The National Council on Teacher Quality issued a report yesterday concluding that most of the nation's education colleges are not doing enough to prepare prospective elementary school teachers to teach math. The council studied entry and exit requirements, curriculum, textbooks and state licensing tests for 77 education colleges in 49 states. It found only 13 percent of the schools were giving teachers adequate math training.

Kate Walsh, president of the council, said in a statement: "As a nation, our dislike and discomfort with math is so endemic that we do not even find it troubling when elementary teachers admit to their own weakness in basic mathematics. Not only are our education schools not tackling these weaknesses, they accommodate them with low expectations and insufficient content."

But there's good news for Maryland: The University of Maryland at College Park is among the 10 schools where the council determined the math preparation was adequate. Towson University is one of five that the report said would pass muster with improved focus and textbooks. That's better than the 37 schools, among them American University, that were found to fail on all measures. Some schools, including Hampton University and University of Richmond, don't require prospective elementary teachers to take any math classes at all.

Think you're qualified to teach elementary school math? See how you do on this test that the council says all elementary math teachers should be able to pass. 

UPDATE, 6/30: See the comments for a rebuttal from the dean of Amerian University's education school, who says the report was not compiled responsibly.

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A new site, postyourtest.com, out of San Diego, is urging university students to upload paper exams to a free online database of college tests.

So far, the tests available appear limited to sunny Southern California, but the site's interface suggests national, even global, ambitions.

Thanks to insidehighered.com for alerting us to this exciting new development in student cheating -- er, studying -- technology. Check out their story for details and a lively discussion.

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The Baltimore metropolitan area is a national leader in health, computer, art and biology education, according to a report released today by the Atlanta Regional Council for Higher Education.  

The Baltimore-Towson region is the nation's 21st largest in terms of overall student enrollments but ranks 6th in production of health and clinical science degrees, 7th in computer and information sciences, 10th in visual and performing arts and 12th in biological and life sicences, the report found.

Thanks largely to Johns Hopkins University, a research powerhouse, Baltimore ranked 3rd among all U.S. metro areas in higher education-related research expenditures.

With more than 25,000 black students enrolled in higher education programs in 2005, the region also ranked 8th among America's metropolitan areas for education of African Americans.

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Two graduating seniors at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County are headed to England's University of Cambridge for an all-expenses-paid graduate degree courtesy of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, college officials announced.  

Simon Gray of South Africa, UMBC's 2008 valedictorian, will pursue a master's degree in chemical engineering, and physics major Phillip Graff (left) of New Jersey will study astrophysics at Cambridge. 

A third UMBC graduate, Ian Ralby, who won the selectived Gates Cambridge scholarship last year, received the award again this year, so that he can follow up a master's degree with a doctorate, college officials said.

Established in 2000 with a $210 million donation by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Cambridge scholarship is similar to the Rhodes Scholarship, which offers American students graduate opportunites at Oxford University.

About 100 students from around the world receive the award every year. This year, 45 U.S. citizens students were awarded scholarships. Among the American recipients this year were two others with Maryland connections: William Eucker of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, and Silver Spring's Jessica Shang, an engineering major at Harvard University.

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The renowned author on educational inequality, who waged a hunger strike last fall to protest No Child Left Behind, will speak at Goucher College at 8 p.m. April 16 in the Haebler Memorial Chapel. His talk, called "The Soul of a Profession," is free and open to the public, but tickets must be reserved in advance. Call 410-337-6333 or email boxoffice@goucher.edu.

Kozol is speaking in honor of Goucher education professor Eli Velder's 50th anniversary with the college.

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Sharon Leff, editor of the Towson University campus paper The Towerlight, dropped a note to say the student-run paper's Web site has been redesigned.

Check it out here.

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The Urban Institute report released last week was great news for the Academy of College and Career Exploration, one of the six innovation high schools in Baltimore found to be improving the academic performance of poor, minority kids. (The innovation schools are run with autonomy and in partnership with outside organizations. The new middle/high schools that Andres Alonso wants to open would run in a similar format.)

Now, there's something even better: Paul DiMatteo, who will be part of ACCE's first graduating class in the spring, has received an early admissions acceptance to Johns Hopkins University. As a "Baltimore scholar," his full tuition will be covered. Hopkins agreed in 2004 to cover the tuition of public school kids from the city who meet admissions requirements. But until now, all the students who have been accepted have been from Baltimore's selective high schools -- mostly City and Poly, which have admissions requirements. DiMatteo is the first from a city high school that anyone can attend. Marion Pines, one of the operators of ACCE (who also happens to be a senior fellow at Hopkins and is a former city housing official), said that "the whole school is dancing."

Paul, by the way, is one of the bloggers on the student-produced site News From Room 123. The blog has had a lot of interesting entries lately, including ACCE students' take on the Robert Poole bus incident, in which nine kids from Robert Poole Middle were charged with attacking a homeless woman and her boyfriend on an MTA bus. (Poole and ACCE share a building in Hampden.) There was also a heartbreaking entry last week by a boy whose house was raided by police looking for evidence against his brother in a murder investigation.

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Goucher College continues to receive both protest and praise about its decision to thin by about 50 the herd of deer that roam its leafy Towson campus. Read our original story here.

Recently, the U.S. Human Society weighed in with a letter to President Sanford J. Ungar (download it), followed by one to the head of Goucher's Board of Trustees (reprinted below). Kristen Keener, the liberal arts college's spokeswoman, said the deer kill -- to be carried out over the holiday break by state-licensed bowmen -- is still on.

Pleasure hunters need not apply, however, said Keener, who recently received a personal campus visit from "a couple of guys in camo who asked if they could participate." They were turned away.

"It's not something where you can pay a fee and bag a buck," Keener said.

The college is remaining mum on when the actual hunt will take place. "It's not something they're announcing for fear that protesters will come," Keener said. "They really do want to keep this on the down-low so that nobody would would be potentially put in any harm's way."

And now, the text of the Humane Society letter -->

December 14, 2007

John M. Bond, Board of Trustees, Goucher College

C/O The Columbia Bank

Corporate Headquarters
7168 Columbia Gateway Drive
Columbia, MD 21046

Dear Mr. Bond,

It is most regrettable that I need to contact you in your capacity as a Trustee of Goucher College about the apparently imminent proposed slaughter of deer with bow and arrow at the college. This has become very controversial, as does the slaughter of any wild animals that are acclimated to people.

We at The Humane Society of the United States have sent a letter to the president of the college offering to meet and help develop a non-lethal deer management plan on a humane basis. Unfortunately, the concerns of many Goucher students and advisors and our offers of help and consultation were summarily dismissed without serious consideration. Indeed, at the meeting President Unger [sic] had with students, he was reportedly explosive, and he simply dismissed the very real concerns the students had regarding the pain and suffering these animals would be forced to endure, resorting instead to threats to impose surcharges on the students’ tuition if humane alternatives were adopted.

In fact, bow hunting at its very best, results in extreme suffering and wounding. Many deer are forced to die over long periods of time from loss of blood caused by open wounds created by arrows. We urge you and the other Trustees at Goucher Collge to take immediate action to stop the killing of these animals and work with the local community and The Humane Society of the United States to develop a more humane and compassionate approach to living with the deer at Goucher College. A respected institution like Goucher College should demonstrate compassion and humane treatment to its wildlife and consideration of empathic and caring responses of its students. Rushing to kill these deer with bow and arrow is an affront to those values.

Sincerely,

John W. Grandy, Ph.D.

Senior Vice President

Wildlife and Habitat Program

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A major new survey by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, finds that after several years in college, students become less religiously observant, but more "spiritual."

Undergraduate life also contributes to more liberal political orientations and increased stress, according to UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute.

Among the findings:

• After three years of college, more students rate as "essential" or "very important" statements such as "integrating spirituality into my life" and "becoming a more loving person."
• There is a "steep decline" in religious attendance from freshman to junior year. Frequent attendance at religious services drops, while the percentage of surveyed students who didn't attend at all nearly doubled, from about 20 percent to about 38 percent.
• The psychological well-being of students declined from the first to third years of college. The percent of students who described their lives as "filled with stress and anxiety" jumped from 26 percent in their freshman year, to about 42 percent by junior year.
• College students also became more liberal during college. The percentage of students who indicated their political orientation as "liberal" or "far left" increased from 29 percent to 34 percent in three years, while those describing themselves as conservative and centrists declined slightly.

The longitudinal survey, titled "Spirituality in Higher Education: Students' Search for Meaning and Purpose," tracked data collected from about 14,500 students from 136 colleges. Students were surveyed as freshmen in 2004, and then again in 2007.

Continue reading "College makes students less religious, but more "spiritual"" »

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College students who regularly cram all-night for exams and papers get lower grades than students who don't, according to a new study out of St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY.  

Psychology professor Pamela Thacher studied the sleep habits and academic transcripts of 111 students and found that two-thirds reported pulling at least one all-nighter a semester. Those that did it regularly also had lower grade-point averages, she found.

Thatcher's findings will be published in the January issue of the journal Behavioral Sleep Medicine.

The conventional wisdom is that all-nights are associated with procrastination -- another venerable college tradition -- but Thatcher did not find a correlation.

"The data indicate that procrastination is not associated with all-nighters, although both practices significantly correlated with lower GPAs," she said in a university news release.

Continue reading "All-nighters = lower grades" »

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An animal-rights group of lawyers sent a letter today to Johns Hopkins' medical school dean demanding an end to operating on live pigs as part of surgical training. Here's the text of the letter:  

December 11, 2007
Edward D. Miller, M.D., Dean

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

733 North Broadway
Baltimore, MD 21205
Dear Dean Miller:
           

I am writing on behalf of the National Center for Animal Law. We strongly urge you to discontinue the use of live pigs in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine third year surgery course, and all other use of live animals in your curriculum, on legal, scientific, and ethical grounds. Your medical school is one of only ten in the country, out of a total of one hundred twenty-six, that still use live animals for educational purposes.  We hope you will join the vast majority of schools, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania and Duke University, who have determined that students earn at least equal, if not better, training without the use of live animals in the classroom.                                                                   

I am sure you are aware of the excellent alternatives that are widely available for medical training.   These humane alternatives are not only great teaching tools, most medical students also prefer them. In 2007, the American Medical Student Association (“AMSA”) passed a resolution amending its “Principles Regarding Vivisection in Medical Education” to strongly encourage the replacement of animal laboratories with non-animal alternatives in medical education. The AMSA resolution demonstrates that medical students are increasingly aware of the ethical problems surrounding the use of live animals as teaching tools. In order to meet the ethical and educational needs of your students, we encourage Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine to explore these alternatives as a means of removing live animals from its classrooms.  Further, the use of animals in classrooms violates the spirit and letter of the Federal Animal Welfare Act (“AWA”). Medical schools are included in the definition of “research facility” in the AWA, and are therefore subject to its provisions.  Further, the live animals used by your institution’s classrooms come within the protection of that statute, which expressly defines protected “animals” to include “any live or dead dog, cat, monkey (nonhuman primate mammal), guinea pig, hamster, rabbit or such other warm blooded animal . . .  intended for use, for research, testing, experimentation, or exhibition purposes, or as a pet.” The Federal statute requires minimization of pain and distress to the subject animal and the use of non-animal alternatives when possible. In light of the availability of superior, non-animal alternative technologies in medical school education, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine arguably violates the principles set forth in the AWA by using pigs in its classrooms. 

Moreover, the use of live animals results in the suffering of sentient beings. Courts have become increasingly aware of such ethical issues and are more often willing to allow legal challenges to unnecessary animal suffering. For instance, a Federal District Court has ruled that a college psychology student had constitutional standing to challenge the exclusion of laboratory rats, birds and mice from the protection of the AWA, because she asserted emotional and aesthetic injury observing their inhumane living conditions. The court noted that the student could bring a lawsuit, “given the express purpose of the AWA to ensure the humane treatment of animals.” Alternatives Research & Development Foundation, et al. v. Glickman, 101 F. Supp. 2d. 7 (D.D.C. 2000).

Loyola College's student newspaper The Greyhound is running a series looking at cocaine use at the private Jesuit school in North Baltimore.

Today's installation deals with a college-administered student survey, which seems to suggest that Loyola students perceive cocaine use is more prevalent than it likely is.

The 2006 survey "showed 82 students out of 1,005 surveyed admitted using cocaine as frequently as only a few times per year, up to three or more times a week. On the other hand, student perception of cocaine use was much higher, with 540 saying the typical student used cocaine a few times a year or more," the Greyhound reported.

The first part of "Cocaine Culture," published last month, offers some insight into the personality of a Loyola druggie:

"He leans over his coffee table, plugs one nostril, and snorts in a line of crushed Percocet through a rolled-up dollar bill ... Five minutes later the user receives a phone call and within 15 minutes a fellow student --a dealer-- enters the room. Twenty dollars is handed to the dealer as they sit down at the table to measure up the half gram of cocaine to be sold ... 'I bought an 8-ball [3.5 grams of cocaine] about a month ago,' he says. 'That [expletive] was gone in two days. I killed a [gram] this Saturday alone.'"

Riveting stuff, though the story relies heavily on unnamed sources, so readers might take it with a gram of salt.

One minor quibble. In a description of drug activity on nearby York Road, the authors write: "Dealers are looking for buyers on the street while buyers are on the corners stretching their arms out as to hail for a cab, but tapping their fingers downward, indicating their want of drugs."

Pointing your fingers downward is just the Baltimore way of hailing a cab, whether illegal "hack" or licensed taxi.

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Harvard University announced MOnday a "sweeping overhaul of financial aid policies" to make its undergraduate degree more affordable.

Because of its high-profile status and prestige, the Cambridge, Mass. school's policies are considered influential among higher-ed policy makers.  

Among the changes:

• No Loans. "In calculating the financial aid packages offered to undergraduates, Harvard will not expect students to take out loans," according to the press release. "Loan funds will be replaced by increased grants from the University."
• Families with incomes below $180,000 will be expected to contribute less money toward tuition and fees. Familes earning $60,000 and below will pay nothing toward their childrens' tuition and fees. For family incomes from $60,000 to $120,000, the expected family contribution will slide up gradually to 10 percent of income. So a family making $120,000 will be asked to pay about $12,000 a year -- down from $19,000 under the current aid formula. High-income families will also benefit. Those earning up to $180,000 in annual income will be expected to pay 10 percent of their incomes.
• Home equity will no longer be considered in determining a family's ability to pay for their kid's college education. "This will reduce the price by an average of $4,000 per year for affected families as compared with current practice," officials said.

Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of a financial aid Web site, said Monday that Harvard's announcement makes it the fifth school to eliminate loans from financial aid packages of low income students, joining Princeton, Davidson, Williams and Amherst.

One more reason to sharpen those SATs and kiss up to your letter-writers.  

Continue reading "Harvard gets cheaper: no loans, lower family contributions to tuition" »

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The Greater Towson Council of Community Associations is recommending that Towson University do away with the spring music festival that draws upward of 10,000 attendees a year, the student-run Towerlight reports.

The suggestion is one of 47 proposals made by the civic association, in response to rising town-gown tensions at the rapidly growing public university.

The Towson Times is also reporting stepped-up police enforcement of disorderly students.

"We've had a lot of problems with Towson students and increased calls for service," future Towson precinct commander Lt. Al Jones tells the community newspaper.  

The Times also recently ran a related story about one Towson man's frustration with college students allegedly turning his neighborhood in a "wild" zone when the bars let out after last call.

What's going on over there?

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News that Goucher College is planning a Yuletide deer kill on its leafy, animal-loving campus, has sparked a lively debate on Tribune's Topix board. 

All that hot air surely makes a bulletin-boarder hungry, so we've dug up some post-fued food. Below, a 1997-era recipe that ran in The Sun for venison medallions with cognac sauce.

For balance, I did try to find a deerish equivalent of tofurkey, but can't hunt up any vegetarian venison choices. The best I could do was a photo of allegedly vegetarian venison from a restaurant in Vietnam (this other blogger claims to have also seen veggie-ven over there):

So we appeal to you, deer readers. Have you any veggie-venison recipes to share?  

In the meantime, for meat-eaters, a recipe featuring the King of Sweden's favorite lean meat:

Venison medallions with cognac sauce    

Makes 4 servings

4 4-ounce venison medallions, trimmed of fat

1 clove garlic, cut in half

2 teaspoons canola oil

salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

2 tablespoons finely chopped shallots

1/2 cup cognac

1 cup quick venison stock (below) or defatted, reduced-sodium beef or chicken broth

1 1/2 tablespoons red currant jelly

2 teaspoons Dijon mustard

1 teaspoon chopped, fresh thyme or 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme leaves

1 teaspoon cornstarch

1 tablespoon cold water

Rub all sides of venison medallions with garlic. Brush with 1/2 teaspoon oil and season with salt and pepper.

Heat a large, heavy skillet (preferably cast-iron) over high heat until very hot. Add venison and cook until seared on all sides, 3 to 4 minutes for medium-rare; be careful not to overcook. Set aside on a plate and cover with aluminum foil to keep warm. Reduce heat to low.

Add remaining 1 1/2 teaspoons oil and shallots to skillet. Cook, stirring, until shallots soften, about 1 minute. Add cognac and cook, stirring, until most of the liquid has evaporated, 1 to 2 minutes. Stir in stock (or broth), jelly, mustard and thyme. Cook, whisking, until jelly melts, 1 to 2 minutes more.

In a small bowl, combine cornstarch and 1 tablespoon water; slowly whisk into simmering sauce until slightly thickened. Strain through a fine sieve. Discard solids. Adjust seasonings with salt and pepper.

Slice venison and fan onto a warmed plate. Serve with the sauce.

Per serving: 250 calories, 26 grams protein, 7 grams fat (0.4 gram saturated fat), 7 grams carbohydrate, 210 mg sodium, 1 mg cholesterol, 0 grams fiber. 

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Check out this new holiday "e-card" from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Impressive production values, but also slightly Soviet in spirit, doncha think? Cameos from Connie Chung and Steny Hoyer. Fear the turtle's PR machine.

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A pretty funny disquisition on Charm City's oft-ridiculed "Believe" campaign by Throat Culture, a sketch comedy group straight outta Homewood.

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