Rabu, 30 Oktober 2013

A Film School With a Sense of Place


By GINANNE BROWNELL
Published: October 27, 2013
LODZ, Poland — Andac Karabeyoglu, a third-year student at the Lodz Film School, sat in a campus cafe on a recent day and explained why she had come all the way from her home in Ankara to study in Poland.
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The Lodz Film School
Roman Polanski, center foreground, who graduated from Lodz, in  ‘‘End of the Night.’’
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Part of the draw, she said, was that Lodz was one of the few film schools left in the world where students still learn on 35-millimeter and 16-millimeter film; but another attraction was the school’s unique way of teaching.
“Coming here gives you a different way of looking at things,” said Ms. Karabeyoglu, 27. “We have to write our own scripts, we have to edit, we have to do our own sound, so there is a huge process that you have to learn. The main aim is not the industry but about discovering yourself, what your strengths are.”
On Oct. 11, the Leon Schiller National Higher School of Film, Television and Theater, to give the school its full name, marked its 65th anniversary with huge ceremony and a bigger party. The Oscar-winning Austrian director Michael Haneke was awarded an honorary doctorate — Roman Polanski and Martin Scorsese are among a handful of other directors who have been granted that honor — and graduates and filmmakers from across the globe were invited to campus to celebrate.
The school counts award-winning film directors like Mr. Polanski, Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kiezlowski among its graduates, together with renowned cinematographers including Pawel Edelman, Dariusz Wolski and Andrzej Bartkowiak.
“When I was at school, as all other students, we believed we were wasting our time,” Mr. Polanski said by telephone. “But with the perspective of a few years, I realized how much I got from this school.”
“Teaching filmmaking is a paradox,” said the school’s rector Mariusz Grzegorzek, a Lodz graduate who has taught directing there for two decades. “If you are smart enough, you can learn the basics of filmmaking in two months. I don’t like it when film schools say, ‘We will teach you, we will train you — all the wisdom, all the rules.’ The most important thing about our school is this good balance between learning the craft, learning the theory and learning how to get your message across in your art.”
World War II saw Poland devastated by German and Russian invasions. By the time it ended, with the country under Soviet domination, many of its pre-war filmmakers and actors were dead or living in exile.
“1945 was pretty much year zero for the Polish film industry; they had to start from scratch, and Lodz was part of that,” said Michael Brooke, a British film historian and writer. “There was little money for filmmaking,” he added, “so many of the talented people went into teaching — so you had that right from the start, and they have maintained that tradition.”
The filmmakers Andrzej Munk, Witold Sobocinski and Mr. Wajda — whose film “Walesa, Man of Hope” opened this month in Poland and Britain — were some of Lodz’s earliest students, becoming leaders of Polish New Wave cinema in the 1950s.
“The difference between Lodz and other films schools was that students were taught to be very analytical, very precise and very to the point,” said Jozef Robakowski, who teaches multimedia at the school and is one of Poland’s most influential video artists. “That was partially influenced by Soviet art and partially because of strong relations between the school and the Lodz Art Museum, founded by avant-garde artists in 1930. So those things had impact on movie making here.”
Students also learned — mostly from one another — how to use symbolism to put across political views while living in a totalitarian state. “Symbolism is a very big thing in the film language in Poland,” said Kathrine Windfeld, an Emmy-nominated Danish director who studied in Lodz in the early 1990s.
“Everyone, for example, knew that if a white horse crossed through a frame, it meant ‘we want a free Poland.’ I learned the language of symbolism there, that everything in filmmaking has to have layers,” she said.
In the 1980s, during the years of martial law in Poland, innovative teachers including Mr. Robakowski — who had pressed the heads of the school to create a more multimedia platform — were dismissed from their positions or left in protest. But with the collapse of Communism in 1989 came a fresh openness to new technologies and media.
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A Library of Classics, Edited for the Teething Set


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Published: October 26, 2013
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The humble board book, with its cardboard-thick pages, gently rounded corners and simple concepts for babies, was once designed to be chewed as much as read.
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William P. O’Donnell/The New York Times
Parents are flocking to the popular BabyLit series, which features works of literary art that have been adapted for babies and toddlers. The board books skip the complicated narratives and instead use the stories as a springboard to explain counting, colors or concepts like opposites.
But today’s babies and toddlers are treated to board books that are miniature works of literary art: classics like “Romeo and Juliet,” “Sense and Sensibility” and “Les Misérables”; luxuriously produced counting primers with complex graphic elements; and even an “Art for Baby” book featuring images by the contemporary artists Damien Hirst and Paul Morrison.
Booksellers say that parents are flocking to these books, even if the idea that a 2-year-old could understand “Moby-Dick” seems absurd on the face of it. A toddler might not be expected to follow the plot, but she could learn about harpoons, ships and waves, with quotes alongside (“The waves rolled by like scrolls of silver”).
Publishers of these books are catering to parents who follow the latest advice by child-development experts to read to babies early and often, and who believe that children can display aesthetic preferences even while they are crawling and eating puréed foods.
“If we’re going to play classical music to our babies in the womb and teach them foreign languages at an early age, then we’re going to want to expose babies to fine art and literature,” said Linda Bubon, an owner and children’s book buyer at Women & Children First, a bookstore in Chicago. “Now we know there are things we can do to stimulate the mind of a baby.”
Suzanne Gibbs Taylor, the associate publisher and creative director of Gibbs Smith, a small publisher in Salt Lake City that conceived the popular BabyLit series, said she realized that no one had ever “taken Jane Austen and made it for babies.”
While the BabyLit books do not try to lay out a complicated narrative of “Wuthering Heights” or “Romeo and Juliet,” they use the stories as a springboard to explain counting, colors or the concept of opposites. The popular “Cozy Classics” line of board books, introduced in 2012 by Simply Read Books, a publisher based in Vancouver, B.C., adapts stories like “Moby-Dick” and “Les Misérables” for infants and toddlers using pictures of needle-felted figures of Captain Ahab and Jean Valjean.
“People are realizing that it’s never too young to start putting things in front of them that are a little more meaningful, that have more levels,” said Ms. Taylor, whose BabyLit series has sold about 300,000 books so far. “It’s not so simple as, ‘Here’s a dog, here’s the number 2.’ ”
While the publishing industry is still scraping through the digital revolution, children’s books have remained relatively untouched. Most parents are sticking to print for their young children even when there are e-book versions or apps available, and videos like the once ubiquitous “Baby Einstein,” founded in 1997 as a fast-track to infant genius, have fallen out of fashion.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that television should be avoided for children younger than 2 years old, and studies have suggested that babies and toddlers receive much greater benefit from real interactions than from experiences involving video screens.
“There has been a proliferation of focus on early childhood development on the education side,” said John Mendelson, the sales director at Candlewick Press, “as well as on the retail side.”
Board books, traditionally for newborns to 3-year-olds, have always been a smaller and somewhat neglected category in the publishing business, compared with the larger and more expensive hardcover picture books designed for children of reading age.
But board books may be catching up. Libraries that used to shun the genre are now buying them from publishers. Bookstores are making more room for board books on their shelves. And while a board book might have once been too insubstantial a gift to bring to a child’s birthday party, the newer, highly stylized versions (that can run up to $15) would easily pass muster.
“A board book was little more than a teething ring,” said Christopher Franceschelli, who directs Handprint Books, an imprint of Chronicle Books. “I think as picture books have developed in the last 20 years, parents, librarians, teachers have thought, ‘Why should board books be any less than their older siblings?’ ”
In 2012, Abrams Books, the art-book publisher, created a new imprint, Abrams Appleseed, to focus on books for babies, toddlers and preschoolers. Since then, it has published high-end books like “Pantone: Color Puzzles,” released this month, which uses intricate drawings and puzzle pieces to teach children the differences between colors like peacock blue and nighttime blue.
“If you look at board books from 15 years ago, it looks like the stuff on there was pulled off the Internet somewhere,” said Cecily Kaiser, the publishing director of Abrams Appleseed. “Now there’s a real embrace of a much more artful style.”
At Chronicle, a San Francisco-based publisher, sales of board books have been rising for at least two to three years. Editors there have experimented with books that attempt interactivity, such as a line of books with finger puppets. “We’re in this era of mass good design for everybody,” said Ginee Seo, the children’s publishing director at Chronicle. “You’re seeing good design at Target; you can buy Jonathan Adler at Barnes & Noble. You’re not willing to accept the cheesy clip art on a board book.”
Jon Yaged, the president and publisher of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, said the demand for board books has driven him to release more of them in recent years. He has also added ornate flourishes: on the cover of a new edition of “The Pout-Pout Fish,” the title reads in a shiny gold foil, a touch that would normally have been reserved for a more expensive picture book.
Cindy Hudson, a guidebook author and mother of two in Portland, Ore., who runs a Web site suggesting books for parents to read with their children, said she doubted a baby would “benefit intellectually” from being exposed to Tolstoy or the Brontë sisters.
Still, “anything that encourages that interaction between babies and parents is a good thing,” she said. “That’s where the learning and the bonding comes from.”
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Concussions and the Classroom


By JAN HOFFMAN
High school football players practice in Brownsville, Tex.Reynaldo Leal for The Texas Tribune High school football players practice in Brownsville, Tex.
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Because of heightened awareness about the hazards of sports-related concussions, many states have implemented standards determining when an injured student may resume playing contact sports. But only a few states have begun to address how and when a student should resume classwork.
On Sunday the American Academy of Pediatrics issued recommendations for “return to learn” checklists to alert doctors, school administrators and parents to potential cognitive and academic challenges to students who have suffered concussions.
“They’re student athletes, and we have to worry about the student part first,” said Dr. Mark E. Halstead, the lead author of “Returning to Learning Following a Concussion,” a clinical report in this week’s Pediatrics.
For adolescents prone to risk-taking behaviors, concussions are not just the nasty by-products of sports. Dr. Halstead, an assistant professor in pediatric sports medicine at Washington University, recently treated a 15-year-old girl whose concussion came not from a soccer match, but because “she was running backwards in a school hallway and cracked heads with someone.”
The academy emphasized that research about recovery protocols and cognitive function is scant: There is no established rest-until-recovered timeline. The new recommendations are based on expert opinions and guidelines developed by the Rocky Mountain Youth Sports Medicine Institute in Denver.

Doctors generally recommend that a student with a concussion rest initially, to give the brain time to heal. That may mean no texting, video games, computer use, reading or television. But there’s a big question mark about the timing and duration of “cognitive rest.” Experts have not identified at what point mental exertion impedes healing, when it actually helps, and when too much rest prolongs recovery. Although many doctors are concerned that a hasty return to a full school day could be harmful, this theory has not yet been confirmed by research.
The student’s pediatrician, parents and teachers should communicate about the incident, the recommendations said, and be watchful for when academic tasks aggravate symptoms such as headaches, dizziness, sensitivity to light and difficulty concentrating. The academy acknowledged that case management must be highly individualized: “Each concussion is unique and may encompass a different constellation and severity of symptoms.”
Most students have a full recovery within three weeks, the article said. But if the recovery seems protracted, specialists should be consulted.
Many school officials do not realize they can make simple accommodations to ease the student’s transition back to the classroom, the academy said.
To alleviate a student’s headaches, for example, schedule rests in the school nurse’s office; for dizziness, allow extra time to get to class through crowded hallways; for light sensitivity, permit sunglasses to be worn indoors. Students accustomed to 45-minute classes might only be able to sit through 30 minutes at the outset, or attend school for a half-day.
“Parents need to follow up with schools and make sure plans are being followed,” Dr. Halstead said.
Dr. Robert C. Cantu, a clinical professor in neurosurgery at the Boston University School of Medicine and a co-author of “Concussions and Our Kids,” said, “The overriding theme is not to exacerbate symptoms.”
Dr. Matthew F. Grady, a pediatric sports medicine specialist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who may see 50 patients with concussions a week during the fall sports season, often suggests that before students return to class, they should first try modest amounts of school work at home, to identify if and when symptoms recur.
“But that ramping-up period will depend on the severity of the concussion and the cognitive demands on the student,” he said.
Dr. Christopher C. Giza, a professor of neurology and neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, cautioned against what he calls “cocoon therapy” — keeping a student sequestered excessively.
“Being a hyped-up, anxious parent doesn’t help the kids recover,” he said. ”Don’t ask them every hour, ‘Do you have a headache?’ That will cause them headaches.”
Annual reports of concussions suffered by young people are routinely considered low. Some researchers count only emergency room visits, though many families see private physicians or do not even seek medical care.
By one estimate, 300,000 high school and college athletes a year get concussions. However, neither middle-school athletes, nor students who play on travel or town recreation teams are included in that figure. Adolescents who suffer head injuries from reckless behavior, like falling out of trees, are also not represented in that figure.
Almost two years ago, when Jack Moseley was 16, he jumped on his longboard (a type of skateboard) to head down the street to a convenience store in northwest Philadelphia. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, nor was he bending his knees in a protective stance. Suddenly the board flew up and he fell back, cracking his head on asphalt.
Dr. Grady confirmed that Jack had suffered a concussion. For several days, Jack slept between 12 and 15 hours at a stretch. He had severe sensitivity to light and noise, migraine headaches and, as he put it, “my appetite was funky.”
He could only tolerate sitting in darkened rooms, not even able to watch the flickering lights of a television. “It’s like being a mushroom, which is hard for a kid,” remarked his father, Rick Moseley.
It took Jack nearly a month to recover. He exercised his brain in increments: 300-piece puzzles, then 10 minutes of homework, then 30. The greatest stressor, he recalled, was being aware of his limitations, even as he knew that rigorous schoolwork was piling up.
But in retrospect, Jack said, he is glad he took it slow. He has seen fellow students with concussions who returned to school right away. Their symptoms lingered far longer than his.
Now, he said, he feels academically strong and has not noticed any sustained effects of the concussion. Although he has yet to get back on a longboard, he has even resumed playing his favorite sport, soccer.
But, he added, “I avoid heading balls.”
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Military Families Who Want to Home-School Their Children Find Support


Susan Walsh/Associated Press
More than 40 families participate in a home-schooling cooperative at Andrews Air Force Base.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: October 27, 2013
ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE, Md. — More military parents are embracing home schooling, rejecting the age-old tradition of switching schools for their children when they are redeployed.
They are finding support on bases, which are providing resources for families and opening their doors to home-schooling cooperatives.
“If there’s a military installation, there’s very likely home-schoolers there if you look,” said Nicole McGhee, 31, of Cameron, N.C., a mother of three with a husband stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina who runs a Facebook site on military home schooling.
At Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, the library has special presentations for home-schoolers on Benjamin Franklin and static electricity. Fort Bragg offers daytime taekwondo classes. At Fort Belvoir, Va., there are athletic events and a parent-led chemistry lab.
At Andrews Air Force Base about 15 miles outside Washington, more than 40 families participate on Wednesdays in a home schooling cooperative at the base’s youth center. This month, teenagers in one room warmed up for a mock audition, while younger children downstairs learned to sign words like “play” and searched for “Special Agent Stan” during a math game. Military mothers taught each class.
Military families move nearly every three years on average. The transition can be tough for children, and home schooling can make it easier, advocates say. The children do not have to adjust to a new teacher or worry that they are behind because the new school’s curriculum is different.
Some military families also cite the same reasons for choosing home schooling as those in the civilian population: a desire to educate their children in a religious environment, concern about the school environment, or to provide for a child with special needs.
Two 16-year-olds, Andrew Roberts and Christina Cagle, interviewed at the Andrews co-op, said they were happy their parents had made the decision to home-school them. Andrew said he thinks he gets more done in a school day than his peers in a traditional school, and he sees his friends at Bible study groups and during other social events with teenagers on base.
“There’s not a lot of peer pressure considering you’re mostly with your siblings and it’s kind of a relaxed environment,” Christina said.
Participating military families say home schooling also allows them to schedule school time around the rigorous deployment, training and school schedules of the military member.
“We can take time off when Dad is home and work harder when he is gone,” Ms. McGhee said, “so we have that flexibility.”
Sharon Moore, the education liaison at Andrews who helps parents with school-related matters, said that at the height of the summer military moving season, she typically gets 20 calls from families moving to the base with home-schooling questions. She links them with families from the co-op and includes the home-schooled children during back-to-school events and other functions like a trip to a planetarium.
“It comes down to they are military children, and we love our military children,” said Ms. Moore, a former schoolteacher. “We recognize that they have unique needs that sometimes other children don’t have, and we want to make sure that we do our best to serve them and meet those needs because they have given so much to this country.”
Strong support for home schooling by the military was uncommon in the 1990s, said Mike Donnelly, a former Army officer who is a lawyer with the Home School Legal Defense Association, based in Purcellville, Va. He said that changed in 2002 with a militarywide memo that said home schooling can be a “legitimate alternative form of education” for military children. Most military bases today are friendly toward home-schoolers, he said.
Lindsay Burchette said she first considered home schooling in 2011 when her husband joined the Navy and they were living in suburban Knoxville, Tenn. Her son, then 8, feared having to start a new school in Pensacola, Fla., when they moved there for her husband’s training and then again within a year when they reached his permanent duty station at Andrews.
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New Milestone Emerges: Baby’s First iPhone App


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Published: October 28, 2013
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Charlotte Deutsch, who will be 2 years old next month, has a look of pure delight as she swipes the screen of her mother’s old iPhone, and finds a picture of herself.
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Gerald Herbert/Associated Press
Frankie Thevenot, 3, plays with an iPad in his Metairie, La., home.
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“Baby Chacha!” she crows, swiping again to encounter another treasure. “Dada!”
On the new iPhone — the one her mother actually uses — her big sister, Izzy, 4, is utterly intent on “Dora’s Ballet Adventure,” her tiny thumb tapping away at the stars and arrows.
The iPhones, loaded with 20 children’s apps and some 1,200 photographs, are among the girls’ favorite playthings. “The little one loves to go through the pictures and name who’s in them, see her grandma and her nanny,” said their mother, Tina Deutsch, a former nursery school teacher. “The older one loves the games, and taking pictures. She loves the clicking sound, and if it’s blurry, she knows how to delete it.”
As adults turn, increasingly, to mobile devices like tablets, Kindles, and iPhones, their children — even the smallest ones — are doing so as well, according to a new study, “Zero to Eight: Children’s Media Use in America, 2013” by Common Sense Media, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that examines children’s use of technology, and rates children’s apps, games and Web sites.
The study is based on a nationally representative Internet survey of 1,463 parents with children under 8.
Over the last two years, the shift has been drastic. Among children under 2, the survey found, 38 percent had used mobile devices like iPhones, tablets, or Kindles — the same share as children 8 and under who had used such technology in a similar survey two years ago.
Tablets, in particular, have become far more common. Forty percent of families now own tablets, up from only 8 percent two years ago. And this year’s survey found that 7 percent of the children had tablets of their own.
“I was blown away by the rapidity of the change,” said Vicky Rideout, the author of both the new report and the 2011 version. “IPhones and tablets are game changers, because they’re so easy to use. While there was some floor on how young you could go with computers and video games, a young child who can touch a picture can open an app, or swipe the screen.”
Though many parents express pride and amazement that their young children are so tech-savvy, she said, what has really happened is that technology has gotten much easier to use.
Certainly, mobile devices are more convenient than traditional technology, whether for a parent’s own use or for distracting a fussy child in a restaurant.
“I know if I need Zoe to be quiet for an hour, I can hand her the iPad and I won’t hear from her,” said Dr. Laurel Glaser, a Philadelphia physician with two daughters, Zoe, 5, and Maya, 1,
Dr. Glaser was one of the few parents interviewed who said she tried to follow the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation that children under 2 should have no screen time.
“I’m not superstrict and sometimes we have the television on and both girls see it,” she said. “But we don’t have any baby apps for Maya.”
Mostly, the group’s recommendation is ignored. The survey found that children under 2, on average, spend an hour a day in front of screens — engaging in activities like watching television, using computers, viewing DVDs, playing with mobile apps. Children ages 2 to 4 averaged two hours a day, and those 5 to 8, two hours and 20 minutes.
There are vast numbers of apps for babies and children, available free or at low cost: educational apps to teach letters, numbers, shapes, sign language; apps featuring television characters like Dora the Explorer; game apps (Angry Birds is a favorite with all ages); and art and music apps.
Many families, like the Deutsches, have smartphones with collections of family photos and videos of their children’s recent outings, haircuts or play dates.
“It used to be that a screen was a screen was a screen, and children just sat and watched,” said Ms. Rideout. “But now it can be lots of different things.”
The time younger children spent on mobile devices was still relatively short, the study found. On average, children under 8 spent 15 minutes a day on mobile devices, up from 5 minutes a day in 2011. Among those who used a mobile device during a typical day, the average was an hour and seven minutes, up from 43 minutes in 2011.
But as mobile devices have become more popular, the amount of time children spend with the screens of more traditional technology — television, DVDs, video games and computers — has declined by half an hour a day over the last two years.
Television still dominates, though, taking up about half of all children’s screen media time.
Almost all parents of children under 8 have televisions, the survey found, and most have cable as well. Three in 10 now have Internet connectivity with their televisions, so they can stream shows to their set from Netflix or other services. And increasingly, television is time-shifted — streamed, on demand, or recorded for later use — to suit the viewers’ convenience.
The study was conducted with a probability-based online panel by GfK, a research company. The data was collected May 20 to June 12 and has a sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points.
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Lists That Rank Colleges’ Value Are on the Rise


Michael Nagle for The New York Times
Queens College ranked second in a list, compiled by Washington Monthly, of colleges that offered the “best bang for the buck."
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Published: October 27, 2013 257 Comments
Looking out over the quadrangle before him as students dashed from one class to the next, James Muyskens was feeling proud one recent afternoon, and why not?
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James Muyskens of Queens College.

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The college he had led for the past 11 years had just been awarded second place in a new ranking of American higher education — ahead of flagship state universities, ahead of elite liberal arts colleges, even ahead of all eight Ivy League universities.
The college is Queens College, a part of the City University of New York with an annual tuition of $5,730, and a view of the Long Island Expressway.
Catering to working-class students, more than half of whom were born in other countries, Queens does not typically find itself at the top of national rankings. Then again, this was not a typical ranking. It was a list of colleges that offer the “best bang for the buck.”
“Elation,” said Dr. Muyskens, recalling his delight when he learned of the honor. “Thrilled!”
Purists might regard such bottom-line calculations as an insult to the intellectual, social and civic value of education. But dollars-and-cents tabulations like that one (which was compiled by Washington Monthly), are the fastest-growing sector of the college rankings industry, with ever more analyses vying for the attention of high school students and their parents who are anxious about finances.
President Obama sharply raised the ante in August with a plan to rate colleges on their value and affordability and to tie those ratings to the $150 billion in financial aid that the federal government supplies each year. Should Mr. Obama’s plan come to pass, value would not just be a selling point for colleges, it would be a matter of life and death.
But there is no agreement on how to measure the value of a college, and there is no agreement, or anything even close, on what value is in the first place.
“It’s a quest for the holy grail,” said Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “It sounds good, it sounds like something we’d love to know, to be able to rank the value of these institutions, but when it comes down to practicalities, it’s very, very difficult.”
U.S. News and World Report, whose academic rankings have long been derided — and obsessively followed — by college presidents, now publishes “best value” lists as well.
Princeton Review, which has advised decades of prospective students on the best party schools, more recently began listing the best value schools, too.
Forbes Magazine got in the is-it-worth-the-money game too, as did, among others, The Wall Street Journal, The Alumni Factor, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance and Payscale, a company that gathers data about the job market.
Some of these analyses approach value as largely a function of cost: How much is tuition? What subsidies are available? Others define it as return on investment: How much do graduates earn? Some factor in student satisfaction or academic ranking or graduation rates or economic diversity, all in varying quantities.
These widely divergent definitions produce wildly divergent results. Queens College did splendidly in a list that emphasizes social mobility and civic virtue. Another New York City public college, Baruch, took third place; No. 1 was Amherst.
But on a ranking that emphasizes alumni salaries, like Payscale’s list of Colleges Worth Your Investment, Queens comes in 341st. The top spot there goes to Harvey Mudd College, in Claremont, Calif., which has a much higher tuition, but whose graduates disproportionately enter lucrative fields like science and engineering. The top tier of U.S. News’s list somehow features Harvard, Princeton, Williams — and Soka University of America, a tiny Buddhist college in Southern California that admitted its first undergraduates in 2001.
Forbes’s most recent list starts out with the five national service academies, which charge no tuition. And when the Education Trust, an advocacy group, set out to list the colleges that do right by low-income students, it found only five entries, including Queens.
As for the federal government, no one yet knows how it will perform its evaluation. Arne Duncan, the education secretary, has said that his goal is a ratings system, not a single first-place-to-last-place ranking, and that the ratings will compare only schools that are similar in their mission, their student population and so on. Harvard and Yale, that is; not Harvard and Soka University of America.
“We’ll be looking at access,” Mr. Duncan said in a recent speech, “such as the percentage of students receiving Pell grants. We’ll be looking at affordability, like average tuition, scholarships and loan debt. And we’ll be looking at outcomes, such as graduation and transfer rates, alumni satisfaction surveys, graduate earnings and the advanced degrees of college graduates.”
In search of the best way to measure those categories, and of other kinds of information that ought to be included, Education Department officials will soon fan out across the country for months of town hall meetings, school forums and interviews. The plan is to compile the ratings by the start of the 2015-16 school year and to link those ratings to federal aid by 2018.
But Carolyn Hoxby, a Stanford professor and an author of an influential study about the failures of college as an engine for social mobility, said the effort is doomed to fail.
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New Jersey School District Cancels Testing After Exams Are Leaked on the Internet


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Published: October 28, 2013
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Testing of public school students in a New York City suburb was canceled on Monday after someone anonymously posted several of the exams on a public website, officials said.

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The breach of test security in the Montclair, N.J., school district was discovered by a parent on Friday, leading to a “full legal investigation,” said Penny MacCormack, the superintendent. She said that only “teachers and senior staff here would have password access” to the secure web portal that contains the exams.
The tests were developed by Montclair teachers over the summer to help measure how students were faring with the new curricular standard known as the Common Core. Students in kindergarten through 12th grade were scheduled to take several of the tests this week in various subjects. But of the 60 different exams, at least 14 were made public, and the district now assumes that the rest could be “out there” in cyberspace, Dr. MacCormack said.
She said the district was now leaving it up to schools to decide whether to use the tests, perhaps as learning tools if not measures of progress. For students in the sixth through 12th grades, the tests would have factored into their class grades.
“I am asking our principals to work with their teacher teams to determine how the assessments can be used to determine student preparation for the major learning standards without attaching student grades,” Dr. MacCormack wrote in a letter to parents Monday evening. The leaking of the tests comes at a pivotal time in education around the nation, as forces for and against the Common Core and testing face off in increasingly hostile tones.
Last week, the New York State Education Department took steps to ease some testing requirements after weeks of criticism from parents and teachers about the quantity and difficulty of the exams.
Parents in Montclair have also raised concerns, and Sunday, an effort called “Assessmentgate” was begun on Twitter and Facebook to rally parents against the local tests.
Christopher L. Len, 39, whose son is in third grade at the Charles H. Bullock school, said Monday that testing was taking time away from more worthy pursuits. “If they don’t learn now how to initiate a conversation, how to cooperate, how to be a good friend, then I think their elementary school experience will have failed them,” he said.
The displeasure is not universally felt; a petition on Change.org urging support for the district’s administration, for example, had more than 400 signatures as of Monday night.
Lois Whipple, of the Montclair Fund for Educational Excellence, which raises money primarily for grants for teachers, said the situation in the district highlighted the unintended consequences — “bad and good” — that could emanate from reform efforts.
“Montclair, like the rest of the country, is involved in a big philosophical, educational, pedagogical divide,” Ms. Whipple said. She also said she was stumped over whether the disclosure of the assessments was an accident, an act of sabotage or something else.
A parent discovered this week’s tests posted on gobookee.org, a website offering books and documents for download, according to the local teachers’ union. The tests were gone from the site by Monday; a group calling itself Anonymous, in the spirit of the amorphous global hacking network, claimed to local news blogs that it was responsible for the leak.
Dr. MacCormack said the testing was intended to prepare students for 2015, when New Jersey is expected to begin administering state tests aligned to the Common Core. New York began this year and saw passing rates plummet.
She said that the local tests would have had no bearing on the rating of an individual school or teacher’s performance and would not have counted in class grades for younger students. Robin B. Kulwin, president of the Montclair Board of Education, said the community would not tolerate a school system that did nothing to prepare its students for more rigorous standards.
“Come 2015, if we do nothing, it’s going to be unacceptable,” she said. “I think it’s good to have a plan, and by the way, a plan that can be tweaked and is not set in stone.”
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Are You Competent? Prove It.


Degrees Based on What You Can Do, Not How Long You Went

By ANYA KAMENETZ
Published: October 29, 2013 141 Comments
IN 1893, Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, introduced to the National Education Association a novel concept: the credit hour. Roughly equivalent to one hour of lecture time a week for a 12- to 14-week semester, it became the basic unit of a college education, and the standard measure for transferring work between institutions. To be accredited, universities have had to base curriculums on credit hours and years of study. The seat-time system — one based on the hours spent in the classroom — is further reinforced by Title IV student aid: to receive need-based Pell grants or federal loans, students have had to carry a certain load of credits each semester.
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Students in Capella University's FlexPath program can see how many criteria they must complete to achieve each competency. Colors indicate how well the student is doing.

FLEX DEGREES

Online self-paced programs, based on demonstrating competence in required skills and knowledge.
CAPELLA (FLEXPATH)
Tuition: $2,000 per three-month term
Degrees: B.S. in business administration; M.B.A. ($2,200 per term)
Started: October 2013
SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE UNIVERSITY (COLLEGE FOR AMERICA)
Tuition: $1,250 per six-month term
Degrees: A.A. in general studies
Started: September 2013
NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY (PERSONALIZED LEARNING)
Tuition: $2,500 per six-month term
Degrees: B.A. in liberal arts, business, computer/information technology
Started: May 2013
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN (FLEXIBLE OPTION)
Tuition: $2,250 per three-month term
Degrees: B.S.N. in nursing; B.S. in diagnostic imaging, information sciences, technology; A.A.S. in general education; certificate in technical communication
Starts: January 2014
WESTERN GOVERNORS UNIVERSITY
Tuition: $2,890 per six-month term
Degrees: B.A., M.A., M.S. in education; B.S., M.S. in information technology; B.S., B.S.N., M.S.N. in nursing ($3,250-$4,250); B.S. in business; M.B.A. ($3,250)
Started: 1997

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After more than a century, the system equating time with learning is being challenged from high quarters.
In March of this year, the Department of Education invited colleges to submit programs for consideration under Title IV aid that do not rely on seat time. In response, public, private and for-profit institutions alike have rushed out programs that are changing the college degree in fundamental ways; they are based not on time in a course but on tangible evidence of learning, a concept known as competency-based education.
The motivation for ditching time is money. This August, at Lackawanna College in Scranton, Pa., President Obama issued a call to improve college affordability that went beyond boilerplates about loans and Pell grants. He proposed a rating system that would attach federal higher education dollars to a college’s cost effectiveness and student performance. “Colleges have to work harder to prevent tuition from going up year after year,” the president said. “We’re going to encourage more colleges to innovate, try new things, do things that can provide a great education without breaking the bank.”
A new wave of innovators is following his injunction. College leaders say that by focusing on what people learn, not how or when they learn it, and by taking advantage of the latest technology, they can save students time and lower costs. There are 37 million Americans with some college but no degree, and political leaders at the local, state and national levels are heralding new competency-based programs as the best way to get them marketable diplomas.
The Lumina Foundation has been one of the champions of the approach. Jamie P. Merisotis, president and chief executive, says the rationale is not just lower cost but better education. “The time-centered system says if you take the coursework, get passing grades and meet our academic standards, you get the degree,” he said. “Competency is a student-centered, learning-outcome-based model. Where you get the education is secondary to what you know and are able to do.”
To help develop a blueprint for other universities, Lumina just announced a $1.2 million grant to support an evaluation of the University of Wisconsin’s competency-based program, set to begin in January.
But not everyone is so excited about the programs. Many are raising alarms that these untested offerings will limit or undermine the power of a university degree.
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CERTIFYING learning, rather than time, is not an entirely new concept. For decades there have been other ways to earn college credits besides sitting in the classroom. You can “test out” of certain courses through A.P., CLEP or D.S.S.T. exams. At many colleges, you can do an independent study and submit a research paper for course credit. Since the 1970s, Excelsior, Thomas Edison and Empire State have allowed students to earn credits through performance-based assessment, like a simulation with patients in a clinical setting, or by submitting a portfolio with evidence of previous learning, whether through workplace experience, military training or even a hobby.
But not until Western Governors University was founded by a consortium of 19 states in 1997 was an entire degree program structured around assessments of learning. The online institution introduced many ideas that have been copied by new competency programs. They charge fees per term, not per credit, with an “all you can eat” policy — take and retake as many assessments as you can fit into a six-month term.
Anya Kamenetz is digital education writer for the Hechinger Report and author of “DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education.”
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Warily, Schools Watch Students on the Internet


Bryce Vickmark for The New York Times
John G. Palfrey Jr. of Phillips Academy said he was cautious about Internet tools that allowed too much surveillance of students.
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Published: October 28, 2013 175 Comments
SAN FRANCISCO — For years, a school principal’s job was to make sure students were not creating a ruckus in the hallways or smoking in the bathroom. Vigilance ended at the schoolhouse gates.
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Chris Frydrych founded a company, Geo Listening, that reviews the public posts of students for school administrators.

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"If it doesn't happen on the bus to or from school, or on school grounds, it is none of their business. "
JB, Minnesota
Now, as students complain, taunt and sometimes cry out for help on social media, educators have more opportunities to monitor students around the clock. And some schools are turning to technology to help them. Several companies offer services to filter and glean what students do on school networks; a few now offer automated tools to comb through off-campus postings for signs of danger. For school officials, this raises new questions about whether they should — or legally can — discipline children for their online outbursts.
The problem has taken on new urgency with the case of a 12-year-old Florida girl who committed suicide after classmates relentlessly bullied her online and offline.
Two girls — ages 12 and 14 — who the authorities contend were her chief tormentors were arrested this month after one posted a Facebook comment about her death.
Educators find themselves needing to balance students’ free speech rights against the dangers children can get into at school and sometimes with the law because of what they say in posts on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Courts have started to weigh in.
In September, a federal appeals court in Nevada, for instance, sided with school officials who suspended a high school sophomore for threatening, through messages on Myspace, to shoot classmates. In 2011, an Indiana court ruled that school officials had violated the Constitution when they disciplined students for posting pictures on Facebook of themselves at a slumber party, posing with rainbow-colored lollipops shaped like phalluses.
“It is a concern and in some cases, a major problem for school districts,” said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, which represents public school superintendents.
Surveillance of students’ online speech, he said, can be cumbersome and confusing. “Is this something that a student has the right to do, or is this something that flies against the rules and regulations of a district?”
Interviews with educators suggest that surveillance of students off campus is still mostly done the old-fashioned way, by relying on students to report trouble or following students on social networks. Tracking students on social media comes with its own risks: One principal in Missouri resigned last year after accusations that she had snooped on students using a fake Facebook account. “It was our children she was monitoring,” said one Twitter user who identified herself as Judy Rayford, after the news broke last year, without, she added, “authorization” from children or parents.
But technology is catching on.
In August, officials in Glendale, a suburb in Southern California, paid Geo Listening, a technology company, to comb through the social network posts of children in the district. The company said its service was not to pry, but to help the district, Glendale Unified, protect its students after suicides by teenagers in the area.
Students mocked the effort on Twitter, saying officials at G.U.S.D., the Glendale Unified School District, would not “even understand what I tweet most of the time, they should hire a high school slang analyst #shoutout2GUSD.”
“We should be monitoring gusd instead,” one Twitter user wrote after an instructor was arrested on charges of sexual abuse; the instructor pleaded not guilty.
Chris Frydrych, the chief executive of Geo Listening, based in Hermosa Beach, also in Southern California, declined to explain how his company’s technology worked, except to say that it was “a sprinkling of technology and a whole lot of human capital.” He said Geo Listening looked for keywords and sentiments on posts that could be viewed publicly. It cannot, for instance, read anyone’s Facebook posts that are designated for “friends” or “friends of friends.”
But with Facebook’s announcement this month that teenagers will be permitted to post public status updates and images, Geo Listening and similar services will potentially have access to more information on that social network.
Glendale has paid Geo Listening $40,500 to monitor the social media posts. Mr. Frydrych declined to say which other schools his company works with, except to predict that by the end of the year, his company would have signed up 3,000 schools.
David Jones of CompuGuardian, based in Salt Lake City, said his product let school officials monitor whether students were researching topics like how to build bombs or discussing anorexia. His customers include five schools, but he, too, is optimistic about market growth.
“It helps you boil down to what students are having what problems,” he said. “And then you can drill down.”
But when does protecting children from each other or from themselves turn into chilling free speech?
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 30, 2013
An article on Tuesday about some schools’ efforts to monitor their students’ off-campus Internet postings for signs of trouble described incorrectly the victims of a shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007. The victims included nonstudents; not all of the 32 killed were students.
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Protests Halt Kelly’s Speech at Brown University


By EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS
Published: October 29, 2013
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A speech by Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly at Brown University planned for Tuesday was canceled after protesters against the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics disrupted the event with shouting and chants.

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Officials at the university, in Providence, R.I., ended the event and cleared the auditorium after the protests continued for almost half an hour, preventing Mr. Kelly from speaking. He had been scheduled to deliver a speech titled “Proactive Policing in America’s Biggest City.”
The university’s president, Christina H. Paxson, said that it was “a sad day for the Brown community” and that she would contact Mr. Kelly to apologize for the way he was treated on campus.
Mr. Kelly declined to comment about the canceled speech.
In a video of the event posted on YouTube, protesters shouted complaints about the policy as Mr. Kelly stood behind a lectern waiting to speak. A campus official told audience members that they would have time to comment during a question-and-answer session after the speech.
But a protester responded, “We’re asking you to stop stopping and frisking people.”
Many of the protesters, who also marched outside the event, appeared to be students, but the event was also open to the public.
In August, a federal judge ruled that New York City’s stop-and-frisk practices violated the rights of minorities, and she designated an independent monitor to oversee changes.
Communities United for Police Reform, a group that has criticized the policy, issued a statement saying that it was not surprised by the criticism of Mr. Kelly.
“It’s not shocking that after directing policing that violates New Yorkers’ civil rights and the U.S. Constitution without any remorse that Commissioner Kelly would be poorly received,” the group said in a statement, “and it’s unfortunate that New York City has become known for political and police leadership that defends discriminatory and abusive policing, and seeks to fight accountability.”
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