336. College Access and Success News

Here are links to recent news on college access and success.

by

Joe Rottenborn

Executive Director, Mahoning Valley College Access Program (MVCAP)

1. AT WHAT COST: Pursuing athletic scholarships is expensive for families http://t.co/OhNiGNTc via @reviewjournal - "It doesn't pay for most families chasing the dream of an athletic scholarship. . . . "I marvel at the money parents spend over the years in the pursuit of athletic scholarships," says Beth Walker, a former college volleyball player at Kansas and now owner of College Funding Coaches. . . . "For most athletes, if they can get even 25 percent of their tuition paid, that's huge. But many of these families are sure they have the next Division I superstar and there are full scholarships coming. I don't know what they're smoking. They're not coming from a place of reality. It's scary."

2. Long Island SAT Fraud Prompts Wider Investigations, by Rebecca R. Ruiz - http://nyti.ms/rrmgXy - "When the Educational Testing Service, the company that administers the test, detects irregularities, it simply notifies the affected students that their scores are being withdrawn. Neither colleges nor high schools are ever alerted that cheating was suspected.
That happens about .04 percent of the time, Ms. Anderson reports, with about 1,000 scores being withdrawn each year out of 2.25 million. Nearly all of those withdrawals – 99 percent of them – are due to one test-taker having copied off of another."

3. Public Schools Also Lose When Online Students Fail, by Burt Hubbard and Nancy Mitchell - http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/10/03/06enc_online.h31.html via @educationweek - "Colorado taxpayers will spend $100 million this year on online schools that are largely failing their elementary and high school students, state education records and interviews with school officials show. The money includes millions in tax dollars that are going to K-12 online schools for students who are no longer there."

4. Are Top Students Getting Short Shrift? - Room for Debate - http://nyti.ms/oSu0fj -"By trying to teach children of varying abilities in one classroom, is American society underdeveloping some of its brightest young people?"

5. In Classrooms, the Ideal vs. the Reality, by C. Kent McGuire - Room for Debate - http://nyti.ms/n8bpom - "The central challenge for American schools is to produce much higher levels of achievement for the vast majority of students. National attention to new Common Core Standards and to 21st Century Skills is based on this challenge. The policy debate we need to have is about how to accomplish this."

6. Latinos Need More Support to Raise Lagging Graduation Rates, Report Says, by Lacey Johnson - http://chronicle.com/article/Latinos-Need-More-Support-to/129247/ - "The study, conducted in 2009, found that only 19.2 percent of Latinos between the ages of 25 and 34 had earned a two- or four-year degree, compared with 41 percent nationally. To increase Latino college completion, policy makers and educators must, among other steps, improve middle- and high-school counseling, make preschool more available to low-income families, provide additional need-based grant money, and simplify the financial-aid system, the report says."

7. Two bitter education rivals begin to bury the hatchet, by Greg Toppo - http://usat.ly/o3HTwG via @usatoday - "We believe you cannot ignore poverty. We just believe right now the reason we have this problem is we're sending kids who face all these extra challenges into the same setup -- not even, because the kids in the more resourced communities have stronger schools, so we're sending them into a lesser version of the same setup that we send kids with many more privileges into, and that is why we have the achievement gap."

8. Online textbooks moving into schools, by Emma Brown - http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/online-textbooks-moving-into-schools/2011/09/27/gIQAwn0KGL_story.html via Washingtonpost.com -"Starting this fall, almost all Fairfax middle and high school students began using online books in social studies, jettisoning the tomes that have weighed down backpacks for decades. It is the Washington area’s most extensive foray into online textbooks, putting Fairfax at the leading edge of a digital movement that publishers and educators say inevitably will sweep schools nationwide."

9. Best Bang For Your Buck Colleges: Unigo List - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/03/bang-for-your-buck-colleges-unigo_n_991943.html - "Want a great education but don't want to accrue tremendous debt to get it? Well, you are in luck. College information site Unigo recently named the colleges that are the best "bang for your buck" --vi.e. colleges that are relatively inexpensive that provide a first-class education."

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