“Joe College has joined the group Lower My GPA…”
College students who use Facebook have significantly lower GPAs than those who do not, according to a new study highlighted by TIME Magazine.
The study, which will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association on April 16, surveyed 219 undergraduate and graduate students and found that the GPAs of Facebook users typically ranged a full grade lower than those of nonusers — 3.0 to 3.5 for users versus 3.5 to 4.0 for their non-networking peers. It also found that 79% of Facebook members did not believe there was any link between their GPA and their networking habits.
“Maybe Facebook users are just prone to distraction,” doctoral candidate Aryn Karpinski of Ohio State University, the study’s author, tells the magazine. “Maybe they are just procrastinators.” What I want to know is how they found enough non-Facebook users on a college campus to make up a control group.
Bonus: …and Twitter makes you amoral.
The Carl C. Icahn Charter School in the Bronx was New York City’s toughest charter school to get into this year. The school had spots for less than 3% of its 868 applicants, the Daily News reports. On last year’s state ELA test, 85.1% of students were proficient, more than double the rate of the surrounding district–as good an argument for the efficacy of a content-rich curriculum on reading achievement as one could want. Math proficiency is even higher–over 97%.
The paper doesn’t mention it, but Carl Icahn is a Core Knowledge school. The school’s mission statement is “to use the Core Knowledge curriculum, developed by E.D. Hirsch, to provide students with a rigorous academic program offered in an extended day/year setting. Students will graduate armed with the skills and knowledge to participate successfully in the most rigorous academic environments, and will have a sense of personal and community responsibility.”
“The first class of eighth-graders who graduated last year all went on to top-tier high schools,” the paper notes, ”including the specialized high school Brooklyn Tech, the elite private school Phillips Exeter on a scholarship, and parochial schools also on scholarship.” The school is run by Jeffrey Litt, who is something of a legend in Core Knowledge circles. Many years ago a South Bronx public school run by Litt became only the second in the nation to adopt the curriculum.
The huge surplus of applicants suggests there’s some serious untapped demand in the Bronx. Do the math. Or ask the kids at Icahn to do it for you.
Texas state legislators have apparently had enough of the endless arguments over evolution and other charged topics that regularly put the state’s Board of Education in the national spotlight. The Wall Street Journal reports they are considering stripping the Board of its authority to set curricula and approve textbooks.
While the science standards have drawn the most attention, the 15-member elected board has been embroiled in other controversies as well. Last year, it rejected a reading curriculum that teachers had spent nearly three years drafting. In its place, the board approved a document that a few members hastily assembled just hours before the vote.
Various proposals being drawn up in Texas would transfer curriculum oversight and textbook adoptions to the state education agency, a legislative board or the commissioner of education. “Other bills would transform the board to an appointed rather than elected body, require Webcasting of meetings, and take away the board’s control of a vast pot of school funding,” the Journal reports.
“Maybe it’s just as well; school vouchers aren’t that “innovative” anyway. In D.C. at least, they merely help poor kids get access to good schools that have been around for a long time. In today’s education reform world, that’s not enough of a “game-changer.” Never mind the difference it makes for several thousand children.” — Mike Petrilli, “Voucher Program Dies” at Flypaper.
“Rather than using symbolism, the modern education reform movement has instead often allowed itself to be defined as a cloistered group of white dilettantes from Ivy League schools-counterproductive symbolism and off the mark.” — Andy Rotherham, “Education Reform Requires Symbols for the Movement to Embrace,” in U.S. News.
“Compare our top-performing schools and our weakest performing schools by looking at test scores, graduation rates, whatever measure you want. Do you find that most top-performing schools are running many more hours per day, or more days per year? Do you find that the top-performing schools have that much more, or better data? Do you find that they are more likely to have linked student data to teachers? Do you find that the top-performing schools have a maniacal focus on test preparation? No, no, no, no.” — David Cohen, a Palo Alto, CA English Teacher via Teacher in a Strange Land.
“I’m a reformist, not a revolutionary, because revolutions in human habits don’t work. Humans resist discontinuity and unpredictability. We may be “wired” that way? In any case, I’m sympathetic, not hostile, to caution. So I’m betting on exploring what “works” within the context of both shared ends and different ends—honoring both continuity and change at the same time. They needn’t be poised as enemies.” — Deborah Meier, “Seeing ‘Reform’ as More Than a Horse Race or Marketplace” at Bridging Differences.
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