Elections and Education: What difference does it make?

Two weeks ago, we watched Americans again vote for change, only two short years after an historic election. But can Washington and our state governments really change, and if they do, what does that mean for those of us in education? I doubt that any of us know the answers at this point, but we must remain engaged in the process if we are to fulfill our mission---to close the achievement gap by preparing ALL students for college readiness and success in a global society.

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STEMming the Gap: Helping an Engineer Find His Wings

There is no shortage of reports offering cautions regarding the competitiveness of the United States in science and engineering. The latest to appear is a 217 page effort from a committee chaired by Dr. Freeman Hrabowski, III, titled Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation: America’s Science and Technology Talent at the Crossroads. Dr. Hrabowski, the renowned president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has long focused his attention of mathematics and science equity and excellence, and has written numerous books and articles on the subject.

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Waiting for "Superman"...the rest of the story

The movie Waiting for ”Superman” brings audiences face-to-face with a true American tragedy: the broken state of our public schools. While the documentary is stirring debate about how to fix our education system, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Unfortunately, many viewers walk out of the movie mistakenly convinced that specially created schools, like charter schools, are the only option for students from impoverished areas to obtain a good education.  Not true.

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Developing a Scholar Identity: Let’s See More Boys and Color

Each year a large, nationwide cadre of AVID scholars graduate ready to enter college. They are ready to learn, ready to face the demands of their professors, and ready to navigate a somewhat daunting system. We believe our graduates meet the standards set forth by David Conley in his four dimensions of college readiness. They possess the cognitive strategies, key content knowledge, academic behaviors, and contextual skills (or “college knowledge”) necessary to persist and attain a degree.

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Are the Boys Really in a College Ready Crisis?

This is the first in a series of posts examining the “gender gap”

As I read Michael Sadowski’s “Putting the ‘Boy Crisis’ in Context” in the July/August issue of the Harvard Education Letter, I was reminded again of what appears to be an emerging national gender gap. Girls are outperforming boys on many college readiness measures. Girls have higher high school GPAs and outnumber boys in both becoming their high schools’ valedictorians and graduating from college.

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