Thursday, July 14, 2005

ANOTHER WAY THE "ONE SIZE FITS ALL" APPROACH OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS DOES NOT WORK

High schools that begin classes as early as 7:30 a.m. deprive teenagers of sleep, and attempts to reset an adolescent's biological clock fail to solve the problem, a study in the June Pediatrics finds.

Sixty high school students in Evanston, Ill., recorded their sleep times in diaries in August, September, and November of 1997 and in February 1998. The diaries showed that students stayed up late in August but still managed to sleep 8 to 9 hours. When school started, they continued staying up late but had to awaken early for school, says Margarita L. Dubocovich, a neuropharmacologist at Northwestern University in Evanston. The teens' average sleep fell to 6 to 7 hours on weekdays.

In an attempt to reset the students' daily biological clocks, or circadian rhythms, so that they would be more alert in daytime and go to bed earlier, the researchers exposed some students in their classrooms to especially bright light between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. Other students were exposed to muted red lighting. But the bright light neither changed students' sleep patterns nor improved their scores on tests of mood, vigor, and cognitive function.

Hormones, television watching, Web surfing, and other factors might explain why adolescents delay sleep in the evening, Dubocovich says, adding that "it's not well understood." Dubocovich advocates napping in the afternoons and says high school officials should consider starting classes later and scheduling important tests only for afternoons. Only 16 percent of high schools in the United States start later than 8:15 a.m., says Richard P. Millman of Brown University in Providence, R.I.

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PRIVATE SCHOOLS FILLING A NEED IN NYC

The meddlers want to "regulate" them, of course but maybe that would be a good idea if the same standards were applied to public schools and the regulations were impartially enforced. I think more public schools would be found to be failing than private ones if the review of them were independent

The fastest-growing segment of higher education in New York State is not the immense public universities, the State University of New York and the City University of New York, nor the well-known private campuses like Columbia and New York University, but a raft of lesser-known commercial institutions often advertised on city subways.

From 1999 to 2004, a period when colleges and universities in New York grew by less than 15 percent, enrollment at degree-granting profit-making schools jumped 46 percent, to more than 44,000. And some enrollments soared. They jumped 265 percent at the Interboro Institute and 180 percent at the Rochester Business Institute.

In fact, commercial schools have been booming nationwide, driven by the rise of education conglomerates, the growth in education via the Internet and a ready market of struggling students who had not been sought out by traditional institutions. Nationally, enrollment at commercial degree-granting schools grew 147 percent between 1995 and 2002, the most recent numbers available, to nearly 600,000 students.

Students at these schools study to prepare for careers in business, culinary arts and design, and to become medical technicians or paralegals. But questions exist about the quality of education at some of these institutions. Federal and state investigators have found that some used inappropriate enrollment practices, like registering students incapable of doing the work. Some critics also charge that the schools make rosy promises about jobs for their graduates that do not materialize.

In recent audits, the New York State comptroller's office found more problems with commercial schools than at other schools. In audits of four degree-granting schools in the past year, the comptroller found that irregularities in financial aid grants were more than eight times higher at the two commercial schools studied than at the public college and the private nonprofit college that it also reviewed.

Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, said in written testimony to a Congressional hearing in March that at one point she had accumulated a two-foot stack of complaints about the schools. She said that while not all schools were bad, enough were to warrant "even more protection from the false sales pitches of many of these for-profit trade schools."

Nonetheless, more and more college students are attracted by the career-oriented education these schools typically offer, as well as by their often relaxed admissions policies and their consumer-oriented focus. Students are also drawn by the aggressive advertising that many employ. In New York City, for example, it is hard to miss their splashy campaigns in newspapers and on buses and subway cars offering quick degrees, generous financial aid and job placement. Cecil Wright, a 31-year-old student at Monroe College in the Bronx, said he was working at Kentucky Fried Chicken when he saw a sign on a bus that said, "Call 1-888-Go-Monroe." He did. "What grabbed me most of all was the whole atmosphere," he said. "I was working, and they had a flexible program that let me attend classes at night. I was also able to get financial aid; their financial aid counselors held my hand through the whole process. And not just then. They held my hand in a way that helped me to succeed."

Commercial school executives like Stephen J. Jerome, president of Monroe College and chairman of the New York State Association of Proprietary Colleges, say the industry is basically sound. "Every sector has horror stories," he said. "Every time a proprietary does something bad, it really comes out, and that drives the rest of us crazy." He said that one indicator of student satisfaction with his school, which has about 5,400 students on campuses in the Bronx and New Rochelle - up from about 3,500 in 1999 - is the growing number of second- and third-generation students.

Much of the growth at such schools is dependent on attracting students eligible for financial aid. Among schools granting degrees, the commercial institutions received 17 percent of what New York State spent on tuition assistance grants in 2002, even though they educated just 6 percent of the undergraduates. Of 441 commercial schools in the state, 41 grant degrees, up from 27 a decade ago.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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