FYI, we had an enormous breakthough with the bar diagrams after hitting a brick wall with the kind where you need to draw two bars (do these types have names?). The kind of problem where "Ann and Betty had the same number of shoes. After Ann lost 6 and Betty sold 2, Betty had twice as many as Ann". For some reason, drawing the two bars directly on top of each other, and touching, made something click to make comparisons between them obvious that somehow weren't obvious when they were just a bit apart.

I like what their president says (except for using "foreground" as a verb!) But, I'm not quite sure the 4 x 2,500 word essays are the best way to go about this. Seems like a lot of work for the applicant. And imagine if you wanted to apply to four or five schools that each did this, all with their own essays. I wonder how much time Bard would plan to spend reading the essays -- how many graders would read each one?

It might be interesting to look at written languages which don't strictly use a phonetic alphabet, like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese.

This was (yet another) thing that really struck me about the book: how universally awful the advice all the girls got from the University's advising service. I wonder if when we're looking at colleges if there's a good way to check out how good the college's advisers are. Or, is this a natural function of the enormous University: if the institution offers thousands of majors, and you are undecided, advising is just a really hard problem?

If you allowed to pick your dorm, though, certain dorms develop reputations, and the partiers tend to congregate there.

Well, there's a surprising correlation. Was there any suggestion as to the cause of this correlation? And, interesting that they may not track GPAs or graduation rate by dorm, but they do track alumni giving...

I think that if we start asking about it, there's more of a chance that it will be tracked. But, even if the colleges don't formally track these things, I think that you can ask existing students informally, and they will know which dorms are the "party dorms", and which ones are the "serious student" dorms.

I'm not sure how universal this is. It seems like one reason this dorm floor at Indiana was so extreme, in addition to the self-selection, was that it had no students in the honors program: they are all in the special honors dorm. There's also a special dorm for foreign language speakers, for women in STEM fields, etc., etc. None of these students were represented in the "party dorm", they all had their special residential location.

Note that this cohort is the self-described "dumb ones of the family", whose smarter siblings are going to selective schools.

I finally finished the book, and would recommended it. While the authors presented plenty of evidence that there is a "party pathway" through school, that is almost required for the kinds of success that upper class girls are looking for, I'm not sure they presented their case that this party pathway is detrimental to those who are trying to use college to improve their station. Something they don't mention, but that I found sad, was the institutionalized sexism of the upper classes. When talking about their families, it was always talking about their fathers' high-paying occupation, not once did they mention the role of their mothers. These girls didn't feel the need to be smart, or to do well in college, or find a career of any kind. They just wanted to live in the style to which they were accustomed, and eventually marry into wealth. Not a single one aspired to be a CEO or CFO, or own their own company, or have any degree of independence; they all wanted to marry into it. They are certainly not looking for the "Mrs. degree", because they know that men who do well in college aren't necessarily super-successful afterwards, and want to wait until their 30s to marry, so they can be sure of their husband's career path. Often, after college, they take jobs that are very low paying, but relatively high-status (such as being an administrative aid for a politically correct charity), living poshly in an expensive city, and rely on financial support from their parents until marriage. Presumably these men are going to the well-regarded IU business school, which is hard, and presumably requires a lot of studying. I would have liked to see how the boys' lives differ. Another big question I had is "how typical is this particular dorm floor". My guess is, not at all. The authors claim that, of the 53 girls living there, only 2 are majoring in "quantitative fields", whatever that means. I consider Calculus as the typical college level math class, but I don't think this word appeared once in the whole book. There were lots of girls taking remedial math classes of all levels. Looking at Indiana's math department's web page, I'm shocked at how many levels of math they offer before Calc, many of which don't count for college credit. One girl attributed her low GPA to bad advice from her adviser: to take "Finite Math" her freshmen year. "No one takes that class freshman year", she complained. And it sounds like she got a D in it, for it brought down her GPA for years. I wasn't sure what subjects are considered "Finite Math", so I looked online, and discovered that the prerequisites for this class are understanding fractions (!) and basic high school algebra. This is the highest level math class mentioned in the book. If I were sending my kids to college soon, and had to put them in dorms, the one question I'd like to ask is "what is the graduation rate of freshmen who start out on this floor, and how does that compare to other dorms?". From what I've read here, that graduation rate will vary tremendously, and what dorm you are in may make a huge difference in your college experience. It seems clear that there is a high correlation between dorm floor and college success, but I'm not sure the causation is due to the partying class. Wasn't there another thread quoting a statistic that said something like "only 18% of those students who start in remedial Math and English ever graduate?" Maybe that's what's going on here.

Again, from the book, it seems like the University is much more concerned about minimizing its legal liability than doing what is best for the students. For example, alcohol is absolutely forbidden in the dorms, and this rule is strongly enforced. There is almost no drinking in the dorm rooms. However, what this means is that the kids go out most every night, usually to frat parties to drink. It was striking to read how the dorms were dead silent at midnight, when most of the kids were out at parties, but when they returned at 2am, plastered, it was incredibly boisterous for hours, even on school nights. The University knows this, and there is only token enforcement of underage drinking at the frats. Obviously, this is much less safe than allowing the kids to drink, under some supervision of their RAs, in their dorm rooms, but if anything bad happens, the University can deflect any liability onto the frats, who are legally separate entities.

And, to be fair, aren't most high-stakes tests in the public schools administered by the same schools who have the most to gain or lose from the results of the tests?

I think there's a deeper question of whether educational outcomes are amenable to science, or at least to the kind of science of analysis of standardized test scores we see all the time. There's a huge "searching for your keys under the streetlight effect going on here", because standardized tests are so easy to administer and grade, but they can't measure the truly important things our students need to learn. And, of course, the tests can be gamed, and lead to the rise of "teaching to the test", and teaching techniques that are only useful in this artificial scenario (learn how to fill in a bubble completely and quickly; if given a math question with four answers, see if you can throw away one or two quickly). My favorite example is the vocabulary section on college entrance tests. Having a large vocabulary was thought to be a proxy for being well-read, or perhaps intelligence in general. However, now that it is tested, we forget that it is a proxy for something else, and just teach vocab directly.

Now there's a relevant point no one else has brought up: Does the student in question have study halls? I've never heard of this way to do English before, and it would explain the lack of homework, but I'd need to think through how I feel about this approach and the potential rigor, compared to the usual class structure. Just doing some quick math, if there are 20 students, and the class is 60 minutes long, and they all schedule their one-on-one time evenly, that's 15 minutes a week one-on-one with the teacher. I'm not sure I'd chose 15 minutes one-on-one once a week compared to 300 minutes of discussion shared with the class, but maybe that depends on the students. Never having any significant writing component of a literature class seems like a huge red flag.

Exactly. CC costs something like $500 for a 3 credit class. So, a remedial math class of 40 students is grossing $20k. If the college is paying an adjunct $3k to teach it, seems like there's a lot of room for overhead.

This is a fantastic question. I just don't get it, and I would like to know how high school can be effectively taught with only 30 minutes of homework. Just take a literature class. No matter how wonderful and skilled the teachers, the students have to read the books. You can't possibly have the students read in class, can you, and waste the time of the highly-trained teacher? Seems like to cover any reasonable amount of ground, the students need to be doing a fair amount of reading at home. I'm curious how many books they read Senior year of high school, and how they manage that without homework? Do they just read excerpts? Only a few novels? How does that 30 minute break down, class-wise?

These numbers are horrible. FWIW, they have been consistent going back to at least 1997, even though the number of ACT takers has dramatically risen: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012026/tables/table_16.asp

I'm sure glad I don't have to deal with education-ese every day. It drives me crazy. Also, this powerpoint reinforces my thoughts to not teach powerpoint myself. This information would be better presented as a written paper, but with power point, you can get away without having very good writing skills. Who needs transitions when you've got bullet points? I'm not sure that K-8, especially, say, K-5 really need letter grades. But if they are going to be given, perhaps we should have a conversation about what they should signify. This "A = advanced, B = proficient, C = high basic, D = low basic" is a bit unusual. [Edited]: Oh, I get it now. For all these poor students, 50% of their classroom grade is based on the state standardized tests, the other 50% is mixed in from their teacher. Now, there is one thing I like on this slide: The grades can only count "evidence of learning", not "motivational factors", such as homework and participation. I like this idea that the grade should be based on what the student can prove that she knows, not bolstered by extra credit and participation boosters.

In particular, having a Spanish test Wednesday, and another one the following Monday seems off. I wonder how many of these "tests" are really short quizzes?

I'm not sure about that. I think that Humanities is one class that subsumes both English and History (which strikes me as very WTM...), and the the Angela's Ashes reading is for Humanities.

I have no idea how much homework your local PS assigned, or the nature thereof. There is no reason to disbelieve you. I have little knowledge what my local PS does. They both may very well issue horrible homework loads. But that's not the point of this thread. If the author is to be believed, we know exactly how much homework was assigned to this student. And so, I would ask those on this thread to only comment on these facts on the table. And objectively, it isn't that much. Personally, if my eighth grade daughter were setting her alarm for 1am, so she could wake up after everyone else in the house had gone to sleep, and accidentally woke me, I would be very dubious of her "I needed to do my homework" excuse. What I have heard from PS moms, is that with the advent of Facebook, chat rooms and text messaging from devices in bedrooms, homework time has become online and social. I bet if the author turned off the internet and collected her cell phone at 8pm, suddenly her homework would get done a lot sooner. Perhaps, but there are some subjects that really benefit from even a little bit of independent work every day. I believe that math and foreign languages fall into this category.

OK, the first night's homework was three things. The math, reading from a novel, and studying for a science test. If the math is reasonable, which of "read from your novel" or "do some unspecified amount of studying for tomorrow's test" is the enormous amount of mindless homework that indicates that public school kids are being overloaded with useless busywork? The article claims that the sum of these takes about 4 hours; 30 minutes of which was the studying for the science test. I can't believe that so many folks on a classical education board are so down on reading.

I still disagree. The time she's taking sounds excessive, and the time that seems to be wasted in the mechanics of the school day and whatever else happens before 8pm seem excessive, but the workload does not. She's taking high school level classes, and to do high school level Math, I would expect some calculation to be done independently every night. Simplifying 11 expressions just isn't that much work. I'm curious what you would recommend: not have any independent math work? 5 problems? 3? And for reading, even if it does take an hour a day, that doesn't seem excessive. If we are all classical educators here, and think that high school freshman should be reading the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Aeneid, Shakespeare and Milton freshman year, an hour a day of reading is about on schedule. I read complaints here all the time about public school students who only read two novels a semester. If you think it is reasonable to read a novel every two weeks, that's going to take some time to get done. Again, how much reading time do you consider reasonable? How many novels should a high school freshman read in honors English in a semester?

I didn't read the whole thing, but on Monday night, the homework was 11 simple algebra problems, read 80 pages of Angela's Ashes, and study for an Earth Science test. Perhaps the reason this works takes 4+ hours for the student to do is that she is multi-tasking, on facebook and text messaging. The Dad claims it took him 30 minutes to read 16 pages of the book. Really? That's a good book, but it isn't War and Peace. I bet I could do the math in 30 minutes tops, the reading is easily less than an hour, and the studying? Dunno, but probably less than 30 minutes. If this is taking 4+ hours, something else is going on. I'm not in favor of busy-work homework, but this doesn't seem that bad to me.

Chanting is good, as is writing out the tables of paradigms long-hand, over and over again. If he doesn't have the chanting down, it can be useful to record himself reading the tables, and put it on an ipod, and listen to the worlds most boring playlist as he walks around campus.