normative statistics for a homosexual in the USA include a Bachelor's degree: For gay men, the median household income is $83,000/yr. (Gay singles $62,000; gay couples living together $130,000), almost 80% above the median U.S. household income of $46,326, per census data. For lesbians, the median household income is $80,000/yr. (Lesbian singles $52,000; Lesbian couples living together $96,000); 36% of lesbians reported household incomes in excess of $100,000/yr. Compare that to the median income of the non-college educated Black male of $30,539. The data speaks for itself.

Leave the social science aside: this is a culture war theme I've seen elsewhere.

Focus, rather, on the reaction of the University of Toledo.

The University of Toledo has suspended with pay one of its administrators for writing a newspaper op-ed that questions whether homosexuality is a civil rights issue. The school said the administrator was suspended precisely because her views on homosexuality do not comport with those of the university, a state institution.

Crystal Dixon, associate vice president of human resources at the Ohio-based university, sparked controversy Apr. 18 when she wrote in the Toledo Free Press that she did not agree with comments by the newspaper's editor that portrayed homosexuals as civil rights victims.

This is the same University of Toledo that takes strategic planning beyond parody.

John Lott asks,

If she had written a piece say the opposite, what would have happened to her? Even if she had listed her affiliation at the university, nothing would have happened.

I'm not sure what he means by "opposite?" Privileging the claims of homosexuals over those of people of color? Or suggesting that the oppressions are equivalent?

Robert VerBruggen at Phi Beta Cons notes this:

I'd add that this is not a school publication but a local paper — one could argue that advancing such views on campus could conflict with her human-resources job.

On a side note, why is a public university "on record" supporting controversial legislation?

Perhaps more to the point, someone in headquarters could ask whether an associate vice-president's public reservations about a university policy might make her less effective at implementing that policy.

As far as "supporting controversial legislation," what's new? Student Affairs and Human Resources and more than a few curriculum committees treat the provisions of civil rights laws as indecently minimal requirements, and seek to have their more aggressive practices codified as law. Thus do professors have to retrain as special education teachers.

THEY SAVED LIVES. Northern Illinois University invited first-responders and community members who pitched in with everything from cookies to ribbons to a reception this afternoon. At the end of the formalities, university and community announced the debut of Huskies on Parade, where $1000 leases you two fiberglass Huskies to decorate in time for the resumption of classes in the fall.

Tuesday's examinations appear to have gone off as scheduled.

ON SATURDAY CAN EXAM WEEK BE PRAISED. I'm returning to grading jail for much of this week. Monday's exams took place with only the usual anxieties. I won't consider the semester done until I see that graduation procession on Saturday.

DON'T KNOW MUCH TRIGONOMETRY. Don't know much about algebra, despite a state mandate.

In a pattern that has area math professors scratching their heads, some community colleges are seeing an increase in the numbers and proportions of entering students who can't do algebra, or even basic arithmetic.

These skills require practice, they're different from riding a bicycle.

One of the biggest reasons for the large wave of college students behind in algebra is timing. If a student takes algebra as an eighth- or ninth-grader, it often means arriving at a community college or state college with several years separating their last encounter with x and y.

"You have to keep practicing your skills or they diminish," said Michael Kane, interim dean of sciences and mathematics at Sierra College. "The pipeline from secondary education to college can have such big gaps."

Even students who have worked through several years of higher math in high school can find themselves back at the algebra drawing board. Too often, high school standards do not run as high as college standards, professors said. [California's] high school exit exam, required to graduate from public school, tests basic math and pre-algebra skills, but doesn't go deeply into algebra, they said.

In addition, if students earn C's or lower in high school math courses, or if teachers grade too softly, it can lead to wider gaps.

"If you get a C in a math class and you try to go on and build, you're going to have holes," said Cosumnes [River College] math professor Lora Stewart.

As Joanne Jacobs notes, universal testing can have perverse effects.

Teachers feel pressured to lower standards so unprepared students — the kids who didn’t learn arithmetic in elementary school — will move on. The math section of the state graduation exam can be passed with a 55 percent; random guessing would yield a 25 percent.

The comments to her post suggest demoralization in the trenches. Wonderful world indeed.

WHERE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND BEGAN. Via Charlie Sykes, a Dallas television station's discovery of the state of college readiness.

This month 7,500 Dallas ISD seniors are expected to walk across the stage and make their families proud.

But what if we told you that 75 percent of the seniors headed to Dallas community colleges can't read above an 8th grade level, and others can't add or subtract?

Graduation is a time for feeling proud, but that might quickly change to frustration for thousands of DISD students like Gia Hollis come fall, when reality hits.

News 8 requested and received documents from the Dallas County Community College District that show, over the last three years, an average of 75 percent of the DISD students enrolled in classes took at least one developmental education course.

“My reading levels are so low, and I’m really not comprehending, and it’s really holding me back," Hollis said. "It’s taking me longer."

Hollis is in a developmental reading course at El Centro College. Developmental courses prepare students to take college classes. In the Fall of 2007, out of the 1,110 DISD students enrolled in Dallas community colleges, 810 had to take one of these courses.

“This percentage is much too high," said Dr. Joan Rodriguez, who teaches developmental reading at El Centro. In her upper level course, where we met Hollis, most students read at an 8th to 10th grade level, struggling to comprehend what’s in some newspaper articles.

“I get so frustrated," Hollis said. "Don't know why I wasn't taught those skills before coming here and having to be at this point in my life and start all over. It’s been very challenging."

”It's very frustrating ... for the students who come in here who say: ‘Wait a minute, you're asking me to do all this? I don't know how to do this. I don't have enough time to do this. I'm not used to doing this. I don't want to do it,'" Dr. Rodriguez said.

Dr. Rodriguez believes high school tests reward students for minimal knowledge, which won’t work in college where professors expect you to know how to read and comprehend complex sentences. She says college professors don’t grade you on whether you try, but what’s right.

The article notes the continued tension between teaching to the test and having the right kind of test, as well as the deleterious effects of calculators on math skills.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. University Diaries Extension, on the fruits of access-assessment-remediation-retention.

“No one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to [university] classes they cannot possibly pass,” writes an anonymous adjunct English professor in the June 2008 Atlantic magazine (far as I know, it’s not available online). He teaches in two “colleges of last resort,” where local, often older, students, go to rack up credits so they can move along a career track.

But they can’t pass the anonymous professor’s required course, because it’s not about memorizing practical vocational information. It’s about thinking and writing coherently, and having a point of view of your own. Many of his students don’t know how to analyze anything, let alone take a polemical position relative to it. They can’t use prose coherently, and they don’t know what it means to set out a grounded, rational argument. Worse, the professor’s other course asks them to write a formal paper about a work of literature. They’ve read almost nothing.

The essay concludes,

Note what the author isolates as the key intellectual trait of authentic college students: They have already learned something by the time they get to college, and the most important thing they’ve learned is a sort of rough intellectual history, an early but functional sense of the categories by which we organize and understand various human expressive acts — this is literature and these are its traits; this is the legal tradition and these its salient features. The serious college curriculum builds upon this foundation by adding not merely more information to it, but more complexity to its categories. The best-educated college graduates move easily among categories to make important intellectual connections — they put science and theology into play in order to think at a high level about empirical and non-empirical truth claims. They read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Mimesis in order to ask not merely what a particular theory or novel means, but what the fact of our having evolved particular standards of scientific legitimacy, and a particular ethos for fiction, means.

This is what university education is about — the disciplined assimilation of information into historically established categories which allow us to regulate and embellish thought about the world. This professor’s English comp and Intro Lit courses are primitive stages in this education: they ask students to convey only the most basic sense of categorical awareness, the shakiest intimation that there are contexts that connect what would otherwise be arbitrary bits of information, random creative eruptions. A few of this professor’s students will be able to do this, but most will not, and it is a cruel and expensive hoax to fail them repeatedly on their efforts.

I'm not sure which hoax the article has in mind: college lite, or social promotion in elementary school, or some mix of both.

LATE TRAINS GET LATER. Rockford Register-Star editor Chuck Sweeney takes stock of regional and inter-city developments along the Dairy Route.

Now we discover that the trains are still three to five years away. We are making progress, nonetheless, thanks to federal planning grants secured by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Rep. Don Manzullo, R-Egan. Last week, consultants released their route and ridership study that picked the Union Pacific line from Rockford through Belvidere, Huntley and Marengo to Elgin as the preferred route for commuter trains.

A lot of people are confused about where Amtrak fits into this picture. It doesn’t. Durbin proposed the reinstatement of Amtrak service from Chicago to Dubuque, Iowa, along the Canadian National line through Elmhurst, Genoa, Rockford, Freeport and Galena.

That’s the former route of Amtrak’s “Black Hawk,” a train promised by the late Bob McGaw when he ran for mayor of Rockford in 1973. McGaw delivered the train in just 10 months. McGaw, a Democrat, was a mayor who had clout in Springfield and knew how to use it.

The “Black Hawk” operated from February 1974 through McGaw’s two terms, but it ended in late summer 1981. The train was nifty in concept, but it was operated by a freight railroad (Illinois Central) that saw it as a nuisance and wasn’t particularly interested in running it on time. I know because I often took that train to Chicago.

Commuter trains and Amtrak trains do different things. The former make many station stops, the latter do not. While we need both, Amtrak service is the quickest to begin, because Amtrak owns the trains and the tracks on the CN line are in good shape. An Amtrak study of 2007 said the CN line would need $31.6 million worth of upgrades from Chicago to Iowa.

That would take state funding. Commuter service on the UP line hasn’t seen passenger trains since about 1950 and the tracks west of Belvidere will need a major, multimillion dollar overhaul. The commuter service also will require voters to approve a tax, most likely a quarter-cent sales tax. Capital cost, according to the TranSystems study released last week, is $247 million.

The guardians of the public purse, however, would rather waive the federal gas tax for the summer, ensuring that the roads will suffer even more from deferred maintenance and corporate welfare for truckers, while Congress will look less fiscally responsible than it does when it masks deficits in other accounts with surpluses in the highway trust fund.

As far as the train service is concerned, CNR, the operator in due course of Illinois Central, are not particularly passenger train friendly, and Union Pacific are likely to demand that the line between Gilberts and Rockford be doubled in order to accommodate the commuter train.