"There’s no doubt about it. Getting your degree – either a Master’s or bachelor’s – is a great way of upping your chances of scoring a better job or climbing the ladder faster within the organization at which you’re already working.
"But things are different for adults returning to college life: they have less time to pursue their studies, have different needs (like online courses) and financial constraints are more pressing. College and university information hub, College Factual, ranks places of higher learning into a handful of different categories. One of those is the Best Colleges for Returning Adults, in which the company rates which institutions offer a great education and best meet the needs of returning adults. (See our gallery below for College Factual’s Top 10.)
"Number one on College Factual’s list is Excelsior College. Located in Albany, New York, the private college is made up entirely of part-time students— over 38,000 of them. More than 2,600 of whom are Post-9/11 G.I. Bill recipients. The school ranks highly for its online courses in business, management and marketing but really shines in its online coursework in engineering, health, nursing and liberal arts. Students graduating in the 2013-2014 academic year reported going on to jobs with an average salary of $50,000.
"In the 2-spot on College Factual’s ranking is Charter Oak State College, based in New Britain, Connecticut. About 80% of the public school’s students are part-timers, and its online courses in liberal arts studies are among its most popular for returning adults. Graduates went on to starting positions that paid $37,000 a year. One drawback, it would seem, is that the only degree the school offers beyond a bachelor’s is a Master’s in Organizational Effectiveness and Leadership. Adults looking to advance their educations in areas other than that one would need to look elsewhere."
2 comments:
A Review of
Beyond the Classroom:
Why School Reform Has Failed and What Parents Need to Do
By Laurence Steinberg, 1996
Reviewer: Rick Walker
“School reform is not doomed to failure, but changes in other facets of students’ lives must occur before it is to yield any major benefits… I think we have framed the question around the wrong issues (more learning opportunities vs. more rigorous expectations). The discussion has focused on schools, when it should have focused on students. Schools matter less than we wish they would not because student achievement is genetically determined, but because schools are only one small part of the environment in which student achievement develops and is expressed. No genetic account could explain the decline in achievement-test performance over the past 30 years since this is far too short a time period in which to see any genetic effects…What has changed in three decades has not been our schools but our students’ lives outside of school.”
While I’ve always known intuitively that parents play a key role in educating their children, and I continue to work with my three sons on their career goals (all three in college this fall), until reading this book I never fully understood the necessary depths of parenting in its impact on our society and our collective future.
Nor did I understand the real power of the peer group, and I thought that my kids were missing something vital in their work ethic by not being employed while in school. Could all three have done better in high school and/or applied to better colleges? Undoubtedly.
If the extra school work is there for the taking, and has value, it isn’t being described to parents so we can’t really support our children. Parents are not in the equation. We aren’t getting our homework! Steinberg is correct that most of us believe what we read in the media; that school reform is the only answer to our problems with education – probably because we feel so powerless! In 1987, I got an inkling that school reform per se is too simplistic, with the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. I starred a few passages, including his comments about the too great “openness” in our society. Freedom without limits is not freedom at all, and our adolescents have an abundance according to Steinberg – but spend only 15% of their waking hours on their studies! Steinberg’s book is based on hard research, a survey of some 20,000 high school students in nine schools in California and Wisconsin and hundreds of interviews with the students and their families – in a diverse group of school systems. As such, it is a credible piece of work, which he calls “the most comprehensive assessment of students’ actual investment in the day-to-day process of schooling that has ever been conducted.” Even though it was published eight years ago it is still timely. Nearly 40% of the students came from ethnic minority families, and more than one-third from homes that had been touched by divorce, remarriage, or single parenthood – consistent with national data.
Bloom has insights that reinforce Steinberg’s chapter on “The Glorification of Stupidity” even though Bloom writes primarily about college students. Bloom:
“What is advertised as a great openness is a great closing. No longer is there a hope that there are great wise men in other places and times who can reveal the truth about life – except for the few remaining young people who look for a quick fix from a guru. Gone is the real historical sense of a Machiavelli who wrested a few hours from each day in which to ‘don regal and courtly garments, enter the courts of the ancients and speak with them.’ None of this concerns those who promote the new curriculum… To be open to knowing, there are certain kinds of things one must know which most people don’t want to bother to learn and which appear boring and irrelevant. Even the life of reason is often unappealing; and useless knowledge, i.e., knowledge that is not obviously useful for a career, has no place in the students’ vision of the curriculum.”
Somewhere in my travels I picked up the following quote: “Boredom is the great and fatal fruit of modern civilization.” It applies to young people who have a lot of free time because schools expect relatively little from them; time which is wasted, becoming a fatal fruit! When Steinberg writes about the glorification of stupidity he is describing what happens in some of this free time:
“During the late 1980s and early 1990s a different but no less telling reaction to the achievement decline appeared (different from the denial of the problem by the education experts). Suddenly, it seemed that people of all ages, but adolescents and young adults in particular, were all fascinated with TV shows and films in which the lead characters were admitted for being insipid, anti-intellectual, or just plain stupid… Never before have characters like this served as role models.”
While he may be right that this fascination provides some strange sort of comfort, a show like The Simpsons apparently goes beyond slapstick. It is apparently provoking discussions of the ignorance pervasive at the heart of our society, and young and old are watching it to try to understand how this ignorance came to be and where it leads. This is a series that is now being studied in college courses! The sad truth, says Steinberg, is that:
“American achievement today is barely at the level it was in the mid 1970s, and in many respects is significantly lower…Two decades ago, a teacher in an average school in this country could expect to have three or four ‘difficult’ students in a class of 30 Today, teachers in these same schools are expected to teach to classrooms in which nearly half of the students have ‘checked out’.”
Even the knowledge that is useful for career planning and deciding on a college major is given short shrift, if any, in our schools today! In my sons’ college prep public school, the career counselor is also the special ed coordinator. Needless to say, it is tough to do two jobs. I can’t recall the school ever having a career day. I tried to get the school to organize one, and collect information on mentors in the community, and even helped out with a speakers program, but then the ball got dropped by the school. The prevailing ethos seems to be: ‘Let them go to college and then decide what they want to do with their lives. Let’s be sure to avoid any and all controversy, including outside speakers.’ But is all of this the fault of the school?
“While schools and teachers differ in how engaging they are,” writes Steinberg, “most discussions of contemporary education overemphasize the responsibility of the school to be engaging and ignore the obligation of the student to be ‘engageable.’ Indeed, our exclusive focus on how to make schools more engaging is one of the central problems of the school reform movement…When we discuss students and their performance in school, we speak in the language of ability. Instead, we should be speaking in the language of engagement. No amount of cognitive ability will result in actual achievement if the requisite emotional characteristics that contribute to interest in school are not present.”
The “battle cry” for school reform to combat the “rising tide of mediocrity” was sounded in 1983 with the publication of “A Nation At Risk.” “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves… We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.”
If anything, the situation is worse now because the gap between American educational achievement and achievement in other countries has widened, as Steinberg notes. We will “not be able to compete successfully in the international marketplace without substantially increasing the skill level and knowledge of our labor force.” How many times is this being echoed daily today in a rising crescendo, with parents role in education being ignored! Parents are being written off! Three-fourths of college faculty report that entering students lack basic skills. Between 30 and 40 percent of entering freshmen across the country require remedial coursework in reading and writing, and an even higher number in math. No wonder college expenses keep going up! Colleges are hiding the extent of remedial education, by not labeling the courses as such, and it is virtually impossible to know what proportion of university instructional expenditures are devoted to remedial versus regular instruction. Furthermore, additional funds are expended on student retention for the students who take remedial coursework, as they are more apt to drop out.
The National Adult Literacy Study found that fewer than half of college graduates were able to write a coherent essay describing an argument presented in a newspaper, or could contrast the opinions in two opposing editorials. Only one-third could write a brief letter explaining a billing error. Only 11% of four-year grads, and only 4% of two-year-college grads, were sufficiently literate to be able to summarize, based on information they were given, two ways that attorneys may challenge prospective jurors. Evidently, even the remedial education on which colleges are spending so much money is failing. Moreover, if American colleges and universities are devoting proportionately more of their resources to remedial education, they are devoting less to advanced instruction, which means that even literate college graduates today probably have less exposure to challenging coursework than their counterparts did in previous eras.
Yet the American public “has reacted to stories about our failing students with a curious mix of denial, anger and boredom (ironically, the same mix of emotions characteristic of the alienated students we see so often on TV).” Similarly, “surveys of parents show that while we recognize something is wrong with our educational system, we are likely to believe that our own children’s schools are doing a fine job.” As an ultimate form of denial, Steinberg notes, since the 1970s we’ve been bizarrely rationalizing SAT declines, until we finally “recentered” the test itself so that an average score is now the equivalent of what used to be below-average.
Even the most positive commentators on education have to admit that levels of student achievement in this country have either declined or remained stagnant in recent decades. This “disheartening” data was summarized by Diane Ravitch in her 1995 book “National Standards in American Education.” The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) as “The Nation’s Report Card” provides a reasonably good barometer. In the 1994 NAEP the percentage of students performing at the top levels was “shockingly low, especially considering that the definition of excellence on these tests is exceedingly liberal… While it is of course true that the achievement problems of poor, urban, minority youth are substantial, the results of research involving affluent, suburban, White youngsters provide little cause for celebration… Even among students attending affluent urban and suburban schools, at no age level, in no subject area, has there been an increase in the past decade in the proportion of students who score at the highest level of proficiency.”
None of this apparently has changed in the decade since Steinberg’s book. It is easy enough to find more up to date information, which likely reports basically the same results or worse today. A lengthy, but well done slide show on achievement gaps by The Education Trust is offered at http://www2.edtrust.org/EdTrust/Product+Catalog/recent+presentations.htm. Recently Achieve was www.achieve.org a co-sponsor of the National Education Summit on High Schools with the National Governor’s Association, The Business Roundtable and the Education Commission of the States of the Feb. 26-27 in Washington D.C.
While the Education Trust offers hard data, Achieve seems to offer just more of the same rhetoric, and both ignore the role of parents. “Too many high school students drop out before earning a diploma, and too many of those who graduate re unprepared for the realities of the 21st century economy,” said Achieve keynoter Bill Gates, in the press release for Achieve. “This failure of our high school system has dire consequences for our economy, but even more important, it is simply wrong.” The release continues: “Nearly one of three eighth graders in America does not graduate from high school, and half of African-American and Hispanic students do not make it to graduation day. Colleges and employers report that many of those who do graduate lack basic skills. Only a small fraction of those who go on to postsecondary education succeed in earning a degree. Half of those who enter two-year institutions, for example, never return for their second year.”
Steinberg notes that poor achievement is characteristic of students in all social classes. The 1994 NAEP study notes that among 17-year-olds in advantaged urban and suburban schools, the only area in which average proficiency has changed over time has been writing – it has declined! Scores in math, science, and reading – low to begin with- haven’t changed at all. Dealing with the international assessments, Steinberg notes that “comparisons of even our best students with those from other nations are discouraging. Indeed, in math and science, our top students know less than students in other industrialized countries who are considered merely average by their countries’ standards. (From National Center for Education Statistics)
Pressure on parents today is undoubtedly fierce, perhaps making denial increasingly attractive. This pressure on mothers is described in a scattershot February 21 2005 Newsweek cover story entitled “The Myth of the Perfect Mother” with two articles: “Why it Drives Real Women Crazy,” and “Moms Shouldn’t Be Martyrs.” Amazingly, in these articles men are given no shrift! The writers advocate for more child care etc. but any talk about sharing some of the burden of child-rearing with men is non existent. It’s as if men don’t exist! In Steinberg’s study, the vast majority of students in the sample were from families with a mother who was employed outside the home. Men apparently are considered incapable of child rearing.
In his section on students Bloom writes of the family:
“The loss of the gripping inner life vouchsafed those who were nurtured by the Bible must be primarily attributed not to our schools or political life, but to the family, which, with all its rights to privacy, has proved unable to maintain any content of its own. The dreariness of the family’s spiritual landscape passes belief. It is as monochrome and unrelated to those who pass through it as are the barren steppes frequented by nomads who take their mere subsistence and move on. The delicate fabric of the civilization into which the successive generations are woven has unraveled, and children are raised, not educated… Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise…Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine…Parents do not have the legal or moral authority they had in the Old World. They lack self-confidence as educators of their children…The future, which is open-ended, cannot be prescribed by parents, and it eclipses the past which they know to be inferior.”
We could go on citing Bloom… Suffice it to say that even Steinberg isn’t quite so bleak. At least he has hope for the Authoritative/Responsive parents, as opposed to the authoritarian and overly permissive family. Authoritative parents “do not hesitate to set limits on their child’s behavior or maintain standards for the child to live up to. They discipline from a position of acceptance rather than power, and they do so in ways that encourage, rather than squelch, the child’s growing sense of autonomy. In other words, authoritative parents are firm without being harsh, strict without being psychologically stifling. Acceptance is especially critical for the child to be able to reap the benefits of parental firmness…Authoritatively raised children attribute their success in school to hard work, and then are not successful, they see their failure as due to lack of effort. Students from homes with other parenting styles, in contrast, often attribute success or failure to conditions that they have little control over, like ability or luck.”
Permissiveness leads teenagers to be relatively more oriented toward their peers, and less oriented toward their parents and other adults, such as teachers. Frighteningly, while it is hard to estimate says Steinberg, there appear to be around 25 percent of parents who fit none of these parenting styles: they are disengaged and have for one reason or another, “checked out” of child-rearing. This is a high percentage! It is corroborated by a 1994 Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Harris survey showing that 22% of students said they never talked to their parents about problems they were having with other students, and 25% said they wondered if their parents really loved them. Between one-fourth and one-third of all students surveyed wished their parents were more involved in their schoolwork. This percentage of parents who have checked ou could be even higher if one were to factor in the families of adolescents who miss school regularly or have left before graduating: as high as 30% to 33%!
But how are parents to be involved in students’ homework? It is encouraged at the elementary level, but then any involvement begins to drop off during the middle school years. The reasons for the gaps between parents’ intentions and their actions fall into three categories:
1. Lack of Knowledge. Many parents have the right goals for their children, but simply don’t know what works and what doesn’t; or they have incorrect of misinformed ideas. Secondly, they may believe that effective child-rearing is either common sense or relative (Who’s to say what a good parent is anyway?). Steinberg’s study shows that effective parenting is based on scientifically demonstrable principles.
2. Lack of Skill. Steinberg says that for these parents effective parenting can be broken down into component parts and learned one at a time.
3. Lack of Opportunity. For these parents, time or energy is limited – because of work commitments, marital stress, psychological problems, financial difficulty, or any number of reasons. (Shades of the Newsweek article) Unfortunately, there are few easy answers for these parents!
I would like to add that I think the huge communication gap between teachers and parents also leads to lack of action and represents a lack of opportunity. Without guidance from teachers about specific actions how are parents supposed to help their children? Busy professional people will make time for important things. While Steinberg rightly encourages parental involvement in the schools, PTAs etc. and meetings with teachers and counselors, these meetings at the middle school and high school level don’t lead to much on a day to day basis. Where is the power of the Internet here for daily communication! Of course, parents are inherently viewed with suspicion by teachers until they establish trust, so meetings will always be necessary. Perhaps more to the point, parents don’t receive any messages from teachers because the curriculum simply doesn’t warrant it, as Steinberg notes:
“There is considerable evidence for the claim that our schools pay less attention to academic instruction today than they did in the past. For example, the proportion of school budgets that go to teacher salaries – as opposed to administrators and service personnel – has dropped dramatically, from 60 percent of school budgets in the late 1950s to about 40 percent in the late 1980s…Only 40% of students’ school days are spent on academic subjects, far less than the comparable figure in other countries…In most schools, too little is expected of students.”
There are a lot of extra, non-academic services but, interestingly, Steinberg notes that this reallocation of resources which happened during the 1970s and 1980s “occurred because of the growing perception among educators that American students needed these additional, nonacademic courses and services in order to remain engaged in school… Schools moved away from a more basic approach to education precisely because of declining student achievement.” What a Catch 22! Some of these courses were added because parents weren’t addressing issues pertaining to sex education drug education, and family relationships and it was felt that this deficit was interfering with student learning, but removing nonacademic subjects from the curriculum probably wouldn’t have a major positive impact on student achievement.
This requires some thought, in my opinion. If online learning takes off in schools, as it inevitably will, and has already at the college level, students will be freed from the confines of the school and taking so-called nonacademic courses in school might actually make sense, especially those that require personal contact. Perhaps schools need to focus on just exactly what work must be done in a classroom. My town is going to have to go to referendum to spend another $20 million expanding the high school, which was done just a few years ago. Infrastructure is expensive, and if online learning takes off buildings become problematic. Perhaps schools should emphasize their role as “gathering places” since that is what they already are. Places for special programs, group and community meetings, mentoring, games (with different peers?), socializing, athletics, and hands-on art and science projects. Testing would still have to be done at school, since students will always need to be monitored to prevent cheating. Perhaps teachers could be freed up so that students would get more personal attention when they come to school and teachers might even communicate with parents. Perhaps, in line with Steinberg’s findings, parents would go to school more often. When thinking about the best types of parental involvement, he came up with surprising findings.
“The type of parental involvement that matters most is not the type of involvement that parents practice most often – checking over homework, encouraging children to do better, and overseeing the child’s academic program from home – especially when a child has reached high school. The type of involvement that makes a real difference is the type that draws the parent into the school physically – attending school programs, extracurricular activities, teacher conferences, and ‘back to school’ nights. These sorts of activities make a small but significant difference in student achievement… It reinforces the view in the child’s mind that school and home are connected, and that school is an integral part of the whole family life.”
Steinberg goes on to raise a more important aspect of parent involvement.
“Parents of successful students used strategies different from those used by parents of unsuccessful students. If a child is doing poorly at school, “parents of unsuccessful students try to handle the problem themselves, at home… Parents of successful students, in contrast, mobilize the school on their child’s behalf – they ‘work the system’…Several national studies of American parents’ involvement in their children’s education have found a steep drop-off in involvement as children get older… Interestingly, a similar drop-off does not occur in most Asian countries… Part of the blame for this misapprehension rests squarely on the schools’ shoulders. Although schools pay lip service to the benefits of parental involvement, their actual behavior reflects mixed feelings about how much, and in what ways, they actually want parents to be engaged… Studies indicate that teachers approve of conferences with parents only when teachers, and not parents, initiate them…Schools are less willing to share with parents the responsibility for overseeing and managing students’ academic careers, and, in fact, they often make it difficult for parents to do so by restricting the amount of information that flows from the school to the home… Some cynical observers believe, perhaps correctly that schools benefit from parental ignorance, because keeping parents in the dark permits schools to hide whatever mistakes they make.”
What about the cities, you ask? Where communities are pushing to have their students spend more time in school since the families are perceived as so dysfunctional. Across the nation we’re spending huge amounts of money on magnet and charter schools, and school renovations pose a daunting backlog. Not even including renovations/expansions currently the U.S. “spends far more per student than Japan or China, for example whose students achieve far more than ours. In fact, America’s schools spend more per pupil annually than virtually any of the countries that routinely trounce us in international scholastic comparisons. We may be spending money on the wrong things, but on the face of it, it would not appear that more spending in and of itself is the answer to America’s achievement problems.” Looking at Steinberg’s research, keeping city kids in school for considerably more hours each day would seem to be the wrong approach for the long-term, based on faulty assumptions about Black and Latino families. It may be a short-term fix. He has good things to say about these families, who want to support their children as much as possible just as white and Asian families. “We have strong evidence that authoritative parenting ‘works’ regardless of the family’s ethnic background… for poor as well as affluent families, and in divorced as well as nondivorced homes… Black parents, on average, are more involved in their children’s schooling than are Asian parents – at least in overt participation in school activities – and Black parents are more likely to be authoritative.” The key would seem to be to work with and encourage families, not force their children out to spend more time in school. (A somewhat longer school day in all schools across the nation is sensible, though not if more time is wasted.) The key is to engage the students.
“According to their own reports, between one-third and 40% of students say that when they are in class, they are neither trying very hard nor paying attention. Two-thirds say they have cheated on a test in the past year. Nine out of ten report that they have copied someone else’s homework…Half say their classes are boring. A third say they have lost interest in school. For some 20% disengagement is due in part to confusion, but for many more, it is not a reaction to too much pressure or to classes that are too difficult, but a response to having too little demanded of them and to the absence of any consequences for failing to meet even these minimal demands… The majority of high school students in the U.S. spend four or fewer hours per week on homework…More than a third do not do the homework they are given.”
As Bloom also noted, knowledge and learning for its own sake doesn’t appear to have value for students today. Steinberg explains that researchers who study human motivation have spent considerable time examining the relative importance of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation in promoting learning and success in school.
“One theory about what happens to students over time is that the importance of extrinsic rewards increases over the course of elementary school, students’ intrinsic interest in learning is progressively weakened. That is, as grades and other concrete consequences of school performance become more important and more salient, the intrinsic reward of learning is eroded… Because schools hesitate to give students bad grades, hold them back, or fail to graduate them, students believe, with some accuracy, that there are no real consequences of doing poorly in school, as long as their performance is not poor enough to threaten graduation. In students’ eyes, then, what matters is only whether one graduates – not how well one does or what one learns along the way. If that is the prevailing belief – and our study suggests that it is – it is easy to understand why so many students coast through school without devoting much energy to the schoolwork. Our findings suggest that it would be possible to motivate students through grading practices, but only if the grades had some real world significance.”
The significance he suggests is to 1. Raise the minimum standards and expectations and to have genuine and unpleasant consequences for failure. 2. Change the parameters of success, which currently matters only for the small minority who seek admission to the nation’s most selective colleges. “Our institutions of higher education are so eager to fill their classrooms that virtually anyone who can afford to go to college is guaranteed admission… One possibility, then, is to raise college entrance requirements at the majority of postsecondary institutions so that admission is not guaranteed to students simply because they have completed high school.” 3. Try to alter the ways in which students are motivated. “Shifting students orientation in this fashion will require not only changing students’ attitudes and beliefs, but changing the behavior of their parents, their peers, and the larger society…Our research points to clear and consistent differences in the home, peer, and extracurricular environments of engaged and disengaged students.”
It is fascinating that peer groups have a greater effect on student learning than parenting styles, according to Steinberg. The Peer Group is the kicker, more so with Black and Latino families. While some peer groups are good and supportive, especially for Asian students (who have to rely on their peers because they aren’t accepted into other groups, fortunately as it turns out), it is all too easy for students to fall prey to a pernicious influence; especially for Blacks and Latinos, since their peers put down the value of schooling and actually restrict academic growth and development.
“As it turns out, knowing where an individual adolescent fits into the peer culture of his or her school tells us a great deal about that students’ orientation toward academics. In many respects, we found that peers were far more influential than parents in influencing teenagers’ achievement, especially when it comes to day-to-day matters such as doing homework, concentrating in class, or taking their studies seriously. In some cases, the influence of peers actually overwhelmed that of parents, undoing whatever influence parents tried to exert at home.”
The power of peer pressure is clear especially among Asian students and their friends to do well in school where it “is so strong that any deficiencies in the home environment – for example, parenting that is either too authoritarian or emotionally distant – are rendered almost unimportant.”
Perhaps the drive to keep city students in school for longer periods is an attempt to keep them away from the pernicious influence of their peers and the streets, rather than keep them from their homes. Of course, there are many single parent homes, and these parents aren’t home when their kids arrive. A longer school day would help alleviate this. Alternatively or in addition to this, online tutoring can fill the gap also. “In essence, much of the good work that Black and Latino parents are doing at home is being undone by countervailing pressures in their youngsters’ peer groups. This is true not only in racially integrated schools, but in segregated schools as well.”
Interestingly, Steinberg writes that:
“Asian students were more likely than other students to believe that not doing well in school would have negative consequences for their future. In contrast, non-Asian students were less likely to hold this belief – they were far more cavalier about the potential negative effects of doing poorly in school… It is undue optimism, not excessive pessimism, that may be holding Black and Latino students back in school. Their problem isn’t that they have lost faith in the value of education; the problem is that many don’t really believe that doing poorly in school will hurt their chances for future success.”
Are they just living in denial, in an illusion, or is their definition of success just hopelessly low? Perhaps this is the influence of the peer group at work. To fit into the culture, they can’t admit that school has value. Steinberg says that either they believe they can succeed without a good education or they have adopted this view as a way of compensating psychologically for their relatively weaker performance. Bill Cosby recently criticized the low brow impact of rap culture on Black youth across America, and took heat for this. Steinberg said somewhat the same thing a decade ago, quoting a colleague from University of Georgia: “The message that academic success is somehow incompatible with a healthy Black identify – is perpetuated by a mass media that… provides images of anti-intellectual Black youth portrayed as normative in music, movies, and TV… In many schools, there is a near-complete absence of identifiable peer groups that respect and encourage academic success and are genuinely open to Black and Latino students… The sad truth is that many students, and Black students in particular, are forced to choose between doing well in school and having friends.”
As Steinberg applies lessons learned from different ethnic group studies, he talks about the negative impact of “Americanization” on ethnic minority youngsters. “Because part of what it means to be an American in contemporary society is adopting a cavalier attitude toward school, the process of Americanization leads toward more and more educational indifference… In essence, the broader context of what it means to be an American teenager in the contemporary U.S. pulls students away from school and draws them toward more social and recreational pursuits.”
Steinberg’s definitions of the different peer groups is enlightening, but I won’t summarize them here as I am writing too much I’m sure! Suffice it to say that “There isn’t much of a place in the typical American high school for students whose primary concern is academic excellence… Less than 5% of all students are members of a high-achieving crowd that defines itself mainly on the basis of academic excellence. Parents have legitimate reason to be concerned about the qualities and values of their children’s friends…In a given neighborhood parents should look for a high level of parental involvement in the local schools, in organized activities serving children, and parental monitoring and supervision… Even if their own parents are not especially involved in school, active in their child’s life, or vigilant supervisors of their child’s activities, the children benefit from contact with peers whose parents have these characteristics.”
Steinberg’s chapter on “All Work and All Play Makes Jack a Dumb Boy” has been mentioned earlier in this review. Students spend too much time on non-academic activities, and the ultimate source of our achievement problem may be how students spend their time out of school. American students manage their academic schedules to fit their work and play schedules, rather than vice versa as in other countries. The weekly numbers are informative:
After school jobs = 15-20 hours
Socializing = 20-25 hours
Extracurricular activities = 10-15 hours
TV = 15 hours
Homework = 5 hours
By the time they are seniors many students spend more time on the job than they do in the classroom. Working for less than 10 hours per week, however, doesn’t seem to take a consistent toll on school performance, says Steinberg. “We should keep in mind, however, that half of all employed seniors, about one-third of juniors, and one-fifth of sophomores work above the 20-hour threshold – indicating that large numbers of students are at risk of compromising their school careers.” Steinberg cites the various negative impacts of working long hours: less healthy meals, less commitment to school, falling asleep in class, the excitement of money makes school seem less rewarding and interesting, and there is increased alcohol and drug use. “Most European and Asian high school students would find it utterly astonishing that their American counterparts have four or five hours of free time each day to devote to an after-school job. And most would find it incredible that the average American teenager spends only about one hour per day on homework.”
Finally, Steinberg tackles the issue of extracurricular activities which, while extensive, is not nearly as intensive as part-time work. He cites the drawbacks of athletics in particular, which may leave participants too preoccupied or fatigued to concentrate on schoolwork. “Playing sports does not make adolescents better students… The impact on achievement of participating in ‘major’ sports (such as football and basketball) is rarely positive, and can sometimes be negative, whereas the impact of participating in service, academic, and leadership activities is clearly beneficial… There is an important exception… Policies that restrict the extracurricular participation of low-achieving students may hurt, rather than help, their academic performance. In all likelihood, school-sponsored extracurriculars helps bond students to school – particularly those who might otherwise disengage from the institution.”
In conclusion, Steinberg has 10 recommendations for places to begin a reasonable discussion:
1. Refocus the discussion so that the public understands that no amount of school reform will work unless we recognize the problem as considerably more far-reaching and complicated than simply changing curricular standards or teaching methods.
2. Establish academic excellence as a national priority. The public needs to know that the problem of low student achievement is pervasive across affluent as well as disadvantaged communities
3. Increase parental effectiveness. The widespread disengagement of parents from th business of child-rearing is a public health problem. We need community-based parent education programs, school-sponsored “clinics” for parents, and publicf service programming.
4. Increase parental involvement in school. Schools must expand efforts to actively draw parents into school programs. This will require restructuring and rescheduling school programs to meet the needs of working parents.
5. Make school performance really count. We must recognize that the prevailing and pervasive peer norm of “getting by” is in part a direct consequence of socializing students within an educational system that neither rewards excellence nor punishes failure.
6. Adopt a system of national standards and examinations. See Diane Ravitch’s excellent book, National Standards in American Education. Too many American students – and far too many Black and Latino students – have been short-changed by an educational system that has been willing to lower its standards in order to protect students from academic failure. The protection these students have ben afforded, however, has resulted in their being placed in classes for less able students, where they receive a low-quality education, meaningless credentials, and, most horribly, inadequate preparation for further schooling or high-paying work. If more is expected of children in school, their parents’ efforts will expand as well.
7. Develop uniform national standards for school transcripts.
8. Eliminate remedial education at four-year colleges and universities
9. Support appropriate school-sponsored extracurricular activities.
10. Limit youngsters’ time in after-school jobs. We must reconsider the proposition that after-school employment is inherently beneficial for teenagers in light of the changing nature of the labor force and the increased demand for high-skilled, highly educated workers. There is very little evidence that students learn the sorts of skills and competencies they will need to be successful adult workers from the after-school jobs that are widely available, while there is considerable proof that extensive after-school employment has more costs than benefits.
Finally, Steinberg has a good summary of his findings in his first chapter “The Real Problem.” This can be handy as a short synopsis, since the above isn’t short!
Hello Mr. Walker,
Keep up the good work. Your service is welcome in the face of the fierce competition that students face today.
I wish you all the success with students in the Greater Hartford area. Give my best regards to the people from the city of New Britain. As people know ,you can leave New Britain but it never really leaves you.
Sincerely,
William Carrier
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