As a professor, how do you get dropout-prone college students to stay in school? Give them your cellphone number. How do you get professors to promptly field text messages, calls and e-mails from students? Buy them smartphones and pay for the service plan. That is the logic Georgia Gwinnett College employed when it decided to offer its more than 300 full- and part-time faculty members cellphones and encouraged them to respond to any calls or texts from students within 24 hours. ON THE WEB: The retention guru MORE FROM INSIDE HIGHER ED: Coppin plays catch-up on retention Under the program, professors are offered a state-of-the-art smartphone and a Sprint data plan that includes the most sophisticated wireless Internet coverage. It is part of a several-tier effort by Georgia Gwinnett — a public, four-year, noncompetitive-admissions college founded in 2005 — to defy the historically low retention rates typical of colleges that set such a modest bar for admission (Georgia Gwinnett admits any Georgia high school graduate). And so far, they say, it is working. The retention rate for returning sophomores at Georgia Gwinnett stands at 75%. That is about double the average rate for noncompetitive-admissions colleges in Georgia, according to Tom Mundie, dean of the school of science and technology at Georgia Gwinnett, and on par with many public institutions that have competitive admissions. In engagement surveys, Mundie says, students have reported “feeling that faculty care about and are accessible to them.” These plaudits and retention numbers are not driven solely by invitations to call or text professors and expect a reasonably swift response, Mundie says. Other aspects of the college’s retention effort probably contribute as well, including small class sizes and a mentoring program that arranges for professors to advise students on academic, career, and personal matters. But professors and administrators at the college seem to believe there is a substantial correlation between the cellphone program and the young institution’s impressive retention numbers — enough that the college, which has grown its student body and faculty by leaps and bounds since its founding five years ago, is preparing to spend $350,000 on faculty cellphones and data plans this year. That works out to about $1,000 per faculty member — a significant investment, and one Lonnie D. Harvel, Georgia Gwinnett’s vice president for instructional technology, is hesitant to divulge, given the eagerness of Georgia legislators to find anything to cut. Georgia Gwinnett sprung for some pretty sophisticated gadgets: for full-time professors, it offers Motorola Evo smartphones with Google ‘s Android operating system and 4G coverage. For part-time professors, it offers Sprint’s HTC Snap smartphone, which is lighter-weight but still retails for several hundred dollars. The college offers the professors regular upgrades. Professors can make the college-funded phone their only phone, and there is no ban on using it for nonwork purposes (Georgia Gwinnett’s deal with Sprint allows additional activity on the network without added costs). If the professors do not want the phones, the college offers to pay the bill on their existing cellphones as long as they put the contact number on their syllabuses. Harvel says that if state legislators try to frame publicly funded Georgia Gwinnett’s cellphone giveaway as wasteful, he’s “ready to fight that battle.” He says the college has observed a bump in faculty productivity as a result of the phones equivalent to “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in labor. For example, Georgia Gwinnett faculty are not required to hold office hours — the idea being that a big bulk of outside-of-class communication with students can be handled via the mobile devices, allowing faculty to deploy their energies on other things. Also, the desktop phone bills are down and inter-faculty communication is up, Harvel says. “A cost analysis demonstrates that the program saves more money than it costs,” Harvel says (though he adds that the benefits are “only valid if the institution is intent on expending resources on student engagement”). A burden on professors? So the cellphone program appears to be a boon for student engagement, but is it a threat to faculty sanity? Does giving students such access and pledging a prompt response invite a deluge of text messages — sometimes at odd hours, sometimes inane or easily answerable elsewhere — that might leave professors feeling held hostage by the technology? Apparently not, according to a handful of professors contacted at random by Inside Higher Ed. “I’ve never known a professor to keep business hours, anyway,” says Brigitte Clifton, an English professor. “{hellip}Yes, I’ve talked a student through a research assignment on my cell in the grocery store while contemplating a bag of beans, but several folks in the aisle around me were doing the same thing in their own lines of work.” Tee Barron, an associate professor of mathematics, says she sometimes gets texts from students asking questions that they could easily have answered by consulting a classmate or the syllabus, but that can be corrected with a benign rebuke. “I’ll sometimes text back, ‘Hahaha by the time it took to e-mail or text me you could have found this out yourself and now you’re going to have to anyway,’ ” Barron says. “I think after the first couple times the [students] who are high-maintenance and try that — they start getting it.” She said she is contacted “daily” by students via her phone, but has hardly been overwhelmed. The key is defining boundaries at the outset, they say. While professors say the college encourages a 24-hour response time, they say it is a guideline more than an enforced rule, and that they have the autonomy to lay out expectations — and limitations — to students on a class-by-class basis. The idea is not so much to turn professors into a 24/7 support service as much as to establish a connection with students that ventures, to a reasonable extent, into the world of real-time, person-to-person interchange. “Even those students with perhaps unreasonable expectations for communications will learn that the professor is not at their immediate disposal, but that we are readily available for questions outside of class,” says Clifton. “In my real-world experience, bosses have much more rigid expectations of access and response outside of office hours.” Engagement, after all, is a two-way street, says Mundie, the technology and sciences dean; faculty are expected to be responsive to the needs of students, just as students are expected to be responsive to the expectations of their professors. And if a student skips a few class sessions, he says, “They might even get a call on their cellphone.”

Every year, the scene plays out in classrooms across the nation. A child clings to his mother, tears welling in his eyes as he pleads with her to stay a few moments longer. The first day of kindergarten is an exciting time for parents and children, but it can also be stressful, especially for kids who have never spent significant time away from Mom and Dad. The good news is that psychologists say separation anxiety is generally short-lived and there are time-tested methods to help reduce everyone’s tension. The root of the problem Experts say separation anxiety can be spurred by biology and environment. “What’s known about separation anxiety is there’s not really one single cause for it,” said Wendy Bravo, a marriage and family therapist based in Reno “If the child tends to be more anxious, you know, anxiety-prone, there are certain things in the environment that will trigger it.” In other words, there are certain children who simply are born anxious. “Different kids have different strengths and weaknesses,” said Kristen Davis-Coelho, a psychologist for Renown Behavioral Health in Reno. “Some are much more adventurous, really like new experiences, and other ones are a little more tentative. Sometimes it can surprise a parent.” Biology or not, family psychologist and syndicated columnist John Rosemond said he believes parents almost always play a significant role in the problem. “When you find a child of school age, kindergarten, first grade, it is almost always associated with parents and specifically a mother who has had difficulty separating from the child from day one,” he said. The good news? In most cases, separation anxiety is quickly reversible. Davis-Coelho said only about 5% of children suffer from separation anxiety disorder, a severe form that lasts longer than a few weeks. Advance planning Bravo said children who are prone to anxiety tend to do better when they know what to expect each day, so she suggests getting them settled into a predictable schedule early. “The child would have their time to eat, their time to go to sleep,” she said. “Maybe a couple of weeks before they start school, they can start a new routine that won’t change when school starts.” Davis-Coelho agreed that advance parental planning can make a big difference. She said parents can do other little things, too, like drive their child to school before classes even start. “Show them where you’re going to be dropping them off, where they’re going to get to play at recess,” she said. “Or pretending. Playing school. Actually getting the toys, having the kid be the teacher and the parent be the teacher. Playing school bus if they’re going to be riding the school bus, where they walk down to where their bus stop is and the parent pulls up in their car and pretends to be the school bus.” The goal, she said, is to make school feel familiar, so the transition is less difficult. Rosemond said his approach to treating separation anxiety is unorthodox because he actually recommends against prolonged conversations about a child’s issues. “Most professionals are going to tell parents to reassure the child and sit down and talk to the child,” he said. “I am absolutely convinced, and my experience confirms this, that the more you talk to the child about the problem, the worse it gets.” So, who’s right? Davis-Coelho said she believes different strategies work with different children. Ultimately, it’s up to parents to decide what approach is resonating with their child. Crying fits One thing everyone agrees on is that parents should nip meltdowns in the bud. That means the best thing a parent can do if their child is crying is leave. “The parents have got to say, ‘We’ve talked about this, and we’re not going to talk about it anymore. You’re going into class, and I’m leaving,’” Rosemond says. “It’s got to be very, very short and sweet.” Bravo and Davis-Coelho agree. “Keeping the amount of time that you let that go on to a minimum is important,” Davis-Coelho said. “The longer the child is feeling that level of panic and upset, the more the memory is getting burned into their head at how awful it is.” Planning an exit Although it’s difficult to leave a child in tears, Rosemond said parents need to be tough. “These parents have this anxiety that this reflects some deep-seated psychological issue that has to be resolved,” he said. “I say to parents, ‘No, there’s no deep-seated psychological issue here at all. It’s just that this child has never learned to comfortably separate from you because of your anxieties. You have to be the actor here. You have to suck it up. The minute the child sees that you have no anxieties whatsoever, the child’s going to be fine. Even if the child cries … it’s no problem. The schools are used to dealing with these things.’” Experts say that most anxious children will stop crying within 15 to 20 minutes of their parents’ departure, and they will then join the class. “Eventually, they’ll calm down,” Bravo said. “Some kids will be different than others if they have a different temperament. … The parent has to be really firm and just leave and let the teacher take care of it. Many times, just 10, 15 minutes later, they will go away and the child will slowly get used to the new environment.” The day after Often, the first day is the toughest, but Davis-Coelho said parents also can take steps to make the rest of the week go smoothly. “The first strategy you can use is developing what I call a special ritual in the morning between you and your child,” she said, “a particular way of saying goodbye. A phrase that you both repeat to each other about seeing each other later. A special handshake. Some sort of ritual in the morning. … Every morning you say goodbye in that particular way.” Pay attention Most children will have conquered their separation anxiety within a month, experts say. If the problem drags on, there might be a broader problem. “If it’s interfering with their functioning or with the family’s functioning, if it’s causing a lot of stress or interfering with them going to school, making friends, probably at that point therapy should be sought,” Davis-Coelho said. In the unlikely case that it comes to that, Bravo said parents should consider a family appointment because the child could be reacting to something unexpected. “Look at if there are any major changes going on in the family, for instance divorce, moving to a different neighborhood, different school, someone who died recently,” she said. “If the parents think that this is a problem, you know, the separation anxiety is becoming a problem, I would recommend they seek treatment that includes family therapy because many times the child is just reflecting something else that’s going on in the family.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

The American Bar Association is moving ahead with changes in its accreditation system that faculty members fear could erode tenure protections for many professors and further weaken job security for clinical faculty members, many of whom don’t have tenure to start with. A special committee of the ABA last week released the latest version of proposed guidelines on academic freedom — just days before an ABA committee met Saturday to discuss (but not alter) the draft language. In the weeks before the draft was released, many faculty leaders had urged the ABA panel not to do the two key things its draft does: • Remove language from the ABA standards that has been interpreted by faculty members as requiring law schools to have a tenure system. (The ABA panel that wrote the revisions now says that tenure was never a requirement and that it is removing references to tenure for reasons of clarity — although that interpretation of current policy is being met with skepticism.) • Remove specific language requiring law schools with clinical professors and legal writing professors to offer them specific forms of job security short of tenure. The ABA panel recommending the changes has stressed that the accreditation requirements still insist that law schools protect academic freedom, and that many law schools would not necessarily change their tenure or other job protection procedures. The report accompanying the most recent draft characterizes the protections for clinical faculty members that would be eliminated as “intrusive mandates” that “are not the proper providence of an accreditation agency and provide approved law schools with latitude and flexibility to articulate and implement policies to attract a qualified faculty and protect faculty academic freedom.” OSU: Leader of USA’s biggest campus takes on tenure 2010: The year of the education documentary? ON THE WEB: Tenure as a tarnished brass ring Many law professors think otherwise. They are angry not only over the recommendations, but the fact that the new draft came out immediately after so many groups had issued lengthy statements in favor of preserving existing protections. “They are trying to ramrod through an ill-advised proposal,” said Michael A. Olivas, a professor of law at the University of Houston. The proposal is “the worst of all worlds, disguised as administrative tinkering.” Olivas is president-elect of the Association of American Law Schools, although he said he was speaking for himself, not the association. Many of the association’s leaders, however, share his concerns. In recent weeks — just before the ABA committee came out with its new draft — a series of impassioned letters were sent to the panel. Robert A. Gorman, an emeritus law professor at the University of Pennsylvania , wrote to the committee that tenure was particularly needed for law schools. “The research, scholarship and teaching of the law professoriate commonly deal with matters of public moment and controversy, more so than is the case in most other parts of the university; and the style of teaching is typically more challenging, argumentative and indeed on occasion confrontational,” Gorman wrote. “Reliance on tenure as a buttress for academic freedom is thus particularly justified for law faculty.” After Gorman’s letter circulated, another was sent endorsing it — by 11 other former AALS presidents, among them two former deans of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley and a former law dean at New York University ( John Sexton , currently the university’s president). The American Association of University Professors came out against changing the tenure protections. And the Clinical Legal Education Association has come out against the changes and the timing of the latest proposal. (Links to many of the letters opposing the changes can be found on the ABA site .) With all these legal luminaries opposed to change, why is it going forward? The push started several years ago, and was led by David Van Zandt, the dean of Northwestern University ‘s law school. Van Zandt said at the time that characterizing the changes as an assault on tenure was unfair. He said that it was wrong for the ABA as an accrediting group to require a tenure policy — and that institutions should decide such matters. “Sometimes some people portray this as an attack on tenure,” he said in 2007. “The real issue is whether or not you’re required to have tenure by an outside body such as the ABA. Not that we don’t want to have that institution.” After a period of some momentum, the move to change the standards stalled — but now is proceeding with the new draft. The current policies say that for a law school to be accredited it must have “an established and announced policy with respect to academic freedom and tenure….” That language would be replaced — under the new draft — with this: “A law school shall have an established and announced policy with respect to the protection of academic freedom of its faculty members and shall provide procedures to ensure that its policy is followed….” While the initial push to change the standards came from those saying that tenure was an inappropriate requirement, the new draft says that tenure was never really a requirement at all, so removing the reference to it doesn’t change things in a material way. “[T]he current standards do not require approved law schools to have systems for tenuring of any or all of their faculty members and this draft retains this feature,” the report says, adding that some have seen a tenure requirement as “implied” by the current language, but that this isn’t really the case. “Interests of greater clarity and transparency require that the revised standards explicitly state whether or not schools must provide tenure rights and for whom on the law faculty. So, this draft retains, explicitly, the current policy that tenure rights are not required as a matter of accreditation policy,” the report states. It notes that there are numerous references to the importance of academic freedom and its key role in legal education. While publicly the ABA leaders pushing for change say that they are not against tenure or law professors, supporters of tenure have noted a steady stream of criticism of law professors that emerges whenever the issue heats up. The National Jurist , a publication for law students, recently ran an article called ” When Law Profs Slack, the Students Suffer .” And that prompted coverage in a The Wall Street Journal blog: ” Are Law Professors Just Plain Lazy? ” Olivas said that he believes that a small group within the ABA leadership “just doesn’t believe in tenure” and wants to change the system. This is more than a little ironic, Olivas said, noting that ABA’s leaders include judges and law firm partners — two categories of people who themselves enjoy a kind of tenure, the latter “tenure with real money.” He said that the declarations of support for academic freedom are empty. “Academic freedom doesn’t anchor tenure. Tenure anchors academic freedom,” he said. So the panel is recommending that academic freedom be preserved while “undercutting” the very system that has protected it. Rights of clinical faculty Another key issue in the changes concerns the rights of faculty who may not be on the tenure track — in law schools, clinical and legal writing faculty members are most commonly in this category. Clinical law professors run programs in which students are supervised as they take on legal cases — frequently on controversial issues — and law schools are regularly attacked over the choice of such cases. Some lawmakers in Louisiana and Maryland pushed legislation this year to crack down on these legal clinics. In Maryland, a clinic at the University of Maryland offended the poultry industry by representing environmental groups. In Louisiana, the target was a law clinic at Tulane University that has done environmental work that angered business interests there. The language that the ABA panel wants to remove from the requirements says that law schools “shall afford to full time clinical faculty members a form of security of position reasonably similar to tenure, and non-compensatory perquisites reasonably similar to those provided other full time faculty members.” Gorman, the Penn professor, said in his letter that removing protections for clinical law professors was a move in the wrong direction. “Nor should it be necessary to explain that of all faculty categories, it has been the clinicians whose teaching — most especially, in the form of live-client litigation clinics — has placed them in the position that is most vulnerable to criticism and pressure (often of the most coarse and intolerable nature) from persons, corporations and legislators who are discomforted by the work of the clinic,” he wrote. “It is precisely the clinical faculty member for whom academic freedom is a vital concern and not merely an abstract slogan, and for whom tenure provides a crucial guarantee that instruction can be carried out in the best interests of our students, and of the public.” Olivas said he was bothered by the way the current standards let law schools place clinical and writing faculty in a separate class, with some protections but not the same as tenured faculty members. He criticized the ABA for moving to end the limited protections these non-tenure faculty members have, rather than moving them to an appropriate equal status with other professors. “There should be no bright line distinction between the two” kinds of faculty members, he said. “If clinical education and legal writing are appropriate parts of legal education, they should have the same protections, the same resources and the same faculty governance and all the academic freedom that is provided, including tenure. They need it more.” A spokeswoman for the ABA said that it would take at least 18 months, should various association panels endorse the changes, for them to take effect.

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Slow readers of the world, uuuuuuuu…niiiiite! At a time when people spend much of their time skimming websites, text messages and e-mails, an English professor at the University of New Hampshire is making the case for slowing down as a way to gain more meaning and pleasure out of the written word. Thomas Newkirk isn’t the first or most prominent proponent of the so-called “slow reading” movement, but he argues it’s becoming all the more important in a culture and educational system that often treats reading as fast food to be gobbled up as quickly as possible. “You see schools where reading is turned into a race, you see kids on the stopwatch to see how many words they can read in a minute,” he said. “That tells students a story about what reading is. It tells students to be fast is to be good.” Newkirk is encouraging schools from elementary through college to return to old strategies such as reading aloud and memorization as a way to help students truly “taste” the words. He uses those techniques in his own classroom, where students have told him that they’ve become so accustomed from flitting from page to page online that they have trouble concentrating while reading printed books. READING: Proficiency at 4th grade linked to nation’s success COLLEGE: One-third need remedial reading, math “One student told me even when he was reading a regular book, he’d come to a word and it would almost act like a hyper link. It would just send his mind off to some other thing,” Newkirk said. “I think they recognize they’re missing out on something.” The idea is not to read everything as slowly as possible, however. As with the slow food movement, the goal is a closer connection between readers and their information, said John Miedema, whose 2009 book “Slow Reading” explores the movement. “It’s not just about students reading as slowly as possible,” he said. “To me, slow reading is about bringing more of the person to bear on the book.” Miedema, a technology specialist at IBM in Ottawa, Ontario, said little formal research has been done on slow reading, other than studies on physical conditions such as dyslexia. But he said the movement is gaining ground: the 2004 book In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Changing the Cult of Speed sprang from author Carl Honore’s realization that his “rushaholism” had gotten out of hand when he considered buying a collection of “one-minute bedtime stories” for his children. In a 2007 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education , the executive humanities editor at Harvard University Press describes a worldwide reading crisis and calls for a “revolution in reading.” “Instead of rushing by works so fast that we don’t even muss up our hair, we should tarry, attend to the sensuousness of reading, allow ourselves to enter the experience of words,” Lindsay Waters wrote. Though slow, or close reading, always has been emphasized at the college-level in literary criticism and other areas, it’s also popping up in elementary schools, Miedema said. Mary Ellen Webb, a third-grade teacher at Mast Way Elementary School in Durham, N.H., has her students memorize poems upward of 40 lines long and then perform them for their peers and parents. She does it more for the sense of pride her students feel but said the technique does transfer to other kinds of reading — the children remember how re-reading and memorizing their poems helped them understand tricky text. “Memorization is one of those lost things, it hasn’t been the ‘in’ thing for a while,” she said. “There’s a big focus on fluency. Some people think because you can read quickly … that’s a judge of what a great reader they are. I think fluency is important, but I think we can err too much on that side.” It’s all about balance, said Patti Flynn, an assistant principal in Nashua, N.H., and mother of a 10-year-old girl. Her school has offered, and her daughter has participated in, numerous reading challenges that reward students for reaching certain milestones — a pizza party for a class that reads 100 books, for example. Though such contests may appear to emphasize speed rather than reading for pleasure or comprehension, they also are good incentives for children who weren’t motivated to read, she said. The challenges have encouraged parents to make reading a priority at home, Flynn said. “The goal shouldn’t be to be whipping through a certain number of pages, the goal should be to make sure kids are gaining some conceptual understanding,” she said. Her daughter, Lily, said she considers herself a “medium-speed” reader and had to increase her speed to finish about 10 books for her classroom’s 100-book challenge. But she said she enjoyed the process and feels like she understood and remembers what she read. “It was fun,” she said. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

PHILADELPHIA — When the Microsoft-designed School of the Future opened, the facility was a paragon of contemporary architecture, with a green roof, light-filled corridors and the latest classroom technology, all housed in a dazzling white modern building. It might as well have been a fishbowl: Educators and media from around the world watched to see whether Microsoft could reform public education through innovation and technology. Although the school’s creative ambitions have been frustrated by high principal turnover, curriculum tensions and a student body unfamiliar with laptop computer culture, the school graduates its first senior class Tuesday with each student having been accepted to an institution of higher learning. “The first three years were definitely a challenge,” said Mary Cullinane, Microsoft’s liaison to the school. “They’re hitting they’re groove now. I’m excited to see what’s in store.” From the beginning, everything about the $63 million School of the Future was designed to be different. Built in the city’s rough Parkside section with district money, the school partnered with Microsoft on new approaches to curriculum, instruction and hiring. It attracted reform-minded teachers and students bent on avoiding traditional high schools. INFLUENCE: Bill Gates pushes education reform The vision was for a paperless, textbook-less school that embodied the motto “Continuous, Relevant, Adaptive.” Each student would get a take-home laptop on which to keep notes, do homework and take tests. But learners are chosen by a lottery of public school students. Most are low-income and without home computers, yet they are expected to manage their high school careers on a laptop. “I felt kind of awkward,” said senior Kenneth Bolds, 17. “I was used to using books and pencils for eight years.” Educators also assumed learners would enter the school performing at grade level, but half the students in the academically troubled district are not proficient at reading or math. The school’s first set of standardized test scores last year were dismal. Only 7.5% of 11th graders scored proficient or higher in math; 23.4% scored proficient or higher in reading. Cullinane notes that the school can’t control students’ education before ninth grade, but said test scores don’t tell the whole story. “It is a long-term journey and we have to get away from short-term yardsticks,” she said. The project-based curriculum also caused problems because it did not translate to district benchmarks. Its interdisciplinary nature made it hard to tell what material had been taught, said Nancy Hopkins-Evans, special assistant to the district’s chief academic officer. “Our issue was that you had content and standards that you absolutely needed to cover,” Hopkins-Evans said. Report cards, too, were incompatible with the district’s needs. The narrative assessments rated students from “Advanced” to “Not on the Radar” instead of giving letter grades. And the idea to replicate a professional work day by using a 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. schedule had to be altered; some students needed the traditional school day. All the while, there were tours, tours, tours. More than 3,000 people from 50 countries have visited the school, said Cullinane, worldwide director of innovation for Microsoft Education. Senior Mahcaiyah Wearing-Gooden, 18, said she led countless tours as a freshman, showing off computerized blackboards (“smart boards”) and digital lockers that popped open by waving an ID card. “It was a lot to process at the time,” she said. Principal Rosalind Chivis — the school’s fourth — described the building’s journey as “trying to build a plane while flying it.” Yet now, she said, a revamped curriculum, steady leadership and better use of resources and scheduling has yielded the “first full year of uninterrupted education.” Teacher Aruna Arjunan said part of the school’s strength lies in offering a combination of academic, technical and real-world skills. Students’ familiarity with Microsoft programs make them employable straight out of high school, she said. They are also evaluated on “competencies” that Seattle-based Microsoft uses with its own employees, such as dealing with ambiguity and thinking on the fly. “There are kids in this building who would have flunked out of other high schools,” Arjunan said. “I just think the culture here is unlike any other.” All 117 seniors were accepted to post-secondary programs, from community colleges to selective schools like Villanova University ; however, 11 of them must attend summer school to graduate. Some students, like Wearing-Gooden, weren’t even considering college as freshmen. But this fall, Wearing-Gooden will be studying climatology on a scholarship at Green Mountain College in Vermont. She said she realized her potential at the School of the Future, which offered individual attention, a supportive atmosphere and a familial dynamic. The hectic first years also taught Wearing-Gooden a valuable life lesson. “It showed me that the world is not as stable as we want it to be,” she said. “Now I’m ready for anything.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Starting the school day earlier may lead to more car accidents involving teenagers, new research suggests. The study, which looked at schools in two cities in Virginia with different start times, found an association between earlier classes and more crashes among sleep-deprived students. “Teenagers need over nine hours sleep a night, and it looks like a large number of teens don’t get sufficient sleep … part of that relates to the time that high schools begin,” said study author Dr. Robert Vorona, an associate professor of internal medicine in the Division of Sleep Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Va. The findings were to be presented Wednesday at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Sleep Societies, in San Antonio. “There are data that demonstrate that lack of sleep has negative consequences for teens,” he said. “And some data show that younger drivers are more likely to have crashes when they have inadequate sleep.” The study compared crash rates in 2008 for high school students with widely varying school starting times in Virginia Beach and Chesapeake, two adjacent cities with similar demographics. Virginia Beach’s classes started at 7:20 a.m.; Chesapeake’s began at 8:40 a.m. While the overall accident rate for all drivers was higher in Virginia Beach, the difference between teens in the two cities was stark, Vorona said. Chesapeake had 46.2 crashes for every 1,000 teen drivers, compared to 65.4 per 1,000 teen drivers in Virginia Beach — a 41% difference. The statistics are significant, Vorona said, even though they did not prove a direct relationship between school starting times and roadway safety. “We think the Virginia Beach students may be sleep-deprived,” said Vorona, “and that is perhaps the reason for the increased crashes.” Vorona said that the amount of sleep teens get largely depends on what time they get up in the morning. “They tend to go to bed later no matter what time they get up,” said Vorona. Other research shows teens who start school later get more sleep. He recommended high schools look at starting the day later. Beyond the impact on driving, early start times probably affect other important areas, Vorona said, calling for research on how they affect teenagers’ moods, tardiness and academic performance. “If you think about something like calculus, we’re asking teens to perform complicated mental functions when their minds are probably not fully alert yet,” he said. Dr. Barbara Phillips, of the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, agreed. Teens are “biologically programmed” to get sleepy and wake up later than adults, said Phillips, a professor with the school’s division of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine. “They truly can’t help it. They’re just not going to get sleepy at 10 p.m., so it’s hard for them to get the eight to 10 hours of sleep they need to get when they have to catch the 7:30 bus.” Phillips is co-author of a study that compared car crash rates and increased sleep for adolescent drivers in Lexington, Ky., when the school district instituted a later school day in 1998. Data were analyzed from the two years before and after the change. The study found that when teens increased their sleep, crash rates declined 16.5% during a period when teen crash rates throughout the state increased by 7.8%. “Younger, inexperienced drivers don’t fare well with additional handicaps such as impaired alertness caused by having to get up earlier than is natural for them,” said Phillips. She noted that schools often resist starting the school day later because it affects bus schedules, sports and other after-school activities. “Changing high school start times is important and difficult,” she said. “It can’t happen without commitment and work on the part of parents and school officials. Teens are not in a position to set their schedules. We need to help them.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

LAS VEGAS — The annual convention of the Career College Association was just gearing up for the day Thursday when word started circulating that the U.S. Senate’s education committee planned to start this month a series of hearings on the increasing flow of federal student aid money to for-profit higher education . It was a stark reminder — in case anyone here really needed it — that the rapidly growing college sector faces a level of federal scrutiny probably unmatched since the early 1990s, when Congress approved a set of changes to the Higher Education Act aimed at reining in perceived abuses of the financial aid programs by what were commonly referred to as “fly-by-night trade schools.” Just how much today’s environment felt like d?j? vu from 20 years ago depended on whom you talked to here. To many financial analysts, investor types and others who focus on stock prices or otherwise take a short-term view, the mood was one of steady-state alarm, focused on the cloud of intensified federal regulation that has loomed over colleges for the last year. Those in this group believe that the for-profit sector has a target on its back, with a coalition of consumer advocates, short-selling investors (who profit if stock prices fall), and ideological government bureaucrats pushing an aggressive, activist agenda. To some observers who’ve worked in and around the industry longer, though, the current round of federal scrutiny (in the form of potentially tough new rules) — while unfair in their eyes — is a far cry from the ’90s, for a few reasons. First, they argue, for-profit colleges are too embedded in the fabric of higher education, and too essential to meeting President Obama’s goals for increasing the country’s college completion rates, to be dealt with in a way that would seriously damage their ability to contribute to that effort. FOR-PROFIT: Sector leads way in e-textbook use COLLEGE BLOG: New student group support for for-profit association Second, during the purge of the early 1990s, for-profit colleges were singled out for scrutiny, with policies put in place that focused specifically on reining them in. This time around, while some federal policymakers clearly have special concerns about for-profit colleges, higher education leaders in all sectors are feeling (and in many cases bristling at) heightened scrutiny from federal, state and other policymakers who see higher education as underperforming and costing students and taxpayers alike too much. “I don’t know anybody in our sector who doesn’t think that the ’92 amendments, and all the trauma they brought about, ultimately had a positive outcome and changed the nature of quality assurance in this sector for the better — though it was clearly something we resisted at the time,” said Elise Scanlon, a Washington lawyer who spent nearly 20 years as an accreditor of for-profit colleges. “Right now it’s hard to see what could come out of this round that would make things better for us, but it is clearly part of a push for better information about quality in all of higher education, at a time of increasingly scarce resources.” Mood of the meeting By many measures, the advocates for for-profit (or “private sector,” as they prefer to call it) higher education who gathered here for the annual meeting of the sector’s main advocacy group could be feeling good. Enrollments in the institutions have grown to nearly 10% of all postsecondary students, and the economic downturn of the last year has enrollments booming. The exhibit hall at the meeting here was bristling with companies of all sorts seeking to sell their services to the institutions, a reflection of their steady and sturdy growth. Bottom line (as it were), business is booming. And yet, that very same enrollment growth — and the fact that it is driven in significant part with Pell Grants and federal student loans — has given new and added urgency to consumer advocates, federal regulators, and others who believe that the for-profit institutions are charging students too much for an education of inferior quality. (A series of critical news media stories have focused on dubious practices.) Those concerns have been at the forefront of the Education Department’s push since last winter to consider a new mechanism for ensuring that vocational programs are helping their graduates find “gainful employment,” among other rules aimed at bolstering the “integrity” of the federal financial aid programs. The department’s favored approach, which would judge programs based on a ratio comparing the incomes of graduates to their monthly payments on their student loan debt, has been vehemently opposed by many career college officials, who say that instituting such a policy could force the closure of many programs and potentially cut off access to college for tens if not hundreds of thousands of students. Lobbyists for and leaders of the colleges have been feverishly opposing the gainful employment regulation (as well as some of the department’s other expected rules), arguing that department officials do not have sufficient evidence and/or justification to support the approach, urging the Obama administration to reconsider. COLLEGE: What if higher ed just isn’t for everyone? OBAMA GOALS: Community colleges like new attention They appear to have made at least minor advances in slowing down the department’s progress in recent days. On Friday, the Office of Management and Budget placed a cryptic note in the Federal Register concluding that the department’s proposed program integrity rules could have a major economic impact, a designation that requires the Education Department to strengthen the evidence it must provide to justify the need for the regulation. In announcing a June 24 hearing (and “a series” of others to follow) by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), the panel’s chairman and long a critic of corporate higher education, cited on Thursday the rapid expansion of for-profit colleges and of the federal student aid funds flowing to them. “Students at for-profit institutions are borrowing more, and more frequently, than their peers at nonprofit schools, and according to the Department of Education, one in five students who left a for-profit college in 2007 defaulted on their loan within three years,” the committee’s news release said. “We need to ensure for-profit colleges are working well to meet the needs of students and not just shareholders,” said Harkin. “We owe it to students and taxpayers to make sure these dollars are being well spent.” For-profit college leaders said they welcomed the chance to tell their story. “Nontraditional students are the new tradition in higher education, and federal student aid is helping millions of working adults get the skills and abilities they need to compete in a global workforce,” Harris Miller , president of the Career College Association, said in a statement. “For these students to be successful, however, change is needed. Private sector institutions are bringing important innovations to postsecondary education, and we welcome the opportunity for a full and open exchange with the committee. These hearings will give our inclusive educational institutions an opportunity to address myths with facts and figures.” To critics of the colleges who see them as under siege from federal policymakers and others, that may sound like bravado. But it’s a view shared by some others who’ve seen for-profit higher education survive previous tough scrutiny, as in 1992. “Back then, lots of people said, ‘Oh my god, the world’s going to end, it’s going to put us all out of business,’” Nancy Broff, a Washington lawyer and former general counsel of the Career College Association, said of the 1992 renewal of the Higher Education Act. “The reality is that this is a very adaptable and resilient group of people and institutions, and they have learned to adapt. And they will this time, too.” Leaders in the sector express confidence that even as federal policymakers seek greater oversight of the institutions, they will avoid steps that could severely impair the colleges’ ability to meet Americans’ demand for higher education, especially at a time when many public institutions are cutting their enrollments because of budget gaps. The country cannot come close to President Obama’s college completion goal without help from the private sector colleges, they say. “The long-term trend is that we need more [higher education] capacity,” said Daniel Hamburger, president and chief executive officer of Devry, Inc. “In the end, I’m confident that smart people will generally find solutions that are in students’ best interests.”

SUWANEE, Ga. (AP) — By third grade, students should know how to write a complex sentence and add fractions, no matter if they live in Georgia or California. Eighth-graders should understand the Pythagorean theorem. And by high school graduation, all U.S. students should be ready for college or a career. That’s the goal of sweeping new education benchmarks released Wednesday called the Common Core State Standards, a project that aims to replace a hodgepodge of educational goals varying wildly from state to state with a uniform set of expectations for students. It’s the first time states have joined together to establish what students should know by the time they graduate high school. “With these standards, we can provide all of the country’s children with the education they deserve,” said West Virginia schools superintendent Steve Paine, who gathered with other educators and officials from across the country at Peachtree Ridge High School in Suwanee just outside Atlanta to release the final draft of the standards. “Having consistent standards across the states means all of our children are going to be prepared for college and career, regardless of zip code.” States are expected to use the standards to revise their curriculum and tests to make learning more uniform across the country, eliminating inequities in education not only between states but also among districts. The standards also will ensure students transferring to a school district in a different state won’t be far behind their classmates or have to repeat classes because they are more advanced. Under Common Core, third-graders should understand subject-verb agreement, fifth-graders need to know about metaphors and similes and seventh-graders must understand how to calculate surface area. States that sign up are supposed to use the standards as a base on which to build their curricula and testing, but they can make their benchmarks tougher than Common Core. All but two states — Alaska and Texas — signed on to the original concept of Common Core more than a year ago. Critics worry that the standards will basically nationalize public schools rather than letting states decide what is best for their students. Texas’ commissioner of education, Robert Scott, has said that the state didn’t sign on to Common Core because it wants to preserve its “sovereign authority to determine what is appropriate for Texas children to learn in its public schools.” So far, the standards have been adopted by Kentucky, Hawaii, Maryland, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Another 40 states and Washington, D.C., have agreed to adopt the standards in coming months, said Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers , which joined with the National Governors Association in leading the Common Core project. “We don’t think it’s acceptable that because a student lives down in Atlanta and not up here, they should have different outcomes,” said Wilhoit before Wednesday’s event in the northern Atlanta suburbs. The federal government was not involved but has encouraged the project, including adoption of the standards as part of the scoring in the U.S. Department of Education ‘s “Race to the Top” grant competition. President Barack Obama has said he wants to make money from Title I — the federal government’s biggest school aid program — contingent on adoption of college- and career-ready reading and math standards. “As the nation seeks to maintain our international competitiveness, ensure all students regardless of background have access to a high quality education and prepare all students for college, work and citizenship, these standards are an important foundation for our collective work,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Wednesday in a prepared statement. Common Core was structured over a year of meetings with teachers, parents, school administrators, civil rights leaders, education policymakers, business leaders and others from across the country. The group produced multiple drafts and collected comments from more than 10,000 people online. “The world is small now, and we’re not just competing with students in our county or across the state. We are competing with the world,” said Robert Kosicki, who graduated from a Georgia high school this year after transferring from Connecticut and having to repeat classes because the curriculum was so different. “This is a move away from the time when a student can be punished for the location of his home or the depth of his father’s pockets.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

This is a preview of a week-long video series starting Monday, May 24 about people who are veterans, single parents, full-time workers — and students, too. Click “see trailers” (above, left) now for the preview, and check back here, students2.usatoday.com , next week for the full video on each featured student. What comes to mind when you hear “college student”? To many Americans , it’s someone who goes to college straight from high school, lives in a dorm, and gets a degree four years later. But things have changed. Three-fourths of today’s students no longer fit that traditional model. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, about half of today’s students are financially independent; 49% are enrolled part-time; 38% work full time; 27% have dependents of their own. Almost half — 12 million — attend two-year community colleges rather than four-year schools. And most students who start college don’t finish. Only 56% of students at four-year colleges complete a degree within six years, and just 20% of first-time students at public community colleges get a degree or certificate within three years. In their own words A video project dubbed “Take America to College” aims to tell the story of today’s non-traditional college students in their own words and images. The project organizers in January put out a casting call and more than 200 nontraditional college students responded by sending in their stories; 78 uploaded audition videos. Five were chosen to represent the millions of students who struggle to complete a college degree. They are: •Dennis Medina, a police officer and a night student at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston; •Kathryn McCormick, a single mom who waitresses 35 hours a week and is enrolled at Valencia Community College in Orlando •Shane Burrows, who works full-time as a sales assistant while studying at Sierra Community College in Rocklin, Calif.; •Brandon Krapf, an Iraq war veteran studying at American University in Washington, D.C.; •Charnee Ball, a Navy veteran, also at Valencia Community College in Orlando The students each received $500 and won a trip to Washington, D.C., to meet with policymakers. Their stories are featured in a week-long series of videos airing online here at students2.usatoday.com starting May 24. The videos are produced by Purple States TV, a media company that uses both professionally filmed and self-filmed video footage to dramatize issues of public policy, in collaboration with DCTV and the Seattle-based social marketing firm Banyan Branch, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Kodak donated Zi8 Pocket Video Cameras used by the students to capture and share their stories. Real students, real stories More background on the five team members and their stories: •Dennis Medina — a Boston police officer chosen for the team in an online contest. “I’m not your stereotypical student,” Medina says. “I wear plain clothes with the Boston Police Department Youth Violence Strike Force also known as the gang unit. When I was employed by the corrections office, I started taking college classes, but money got tight, and life got in the way. When I moved to the Boston Police Department, I realized that without a college degree I couldn’t further my career. I can only take one or two classes a semester. Going to college is almost impossible … I have court during the day, then I have my regular shift which is 4 p.m. to midnight. I also have family obligations. I live with my wife, two sons and a daughter and my grandson also lives with us.” •Kathryn McCormick — A single parent and full-time waitress, studying to become a physician assistant. “Each year I take out about $15,000 in student loans to pay my bills. This is an incredibly large amount of money that is going to take me a long time to pay off when I get out of school,” she says. “It’s also not enough to pay my bills. I still have to work. The program I’m trying to get in is extremely competitive and I need every single ounce of my time that I can possibly squeeze out of my day to make sure that my grades are perfect. I’d love to see a change in financial aid as far as the one-size-fits-all cap that they have. It doesn’t matter whether you are a single mom of two kids and struggling and working and trying to do the best that you can. A person who’s a single person still gets the same amount of money as you do. That’s really hard.” •Shane Burrows — Works full time as a sales assistant while accumulating college credits toward an associates degree; he wants to be a music teacher. He is having trouble completing his degree because core courses aren’t available in the evenings, or are being cut because of California’s budget crisis. “When I turned 18, I dropped out of college and worked two jobs because I just couldn’t afford to pay for my education,” he says. “I lost my mom when I was only 7. My dad could only afford to provide a house over our heads, food, clothing, and basics to get by. I needed to work to live and unfortunately I had to put school on the side. After taking five years off school, I decided to go back part time at a junior college. I work full time and quit my second job so I could have time for school. I would love to take more than four classes a semester but I can barely afford to live let alone pay for classes and books. I’m drowning in debt and on the verge of filing for bankruptcy. With rising tuition costs and budget cuts cutting classes, I feel like I’ll never finish.” •Brandon Krapf — an Iraq war veteran, now in the Army reserves and a senior at American University, in Washington, D.C. “When you get the GI Bill it’s supposed to cover tuition but you end up living off of it. They don’t come and tell you, ‘Oh hey, listen, you also have to cover books, rent and your regular bills on top of that.” Luckily with the post 9-11 GI Bill it’s been a lot easier for student vets but there’s still been a lot of troubles with it, especially last semester when they had a huge influx of new applications for the GI Bill. Going to school’s probably put me in debt with student loans a good $100,000 dollars.” •Charnee Ball — Navy veteran who wants to be an aviation mechanic. She is not receiving GI benefits because she was discharged under the Pentagon’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy. “I know the people who make those decisions think it’s for the greater good, but believe me, there’s been so many qualified technicians and officers and people who went and did their job and served their country that have been discharged for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. I did my job. I served my country. And when I need it most, I’m not eligible (for benefits). So it’s really hard for me to make it through, to realize my dream of becoming an aviation mechanic. Right now I’m about $38,000 in debt from student loans. It is a struggle every day to find the money to make ends meet.” Have questions about the students’ college experiences? Leave them in the comments, or save them for a live discussion with Take America to College participants on May 26, 2010 at 1 p.m. ET. You can set an e-mail reminder for the chat in the window below. Chat with the students

More than once, Bailey Osborne thought about dropping out. Like the time her washing machine caught fire. And when daughter Madison was in bed for 11 days with swine flu. That’s when Osborne would look at her four kids and remind herself, yet again, that giving up on college would be a little like giving up on them. “I knew in my heart why I couldn’t just quit,” says Osborne, who on Sunday will celebrate Mother’s Day with a brand-new bachelor’s degree. Her kids — Ashley, 26, Tyler, 25, Casey, 16, and Madison, 4 — plan to be her cheering section Saturday when she graduates from Champlain College in Burlington, Vt. Osborne, 48, says she might never have made it without Champlain’s Single Parents Program, founded in 1988 on the premise that higher education is the surest ticket out of poverty. Rising out of poverty It seems to have made a difference. More than 500 students have earned a degree through the program. A study for the state found that, of 4,007 households that left Vermont welfare rolls in 2003, those who then pursued a college education earned more on average and were less likely to have returned to welfare a year later than those who didn’t go on to school. No one tracks that kind of progress on a national level. But federal data suggest more single parents are entering college. In 2008, they represented 13.4% of the nation’s 18 million college students. Most were women (74%). About one-third attended for-profit institutions. They were more than twice as likely as other students (54% vs. 23%) to be eligible for Pell Grants for needy students, says the non-profit Institute for Women’s Policy Research. And, as Osborne’s experience suggests, low-income parents face challenges far different from their childless peers: •About 1,700 colleges have day care centers for students, parents and faculty, and many also provide academic and financial support. Yet child care sometimes costs more than tuition, and federal funding for campus centers for low-income families has dropped from $25 million in 2002 to about $16 million last year. • Family Care Solutions, a non-profit in Philadelphia, has awarded nearly $2 million in child care grants to low-income students since 1998 but has made no new awards recently. “The lack of funding has seriously threatened our programs,” says president Sherrill Mosee. Demand is high: About 435,000 parents (most of them mothers) applied for scholarships offered since 2008 by eLearners.com, which links students to online programs. It has given 150 awards so far and wants to give 280 this year. •Federal welfare laws since 1996 have emphasized jobs more than education, says Amy Ellen Duke-Benfield, a policy analyst for the Center for Law and Social Policy, a non-profit advocacy group. A few states, including Maine and Kentucky, have created incentives for college-going welfare recipients. But, she says, many states are cutting services, such as tutoring and transportation, that are often critical to single parents. Help for parents is eroding Champlain’s program, funded by state, federal and campus dollars, is no exception. Vermont recently halved its contribution; director Carol Moran-Brown says services will continue, with some changes. Professionals in the field would like to see programs on more campuses but aren’t optimistic. “I have not seen a growing interest in supporting student parents,” says Karen Alsbrooks of Ohio State University , which has a program and has hosted conferences on the topic in recent years. She also is co-founder, in 2005, of Higher Education Alliance of Advocates for Students with Children. About 25 colleges, including Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Berea College in Kentucky, are members. Each program has unique features. Some offer housing, for example, or child care. All aim to help single-parents juggle multiple responsibilities. When her daughter’s illness kept Osborne at home, for example, case manager Felicia Messuri arranged extensions on her homework. When Osborne’s washer was damaged, Messuri tapped an emergency fund to replace it. Many times, Osborne says, Messuri was her “go-to person.” And Single Parents Program “is the glue that holds everything together.”