Links for 1/3/11

RiShawn Biddle and Jay Mathews

Mathews: I was intrigued by your argument that what happens in the classroom is NOT the most important part of improving schools. What do you think is more important, and why?

Biddle: Certainly you can't improve schools without improving what happens in classrooms. All that said, you can’t fix what happens in classrooms until you deal with the systemic problems plaguing American public education today: Low teacher quality; abysmal curricula; the failure to inform parents and let them be lead players in education decision-making; and a culture of low expectations set by teachers, administrators, parents and community leaders alike…

TAMAR LEWIN

if everybody in the class gets an A, what does an A mean?...

Princeton adopted guidelines in 2004 providing that no more than 35 percent of undergraduate grades should be A’s, a policy that remains controversial on campus…

Dartmouth transcripts include median grades, along with the number of courses in which the student exceeded, equaled or came in lower than those medians. Columbia transcripts show the percentage of students in the course who earned an A…

a study by three Cornell economists found a large increase in enrollment in courses with a median grade of A — further driving grade inflation…

JAMES WARREN

Heckman marshals ample data to suggest that better teaching, higher standards, smaller classrooms and more Internet access “have less impact than we think,”…

He urges more effectively educating children before they step into a classroom where, as Chicago teachers tell me, they often are clueless about letters, numbers and colors — and lack the attentiveness and persistence to ever catch up…

Stuart Rojstaczer & Christopher Healy

nationwide rise in grades over time of roughly 0.1 change in GPA per decade… They also may help explain why undergraduate students are increasingly disengaged from learning and why the US has difficulty filling its employment needs in engineering and technology…