Report Finds New College Admissions Trends, Including More Early Decision Acceptances

An insightful read on the reasons behind the increase of Early Decision Admits... 


:::Perhaps the most useful piece of information for applicants is the rise of an additional criteria. While the usual factors remain important--grades and overall GPA, strength of high school curriculum and admissions test scores--more schools are now looking at "demonstrated interest in enrolling". In 2003, just seven percent of colleges considered interest in enrolling "considerably important". In recent years, however, approximately 21 percent of colleges have given it more weight in the decision process. Many colleges believe that demonstrated interest, such as campus visits and contact with admissions offices, is an indication that students are more likely to enroll.:::..read the entire article here.

~I dream of making academic excellence 

as important to American schools 

as varsity athletics~ 

Will Fitzhugh, of The Concord Review, a quarterly journal dedicated to showcasing the best history papers written by high school students..  

The Twilight Generation Can't Read

National Association of Scholars article:::

October 18, 2010 By Sandra Stotsky

This press release comes from the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW), an organization in whose founding many NAS members were involved, and in which they continue to participate. It was created in many ways to be an alternative to the Modern Language Association. The ALSCW has completed an interesting report on the state of the American high school English curriculum. One observation it makes is that the top books read by high school students are young adult fantasies. The ALSCW identifies this as a potential source of the decline in reading achievement among young Americans. Below are ALSCW's other findings and recommendations. 

Boston, Mass., October, 2010. A newly released study by the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW) strongly suggests that two factors—a fragmented English curriculum and a neglect of close reading—may explain why the reading skills of American high school students have shown little or no improvement in several decades despite...:::read the entire article here:::

*may the force be with you*

Setting Goals for oneself is key to life. Engage you should, as students, in some form of goal setting quarterly. Very important it is, to prepare first: journal, writing tool, solitude, honesty.


Keep a goal journal

• Reflection:::

Revisit goals from your last goal setting session
Which goals did you achieve and why?
Which goals were not achieved/ did not work and why? How will you push through the threshold next time to beat the obstacle that faced you?

• Forward:::

Develop a list of goals that are most immediately reasonable and a list of reach goals
Develop a list of three to five short-term (one week to one academic quarter) goals 
Develop a list of two to four longterm (academic quarter to a year) goals

• Writing your goals down is just the beginning.

• Each goal deserves a few questions that you honestly and thoroughly answer until you thoughtfully create a very clear road map of how to arrive at the goal:

  For example:

1. What is the goal? (To eliminate procrastination on homework)
2. How will I accomplish this goal? (I will do my homework on time)
3. How? (By eliminating distractions and by time management)
4. What are my distractions and how will I eliminate them?...
5. What will have to change? What works for me and what doesn't? 
6. Who can help me accomplish this goal?
7. What are the rewards of the goal?
8. Who can I share (some of) my goals with in order to help me persevere through to the end result?

Midway through the lifeline of your goals, assess their status.

ACT Study Shows Little Progress in Preparing High School Graduates for College and Careers

After so many years of research in education, experience in and out of the classroom with students, and multiple discussions with them of how they feel education should change, this is a read that speaks to my heart. It does address most of the teacher to student gaps, pragmatically. There is acknowledgement that historically, many of the factors that have caused students to be so dreadful of class time, are models that were put in place in the late 1800s in order to carry out social engineering and conforming goals of the elite through schooling. I have often said that education reform may not happen because it is students and society that want reform, not necessarily those in charge of education policies.

This is an excerpt that is posted on EducationNews.org; the link to the entire article is posted below the following excerpt- a worthwhile read!!

...:::Turned Off Younger Teachers 
 The factory model high school is also turning off our younger teachers who must replace the huge cohort of “Baby Boom” teachers who have already begun to retire. Too many become discouraged by the isolation from colleagues they feel in these schools. These younger teachers also perceive that bonding and sustainable healthy relationships among and between students and teachers occurs all too infrequently in such schools. From the Facebook and Twitter generation, they correctly intuit that you can’t achieve academic rigor in schools without these relationships and for that matter relevance of the curriculum to the career and life challenges that await students. Additionally, compared to how work is organized in non-school settings, they see that the factory model school is a huge time waster with time lost transitioning between classrooms, achieving order, taking attendance, reviewing previous day's lesson, and continual interruptions and school announcements. No wonder 1/3 of new teachers quit in 3 years; 1/2 within 5 years.

No Academic Rigor without Relationships and Relevance What should replace the industrial era factory model high school? That is, which curricula and school structures would best help American teenagers re-engage in school and meet the higher and better standards we’ve been developing for the last 20 years? Answering such questions should claim most of our investment dollars for K-12 education. Yet we continue to divert our energies and resources to more and better tests and other strategies that have questionable payoff such as closing failed schools or re-opening them under new management or with a different staff. Another questionable strategy is to provide huge amounts of professional development without fundamentally changing the curriculum. 

Opinions abound on which curricular innovations make sense, and a fairly sophisticated evaluation industry is developing to determine which ones produce the best results. Opinion seems to be coalescing around a few principles that point the direction for future change. First and foremost, is that a high school is unlikely to establish academic rigor without strong interpersonal relationships and relevance of the curricula to employment and life challenges.

Relationships require a nurturing environment where faculty and students are together long enough to be able get to know and bond with one another. To provide such an environment, a growing number of high schools are assigning students to the same homeroom and/or the same counselor for all four years. Other schools use the house system in which teachers go to where the students are and students remain in the same group for all or most of their classes. This is in stark contrast to the factory model high school where students typically change work groups, supervisors (viz. teachers) and classrooms 5-6 times a day. This traditional model is particularly dysfunctional for students in poverty and those from single parent homes, many of whom have an emotional-psychological mindset that will not allow them to learn and establish in their minds a compelling vision of success. 

Relationships and bonding among students and teachers is also enhanced through smaller schools or breaking down larger schools into smaller theme-oriented schools or academies that have a fair amount of operational independence.::: ...read the full piece here.

:::Education must be more than a rat race for university places:::

A study by London University’s Institute of Education published this week found that the relentless pursuit of top grades at GCSE and A-level "compromised" independent schools’ abilities to deliver an all-round education such as sport, drama and trips.

By James Priory

Published: 8:00AM BST 01 Oct 2010

Telegraph.co.uk

Some schools are forced to cut sport and official outings for final year students in favour of exam cramming, the report found. Photo: PA

The only time pupils spend outside the classroom, it seems, is queuing to get into the examination hall.

But the report’s authors also found that “anti-modular sentiment was more widespread than anti-modular action” because of the continued support for more regular assessment among students.

Though the voices in the wilderness might be getting louder, the road to league table success remains a devastatingly straight and narrow one.

Two years ago when A-level was re-launched nationwide, the heads of department at my own school, Portsmouth Grammar, saw an opportunity to make A-levels work for us rather than the other way round.

If we wanted our students to care about the subject and not the qualification we knew we had to create a public-examination-free year between GCSE and A-level.

Students would no longer therefore sit AS modules in Year 12 but would wait until January in Year 13.

We also wanted to encourage more students to complete their fourth subject as an A-level, rather than leaving it dangling at the end of Year 12. The reduction in most subjects from six to four modules made us feel that it here at last was a possibility to develop a broader, and at the same time more mature approach to sixth-form study.

Some students were understandably anxious; they knew they would be competing with students from other schools and colleges who would re-sit AS-level modules more often.

Some worried about applying for competitive university places without AS-level module scores to rely on.

And why should they study four subjects when most universities only showed interest in three?

Parents, however, were supportive and trusted that the school would not wish to jettison a proud track record by turning their children into unsuspecting guinea-pigs.

So how did we get on two years later?  ...read the rest of the article here.