When Chemists Attack

I’ve heard it said that spending money on public education is “throwing money at the problem” (as if the solution to an aging bus fleet is to spend less money on buses). I generally do not agree with that assertion, because it’s pretty obvious that a lot of the problems facing our public schools are connected to funding. Education isn’t cheap!

Having said that, there does seem to be one area where South Carolina seems to be “throwing money at the problem” – charter schools. Have a look at this Greenville News article about Restoring the Minds Math and Business Academy, one of South Carolina’s less-than-successful charter schools.

One-third of the 43 groups in the state that have received grants of $20,000 to plan one of these publicly funded independent schools never opened, costing taxpayers at least $280,000, according to the state Department of Education.

Now that’s throwing money at a problem. What have we gotten for our $280,000? We could have gotten buses or teachers. But we didn’t.

But let’s look at one of the charter schools that did open – Restoring the Minds Math and Business Academy.

Some charter schools that do open, such as Restoring the Minds Math and Business Academy, draw from a $200,000 start-up grant but go out of business before they finish a school year.

That giant flushing sound you just heard was your tax money, which could have gone for for more buses and more quality teachers, going down the toilet.

This particular charter school was run by Martha Evans, pastor of Resurrected Treasure Ministries. This church also runs a private school using the ACE curriculum, a holy-roller curriculum that’s a combination of bad pedagogy and bad science.

Why did their charter school close? Their charter was revoked for many reasons, according to the the Greenville county school board. They accuse the school of

(1) Material violations of the conditions, standards, and procedures provided for in the charter, as demonstrated by these failures:

• Failure to operate according to a year-round calendar
• Failure to provide single-gender classes
• Failure to utilize school uniforms
• Failure to comply with State curriculum standards
• Failure to comply with provisions for special education teacher
• Failure to follow employee grievance and termination procedures
• Failure to follow student discipline procedures
• Failure to implement innovative ideas, techniques, and methodologies
• Failure to implement interdisciplinary learning

(2) Failure to meet or make reasonable progress toward pupil achievement standards identified in the charter application, as demonstrated by the following:

• Failure to comply with State curriculum standards
• Failure to assess and implement individualized academic plans

(3) Failure to meet generally accepted standards of fiscal management, as demonstrated by the following issues:

• Failure to maintain records of financial transactions or receipts of bills paid
• Failure to comply with routine procedures and standards for compensating employees
• Inflation of enrollment numbers
• Failure to comply with SASI reporting procedures
• Failure to secure payment for out-of-district students

(4) Violations of provisions of the law from which the charter school was not specifically exempted, as demonstrated by the following:

• Failure to submit proper reports, conduct manifestation determinations, handle discipline, comply with IEP’s, provide compensatory education, and provide instruction from a qualified teacher in violation of IDEA, section 504, and the ADA
• Failure to employ certified teachers for at least 75% of the school’s teaching staff in violation of section 59-40-50(B)(5) of the South Carolina Code
• Failure to test and provide instruction to students with limited English language proficiency in violation of the fourteenth amendment, title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974
• Failure to comply with audit procedures and requirements in violation of section 59-40-50(B)(3) of the South Carolina Code
• Failure to comply with student attendance requirements in violation of section 59-40-50 (B)(2) of the South Carolina Code

I’ve highlighted a few things above. It looks like the school already had corruption problems (shady handling of funds and inflation of enrollment numbers) and quality problems (lack of certified teachers and substandard curriculum). This is what we’re pulling money away from our public schools to fund?

Something to think about …

That report from the Department of Education turns out to be pretty interesting – especially when you look at a few comparisons between public schools and private schools.

One interesting point is the fraction of students in the public schools with either learning disablilites (LD) of some kind or who are learning English as a second language (ELL). These students are more difficult to teach (in terms of time and money) than a non-disabled student who is from an English-speaking home. The data below was for fourth grade reading, but the percentages are similar for the other groups the study examined.

So the next time someone says that private schools seem to have a lower average cost per student (and they must therefore be running much more efficiently as a result), remember that they’re educating different students. They simply don’t take the more costly students!

Here in South Carolina, we’ve got a bunch of small private fundamentalist religious schools. The Department of Education report breaks these apart from private schools in general in a few places. Here’s the money quote:

For math scores,

the initial difference between Conservative Christian schools and all public schools was substantially smaller (5.1 points) and not significant. The average difference in adjusted school means between Conservative Christian schools and all public schools was -7.6 points (i.e., a higher average school mean for public schools) and was significantly different from zero.

In other words, fundamentalist schools don’t do a significantly better job at educating students in math even if you don’t recognize the fact that they don’t have as many LD/ELL students. When you do account for student factors, you see that these fundamentalist schools do demonstrably worse than the public schools.

So why is it that we want vouchers here in South Carolina, again?

There’s a new Senate bill generating some buzz on the news: S.3682, sponsored by Alexander Lamar from TN (search for it at thomas.loc.gov or try clicking here). The bill looks like it’ll provide vouchers for “low-income” kids to go to private schools – presumably on the basis that transferring poor kids from public school to private school will help them do better.

This premise appears to be flawed. The National Center for Education Statistics has released a report that says sometihng like this. While private schools appear at first glance to produce students who score better on assessments of reading and math than public school students, this difference disappears (and even reverses in some cases), when differences among ethnicity, family income, etc. are taken into account. In other words, it’s not that private schools are necessarily better at educating, it’s that they can and do select their own students.

I fail to see the great need to funnel students out of public schools (which are accountable on some level to taxpayers) to private schools (which are largely unaccountable to taxpayers), when it does not appear that the private schools will do any better a job at educating these students than the public schools do.

But even if you accept that school vouchers are a good idea, if you are into quality science education this little provision in S.3682 should give you a bit of indigestion. While schools

participating in a project under this Act shall not discriminate against an individual participant in, or an individual applicant to participate in, the project on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin

, all bets seem to be off if the school is a religious school. In particular,

if a school […] receives funds made available under this Act for an eligible student as a result of a choice made by the student’s parent, the receipt of the funds shall not, consistent with the first amendment of the Constitution–

(A) necessitate any change in the school’s teaching mission;

. So, while public schools are required (for good reason) to teach accepted science, the fundamentalist religious schools can slurp up those sweet, sweet taxpayer dollars while teaching kids nonsense like creation science on religious grounds.

(Edited – fixed thomas link and corrected bill number)

For those of you who are used to having your students stagger in with a hangover after a weekend beer binge, here’s some good news!

Nearly three quarters, or 73 percent, of 1,200 students surveyed said iPods were “in” — more than any other item in a list that also included text messaging, bar hopping and downloading music.

They’ll still stagger in drunk, but they’ll also have the earphones of their iPod stuffed into their ears!

But hey – maybe they’ll at least be listening to someone’s class…

It’s that time of year again – time for college faculty to attempt to line up in a straight line.

Faculty demonstrate scatter in linear curve fit

It was also time for severe thunderstorms to give us, for the first time in my years here, a cellphone-lighted graduation ceremony. (I’d have said a “candlelight ceremony”, but that would be so 20^th century!)

It was a dark and stormy night …

But in all seriousness, this is the day we faculty members work for – they day our graduates go out and show the rsst of the world that they learned something – and are better people for their time here at our school.

Marching to the stage

Congratulations 2006 graduates! We’re proud of you!

Warning – rant coming up!

Occasionally, at the end of the semester, I will get e-mails like this:

I just looked up the grade and saw that I had a “D”. I would like to talk with you face to face and see if there is anything that I can do to get a “C”. Please let me know.

As an instructor, this is probably one of the most annoying kinds of e-mails I ever receive. It’s more annoying than finding out you have a 7:30 AM meeting on the same day you have a night class that meets until 11 PM. It’s more annoying than the bazillion e-mails generated by my blog software when a spambot hits my filters – et cetera.

Why are these sorts of e-mails so annoying? Look at what the student it actually saying. The student isn’t saying that I made an error calculating grades or anything like that. The student knows full well that (s)he earned a “D”, and would like me to just, well, “give” out a grade that wasn’t earned – to certify that a student has certain knowledge when I know (s)he doesn’t.

That’s insulting, because it implies that the student thinks that I am dishonest enough to simply change a student’s grade because they whine loudly enough.

If you’re a student reading this, let me clue you in – most of us instructor types value our integrity. We will do our best to help you earn a good grade in our courses. We will sit with you in our offices or in the lab and help you wrap your head around the course material. Many of us offer nearly 24-hour-a-day access via e-mail, if you need help outside of school hours. At the end of the term, we will record a grade that is in line with your mastery of the course content. If you do “D” work, you’ll get a “D”. If you do “A” work, you’ll get an “A”. Very simple. if we screw up calculating your grade, we’ll correct it – but we won’t just “give you a C” if you flunked. So don’t ask.

This concludes the rant.

A friend of mine pointed me to this story in the Greenville News about two middle school kids, a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old, who were caught “gambling” – by flipping coins – in class.

Flipping coins has become popular with kids, Gambrell said. Rules vary, but it can be as simple as calling heads or tails and the winner gets the coin.

If convicted of gambling in the city, the fine is $295.50 and/or a jail term of 30 days

In a state with legalized gambling in the form of the lottery, my first reaction to the article went something like this: “So what is done if the kids are caught fighting in school? Are they beheaded immediately, or are they hung until nearly dead first?”

But it occurred to me that there may be another issue at work here.

A teacher told the 12-year-old and 15-year-old to stop playing, but the students continued and challenged the teacher, the police report said.

… after which the kids were arrested for “gambling”. Do the teachers really have so little authority in the classroom today that the only way to get rid of two disruptive kids in the middle of class is to have them arrested? That’s something to think about.

There’s a snippet of an article from News of the Weird making the rounds in the department today. It’s about a school in Canada that has supposedly forbidden faculty to use online services to check student-submitted papers for plagiarism.

We use one of these services at our school, and I think it’s a pretty good way to make sure students aren’t turning in someone else’s work and claiming it as their own. I personally son’t use the service at the moment, because my intro chemistry and general chemistry students aren’t given term papers to do.

Rather than believe the “News of the Weird” item as it was forwarded to me, I decided to see if I could find out the truth behind the matter. Surely no college would think that forbidding access to a simple tool to help instructors keep students honest would be a good thing to do, right?

Wrong. Here’s an article from CBC News about Mount Saint Vincent University in Nova Scotia, whose administrators have caved in to pressure from some student groups to keep instructors from using plagiarism-detection tools!

The university is banning all plagiarism detection software as of May, when the summer session begins.

Surely, there must be a good reason for this, right?

“Students go to university for a higher education. They don’t go to be involved in a culture of mistrust, a culture of guilt,” said Chantal Brushett, president of the students union.

Sorry, Chantal, but students have been cheating in school ever since the invention of the grade. You say you don’t want a “culture of mistrust”? Well, you’ve just bought yourself one, by admitting here that you do not want your work to be checked to see if it is your own. These programs basically just check to see if you have lifted blocks of text verbatim from other sources without proper attribution, making it a little easier for the instructor to check to see if sources are properly credited and used appropriately.

What puzzles me, though, is this question … why did this college cave in?

Students at several Canadian universities that use the service have objected to the practice, saying an American company is profiting by fostering an atmosphere of distrust at Canadian campuses.

(Emphasis mine) So, anti-Americanism is helping Canadian students cheat? Hey, at least that’s a more creative excuse than the stuff I get.

They also don’t like the fact that their own work becomes part of the database when it is submitted.

I don’t much like that one, myself – but I’m not certain that every bit of anti-plagiarism software on the planet does this.

Brushett acknowledges that some students do cheat, but she fears someone could be accused of plagiarism before the professor even reads that person’s paper.

Only if the paper contains wholesale cut-and-paste copying, Chantal.

Apparently, this tying of instructors’ hands is part of a long-running campaign by the Canadian Federation of Students. The article quoted above links to this 2003 article describing the effort.

The Canadian Federation of Students plans to start a campaign to convince universities to to stop subscribing to the service. It wants schools to use traditional methods of plagiarizing protection, such as submitting first drafts of essays and more detailed bibliographies.

Well, if this student group wants instructors to rely on ancient methods for detecting plagiarism, then perhaps the students would agree to writing their papers with the same technological limitations?

1. Internet or computer searching for information is not allowed. All references must be photocopied and submitted along with the paper.
2. All papers must be submitted with one inch margins all around and double-spaced. Papers must be typed on a manual typewriter. Word processing programs or typewriters with word processing features are not permitted.
3. Charts and graphs must be drawn in black ink on a sheet of graph paper. Computer-printed charts and graphs will not be accepted.
4. All numerical data will be analyzed manually. In the interests of fostering the use of technology, calculators will be allowed, as long as they do not have spreadsheet functions. The use of spreadsheets for data analysis is forbidden.

Of course, the requirements above are pretty silly. But they’re the student-side equivalent of what these students are asking their instructors to do by lobbying for the prohibition of anti-plagiarism software.

I do have a suggestion for these students who are terrified at the thought that their papers might be run through anti-plagiarism software by their instructors: Stop cutting and pasting stuff off the Internet into your papers! If y’all would stop doing that, we wouldn’t need to pay for anti-plagiarism software!

From CNN, 32 teachers lose their jobs in Florida for buying fake transcripts.

While I sympathize with the idea that continuing ed classes can be a burden on teachers who more often than not already have way too much to do, buying fake credits to cheat your way around the requirements crosses the line.

You wouldn’t accept faked work from your students, why should your students accept it from you?

The punishments stem from a scam run by former high school teacher William McCoggle, who claimed to offer continuing-education classes through a private company. McCoggle pleaded guilty to fraud in November, admitting he did little more than sell transcripts, requiring no tests, homework or other academic work.

Oddly,

dozens of students and parents defended the teachers who lost their jobs, saying that removing them in the middle of the school year would be too disruptive.

On the other hand, it does send the message that cheating will not be tolerated. From anyone.

Here’s more from the Miami Herald

”You don’t know me,” said Currais, one of 32 teachers who was fired or forced to resign for participating in Miami-Dade’s continuing-education credit-buying scandal.“You don’t know anything about me except the one mistake you saw on that paper.”

This is often the reaction I’ve gotten from students who were caught cheating on assignments.

Here’s more.

Many of the teachers who would comment said they never tried to submit the MOTET classes when they renewed their licenses.

”When I realized it didn’t seem like a normal education program, I refused to use the credits I received,” [Maria] Dominguez said. “If the School Board is going to terminate my employment, I will file an appeal and take it to a hearing with the UTD’s support.”

And hopefully this reacher will win the appeal, or not have to go through it in the first place. It’s certainly possible that some of these teachers didn’t know it was a scam until the scammer got their money and they got a transcript without having done any work. My next step might have been to sue the pants off the scammer.