California to Require Gay History in Schools

LOS ANGELES — California will become the first state to require public schools to teach gay and lesbian history.

As expected, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill on Thursday that mandates that the contributions of gays and lesbians in the state and the country be included in social science instruction and in textbooks. School districts will have until next January to begin implementing the new law, which was also promoted in part as a way to combat bullying of gay and lesbian students.

“This is definitely a step forward, and I’m hopeful that other states will follow,” said Mark Leno, California’s first openly gay state senator, who sponsored the bill. “We are failing our students when we don’t teach them about the broad diversity of human experience.”

The state already requires schools to teach students about the contributions of some other minority groups, including black people and women. But until now, gay figures like Harvey Milk received little mention in state-approved textbooks.

The Democratic-controlled Legislature passed a similar bill in 2006, but Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who was then the governor, vetoed it.

This time, however, California has a Democratic governor, and the legislation came on the heels of a highly publicized string of suicides among gay teenagers, including a 13-year-old boy from the state’s Central Valley.

Advocates for the legislation said they believed the shift would help make schools safer for gay and lesbian students, who are often ostracized.

“There is an increasing awareness in the public and among elected officials that we have to do something to address the problems of bullying, and the negative consequences” for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students, said Carolyn Laub, director of the Gay-Straight Alliance Network.

Some conservative lawmakers, however, continued to oppose the bill, saying that curriculum should be left to individual school districts.

“It’s a sad day for our republic when we have the government essentially telling people what they should think,” said Tim Donnelly, a Republican state assemblyman from San Bernadino. Mr. Donnelly said the law prohibited schools from presenting gays and lesbians “in anything other than a positive light, and I think that’s censorship right there.”

Though the new law will take effect in January, state textbooks and curriculum will not be updated for several years. In the meantime, local school districts will have to use supplemental materials in the curriculums.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 18, 2011

An article on Friday about California’s becoming the first state to require gay history in schools erroneously attributed a distinction to Mark Leno. While he is the first openly gay man to serve as a state senator, he is not California’s first gay state senator. Former Senator Sheila Kuehl holds that distinction.

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On Education: Message From a Charter School: Thrive or Transfer

And so, when Eva S. Moskowitz, the former city councilwoman who operates seven Success charter schools in Harlem and the Bronx, asked Ms. Sprowal to be in a promotional video, she was happy to be included.

Matthew is bright but can be disruptive and easily distracted. It was not a natural fit for the Success charters, which are known for discipline and long school days. From Day 1 of kindergarten, Ms. Sprowal said, he was punished for acting out.

“They kept him after school to practice walking in the hallway,” she said.

Several times, she was called to pick him up early, she said, and in his third week he was suspended three days for bothering other children.

In Matthew’s three years of preschool, Ms. Sprowal said, he had never missed time for behavior problems. “After only 12 days in your school,” she wrote the principal, “you have assessed and concluded that our son is defective and will not meet your school criteria.”

Five days later, Ms. Sprowal got an e-mail from Ms. Moskowitz that she took as a veiled message to leave. “Am not familiar with the issue,” Ms. Moskowitz wrote, “but it is extremely important that children feel successful and a nine-hour day with more than 23 children (and that’s our small class size!) where they are constantly being asked to focus and concentrate can overwhelm children and be a bad environment.”

The next week, the school psychologist evaluated Matthew and concluded he would be better suited elsewhere: “He may need a smaller classroom than his current school has available.”

By then, Matthew was throwing up most mornings and asking his mother if he was going to be fired from school. Worn down, Ms. Sprowal requested help finding her son another school, and Success officials were delighted to refer him to Public School 75 on the Upper West Side.

At that point, Ms. Sprowal had come to believe her son was so difficult that she was lucky anyone would take him. She wrote several e-mails thanking Ms. Moskowitz, saying she hoped that Matthew would someday be well-behaved enough to return to her “phenomenal” school.

Three years later, looking back, Ms. Sprowal said she felt her son had been done an injustice. Matthew, who has had a diagnosis of an attention disorder, has thrived at P.S. 75. His second-grade teachers, Johanny Lopez and Chante Martindale, have taught him many ways to calm himself, including stepping into the hallway for an exercise break. His report card last month was all 3s and 4s, the top marks; the teachers commented, “Matthew is a sweet boy who is a joy to have in the classroom.”

Matthew’s story raises perhaps the most critical question in the debate about charter schools: do they cherry-pick students, if not by gaming the admissions process, then by counseling out children who might be more expensive or difficult to educate — and who could bring down their test scores, graduation rates and safety records?

Kim Sweet, director of Advocates for Children of New York, said she had heard many such stories. “When we look at our cases where children are sent away from schools because of disabilities,” she said, “there are a disproportionate number of calls about charter schools.”

There is no more tenacious champion of charters than Ms. Moskowitz, whose students earn top test scores and who has plans to build a chain of 40 schools. She saw Matthew’s experience in a far different light, as her spokeswoman, Jenny Sedlis, explained in two voluminous e-mails totaling 5,701 words.

“We helped place him in a school that would better suit his needs,” Ms. Sedlis wrote. “His success today confirms the correctness of his placement. I believe that 100 percent of the time we were acting in Matthew’s best interest and that the end result benefited him and benefited P.S. 75, which now has a child excelling.”

Ms. Sedlis denied that Matthew had been suspended, and said he was not disciplined when he was kept after school.

E-mail: oneducation @nytimes.com

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The Master’s as the New Bachelor’s

William Klein’a story may sound familiar to his fellow graduates. After earning his bachelor’s in history from the College at Brockport, he found himself living in his parents’ Buffalo home, working the same $7.25-an-hour waiter job he had in high school.

It wasn’t that there weren’t other jobs out there. It’s that they all seemed to want more education. Even tutoring at a for-profit learning center or leading tours at a historic site required a master’s. “It’s pretty apparent that with the degree I have right now, there are not too many jobs I would want to commit to,” Mr. Klein says.

So this fall, he will sharpen his marketability at Rutgers’ new master’s program in Jewish studies (think teaching, museums and fund-raising in the Jewish community). Jewish studies may not be the first thing that comes to mind as being the road to career advancement, and Mr. Klein is not sure exactly where the degree will lead him (he’d like to work for the Central Intelligence Agency in the Middle East). But he is sure of this: he needs a master’s. Browse professional job listings and it’s “bachelor’s required, master’s preferred.”

Call it credentials inflation. Once derided as the consolation prize for failing to finish a Ph.D. or just a way to kill time waiting out economic downturns, the master’s is now the fastest-growing degree. The number awarded, about 657,000 in 2009, has more than doubled since the 1980s, and the rate of increase has quickened substantially in the last couple of years, says Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools. Nearly 2 in 25 people age 25 and over have a master’s, about the same proportion that had a bachelor’s or higher in 1960.

“Several years ago it became very clear to us that master’s education was moving very rapidly to become the entry degree in many professions,” Dr. Stewart says. The sheen has come, in part, because the degrees are newly specific and utilitarian. These are not your general master’s in policy or administration. Even the M.B.A., observed one business school dean, “is kind of too broad in the current environment.” Now, you have the M.S. in supply chain management, and in managing mission-driven organizations. There’s an M.S. in skeletal and dental bioarchaeology, and an M.A. in learning and thinking.

The degree of the moment is the professional science master’s, or P.S.M., combining job-specific training with business skills. Where only a handful of programs existed a few years ago, there are now 239, with scores in development. Florida’s university system, for example, plans 28 by 2013, clustered in areas integral to the state’s economy, including simulation (yes, like Disney, but applied to fields like medicine and defense). And there could be many more, says Patricia J. Bishop, vice provost and dean of graduate studies at the University of Central Florida. “Who knows when we’ll be done?”

While many new master’s are in so-called STEM areas — science, technology, engineering and math — humanities departments, once allergic to applied degrees, are recognizing that not everyone is ivory tower-bound and are drafting credentials for resume boosting.

“There is a trend toward thinking about professionalizing degrees,” acknowledges Carol B. Lynch, director of professional master’s programs at the Council of Graduate Schools. “At some point you need to get out of the library and out into the real world. If you are not giving people the skills to do that, we are not doing our job.”

This, she says, has led to master’s in public history (for work at a historical society or museum), in art (for managing galleries) and in music (for choir directors or the business side of music). Language departments are tweaking master’s degrees so graduates, with a portfolio of cultural knowledge and language skills, can land jobs with multinational companies.

Laura Pappano is author of “Inside School Turnarounds: Urgent Hopes, Unfolding Stories.”

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The Learning Network: 'Mission Complete, Houston'

Use the photo and article to answer basic news questions.

WHO was the commander of the last flight of the space shuttle Atlantis – and, indeed, of the last space shuttle flight ever?

WHAT did the commander say as he landed?

WHERE will the Atlantis go?

WHEN did the shuttle land?

WHY did the shuttle have to flip to a nose-first position to land?

HOW will supplies now be taken to the International Space Station?

Related: The activity “30 Years of the Space Shuttle: A Fact Scavenger Hunt.”

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Bronx Charter School Disciplined Over Admissions Methods

The school, Academic Leadership Charter School, opened in 2009 and is the first New York City charter to be disciplined for violating the rules for random admissions.

The violations go to the crux of the debate over charters, which are publicly financed but independently operated. Random admissions is a key tenet in most states, but critics have long contended that the schools surreptitiously weed out students who are unlikely to do well on standardized tests or are more difficult to educate.

In a letter sent to Academic Leadership’s board on Tuesday, the executive director of the city’s charter school office, Recy Dunn, accused the school of twice violating state admissions laws, and described a school in chaos from “a pattern of failed operational oversight by school leadership.”

Besides the admissions problems, the city found that two former staff members may have stolen from the school. The Department of Labor is also investigating Academic Leadership’s hiring practices, and the school is being audited by the city for unpaid food bills.

At most city charter schools, students are selected at public meetings where applicants’ names are picked from a box. But city officials found that at Academic Leadership, which has about 200 children in kindergarten through second grade, hundreds of applicants were left out of this year’s drawing. The lottery was supervised not by an impartial observer, but by a member of the parent association, the letter said. And while students who applied after the lottery should have been added to the waiting list, scores of them were not, it said.

“They are treating it like it’s a private school on the Upper East Side,” said a former school employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “Like people are applying to Dalton. This isn’t Dalton.”

In a similar case, a charter school in Albany was caught last year weeding out applicants who performed poorly on a reading test or had learning disabilities or behavioral issues. That school, Albany Preparatory Charter School, was placed on probation and its principal was replaced, but it eventually had its charter renewed for three years.

Putting Academic Leadership on probation means the school could be closed if it does not follow the city’s recommendations, which included revamping the lottery process, hiring a director of operations and having more frequent board meetings.

The city began investigating admissions practices at Academic Leadership after an article in May by this reporter on Gotham Schools, a Web site that covers New York City education. City officials said they found no evidence that the school’s staff was skimming higher-performing students off the top of the applicant pool, and said that any possible testing of applicants prior to the lottery appeared to be accidental.

But city investigators interviewed only current Academic Leadership employees and members of its board. Interviews with five former employees and seven parents who applied to the school, along with documents they provided, point to a system of inappropriately testing students or reviewing their previous school files, with those who did not meet the standards of the principal, Norma Figueroa-Hurwitz, being shut out.

Charley Grant, who was Dr. Figueroa-Hurwitz’s executive assistant for the school’s first year, said in an e-mail message that she “ordered her educational staff to carry out the testing, would issue an order about whether a student was to be granted admission to the school, and would order the administrative staff to carry out the order.” He added, “If the city had asked me, I would have told them that.”

A former teacher who provided The New York Times with copies of several students’ applications said one of them was turned away because his report card from another school indicated that he was disruptive in class and careless in his homework.

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Schools Chiefs See a Path to Proposing Their Own Accountability Systems

These education chiefs said this week that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and his aides have signaled that they may grant a waiver on a crucial provision in the law, a requirement that all children be proficient in English and math by 2014, a goal widely seen as unrealistic.

Other provisions that the administration might be willing to relax include a requirement that districts identify and address schools that do not make “adequate yearly progress” toward specific goals and restrictions on how some federal education money must be spent.

In exchange for being freed from these requirements, states would have to propose their own accountability rules and ways they would intervene in underperforming schools, these state education chiefs said they had been told.

Kevin S. Huffman, the Tennessee education commissioner, said administration officials “have been crystal clear that it would not be a waiver for everyone, but for states who are positioned to engage in meaningful reform with real accountability.”

Mr. Huffman added, “They are not saying we’re going to waive school-by-school interventions and let you just make up something.”

The state education chiefs said they envisioned state accountability systems that placed more weight on student “growth” — that is, individual performance on state tests from year to year — and possibly other factors, like high school graduation rates and participation in Advanced Placement courses, as ways to measure student achievement.

Under No Child Left Behind, schools are largely measured by students’ performance on standardized tests, and by the performance of certain subgroups of disadvantaged students.

“The biggest criticism about No Child Left Behind is the pass-fail,” said Hanna Skandera, secretary of education in New Mexico, who supports the law and hopes for more flexibility to make improvements. In 2010, 77 percent of the 827 public schools in New Mexico failed to make adequate yearly progress. “You either make A.Y.P. or you don’t,” Ms. Skandera said. “We’re not able to capture differences.”

The administration’s suggestion of waivers has already drawn opposition from Congressional leaders, including Representative John Kline, a Minnesota Republican who is chairman of the House education committee. They have challenged Mr. Duncan’s legal authority to demand certain reforms in exchange for waivers, saying that it would undermine Congress’s efforts to enact more lasting changes.

But some education advocates say the waivers are a realistic alternative to a comprehensive overhaul of the law, provided that states are still held accountable for raising achievement for all children and closing the gaps that separate poor and minority students from their peers.

“This does provide an opportunity, but only if done well,” said Daria Hall, a policy director for the Education Trust, an advocacy group in Washington. “This can’t be about letting states off the hook. It has to be about setting a high bar for states and granting flexibility to those who are willing and able to do it.”

John B. King, New York’s education commissioner, said that while New York has not made any specific proposals to federal education officials, he would be interested in exploring an accountability system that looked at student growth as well as proficiency in science and social studies. (No Child Left Behind focuses primarily on English and math). “My sense is that they’re trying to determine whether to have minimum criteria for accountability proposals, and if they were to have them, what they should be,” Mr. King said.

Some states like Indiana and Tennessee have already moved to develop their own accountability systems factoring in student growth, among other things, but they are still required under federal law to assess schools based on No Child Left Behind. The result in Tennessee has been that education officials “feel like our reforms are being splintered across multiple reporting structures,” Mr. Huffman said.

In Indiana, where schools are now graded from A to F, Tony Bennett, the state superintendent of public instruction, said that he would like to see every school — even high-performing ones — focus on raising achievement among the lowest 25 percent of students. Mr. Bennett said he would also give more weight to teacher effectiveness over how many academic degrees or years of experience teachers have.

“I’m a strong supporter of accountability measures,” he said. “But since No Child Left Behind was enacted, we have new accountability measures, and we should build more around them.”

Lillian Lowery, Delaware’s secretary of education, said more flexibility in spending federal aid and helping failing schools would allow her state to try more creative approaches, like language immersion elementary programs, summer classes in science, math and engineering, and educational games.

“We drill and we re-teach, but it’s more of the same for them,” Ms. Lowery said. “So what can we do to hook them so they’re interested and they learn?”

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The Learning Network: News Quiz | July 22, 2011

The Learning Network provides teaching and learning materials and ideas based on New York Times content.

Teachers can use or adapt our lessons across subject areas and levels. Students can respond to our Opinion questions, take our News Quizzes, learn the Word of the Day, try our Test Yourself questions, complete a Fill-In or read our Poetry Pairings.

Join the conversation by commenting on any post. We'd love to hear what you think!

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The Best School $75 Million Can Buy

If you are Chris Whittle, an educational entrepreneur, you gather well-to-do parents at places like the Harvard Club or the Crosby Hotel in Manhattan, hoping the feeling of accomplishment will rub off. Then you pour wine and offer salmon sandwiches and wow the audience with pictures of the stunning new private school you plan to build in Chelsea. Focus on the bilingual curriculum and the collaborative approach to learning. And take swipes at established competitors that you believe are overly focused on sending students to top-tier colleges. Invoke some Tiger-mom fear by pointing out that 200,000 Americans are learning Chinese, while 300 million Chinese have studied English.

Then watch them come.

As of June 15, more than 1,200 families had applied for early admission to Avenues: The World School, a for-profit private school co-founded by Mr. Whittle that will not open its doors until September 2012. Acceptance letters go out this week. Gardner P. Dunnan, the former head of the Dalton School and academic dean and head of the upper school at Avenues, said he expected 5,000 applicants for the 1,320 spots available from nursery through ninth grade. “You have to see the enthusiasm,” Mr. Whittle crowed.

And this for a school whose building remains a construction site, where the curriculum is still being designed and only 8 of 180 teachers have been hired.

The for-profit model for primary and secondary schools, while popular abroad, is relatively untested in the United States. And while tuition at Avenues will cost about the same as Horace Mann’s or Collegiate’s in 2012 — almost $40,000 annually — the new school has no track record.

The same cannot be said of Mr. Whittle, whose last venture, Edison Schools, did not revolutionize public education as he had envisioned or make the money he had thought he could.

None of that may matter, thanks to the brute reality of the Manhattan private-school admissions race: There is a serious supply-demand imbalance between school seats and children, especially downtown. The population of children under age 5 in Manhattan has risen 32 percent in five years, while the number of seats at top independent schools has inched up by 400 in the past decade, Mr. Whittle said. And, he said, those spots are going to siblings and legacies.

But Avenues is not just about offering new private-school seats. It also proposes to educate children differently. The world has changed, Team Avenues says, and the way private schools educate has not.

The founders say students at Avenues will learn bilingually, immersed in classrooms where half of the instruction will be in Spanish or Mandarin, the other half in English, from nursery school through fourth grade. The school will be part of a network of 20 campuses around the world with roughly the same curriculum. If Mom and Dad move to London, little Mateo doesn’t have to find a new school, or maybe even miss any class. When Sophia is in middle school, she can spend her summers in Shanghai, and when she’s in high school, she can globe-trot by semester. Avenues will foster “mastery,” finding students’ passions early and building on them.

“Schools need to do a better job preparing children for international lives,” Mr. Whittle said. He and his team call themselves “fervent evolutionaries,” purposefully shying away from the r-word since, as they (now) acknowledge, most parents aren’t too keen to mix “revolution” and “my children.”

The result, they believe, will be a school where Singapore math and British geography collide with Juilliard-level violin instruction, in 20 shining schools around the world. It is a vision that many parents have embraced.

“Finding something in our neighborhood that both of our kids connected to, where we could have them in the same school — and one with a highly talented and wonderfully pedigreed senior staff — seemed like a great find,” says Liza Landsman Gold, a private-equity partner whose two children, currently in different public schools, applied for entry.

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Tom Vander Ark’s New York-Area Charter Schools Falter

Mr. Vander Ark, the foundation’s former executive director of education and a national leader in the online learning movement, was granted charters in 2010 to open a high school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and two others in Newark. The New York school, Brooklyn City Prep, also got space in a public school building — a precious and controversial commodity — hired a principal, and welcomed applications from 150 eighth graders this spring.

But after spending more than $1.5 million of investors’ money on consultants and lawyers, Mr. Vander Ark, 52, has walked away from the project, and the schools will not open as planned this fall, leaving others involved stunned and frustrated.

“If we had plotted a worst-case scenario, no one could have constructed the current situation,” said Mr. Vander Ark, saying the weak economy and the difficulty of establishing charters in New York and New Jersey “led to less success than we had hoped for.”

In an e-mail to the board members he had recruited, Mr. Vander Ark added, “I have a lot more sympathy for nonprofit leaders now that I’m on this side of the table.”

Those he has been working with had a harsher assessment.

“He’s flying 30,000 feet on the air, but can’t do it on the ground,” said Joshua Morales, a former official with the New York City Education Department who was hired by Mr. Vander Ark to develop the schools.

James Wiley, an educational technology consultant who has been serving as chairman of Brooklyn City Prep’s board of directors, said: “I’m from the Bronx, so you can imagine what language I used when I found out he was having these problems and we didn’t know anything about it. We just assumed that he was ticking along and things were going O.K.”

Mr. Vander Ark said he had kept his colleagues informed.

“So it’s ridiculous for them to claim that they were unaware,” he said. “They created these ideas. They helped pitch these ideas.”

While many new charter schools are asked to take a year for planning, it is relatively rare to require two, and unusual for a founder — in this case, a well-known figure in education reform — to walk away.

A former businessman and superintendent of a Washington State school district, Mr. Vander Ark doled out more than $1.6 billion in Gates Foundation money from 1999 to 2006, much of it to create and support small high schools. In 2008, he founded City Prep Academies, a for-profit organization intended to create and operate charter schools that combined traditional classroom teaching and online learning. He said the group was financed by $1.5 million from Revolution Learning, a venture fund where he is a managing partner.

But City Prep Academies immediately ran into problems. Its first application for a New York charter, made in summer 2009 as a close copy of the NYC iSchool that opened in SoHo the year before, received a tepid response from the city’s Education Department. Like the iSchool, Brooklyn City Prep promised to blend traditional classroom teaching with online learning, but many who read the application found it lacking in details.

“There was definitely the sense that they were not immediately ready to open the school,” said Michael Duffy, who was the director of the city’s charter school office at the time.

Dirk Tillotson, a charter-school consultant who read the application, agreed. “It didn’t seem like there was enough of a ‘there’ there,” he said, adding, “You didn’t know what the school was going to look like.”

The city and state approved the charter the next year, on the condition that Brooklyn Prep take an extra year to ready itself, with the opening scheduled for September 2011. At the same time, the first of the Newark schools, Vailsburg Prep, had its opening postponed to 2011 from the requested 2010, and the second, Spirit Prep, applied in 2010 for a 2011 opening but was also delayed a year.

After the initial $1.5 million investment from his own venture fund, Mr. Vander Ark found himself unable to raise the money — up to $500,000 per school — that he said he needed to open them. He switched strategies and asked the Charter School Growth Fund, a nonprofit investment fund based in Colorado, to help him start a charter management organization, City Prep Academies Northeast. He also changed the name of his for-profit organization to Open Education Solutions.

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Room For Debate: The Case Against Law School

Mark Graham for The New York Times Is law school really necessary for the bar exam?

Law school tuition is rising four times as fast as the cost of an undergraduate degree, which itself is soaring. Despite the high price, students are still flocking to law schools, even if it means going into heavy debt to enter a tight job market with few top-paying openings.

Should the standard three-year model of legal education, followed by taking and passing the bar exam, be the only path toward becoming a lawyer? Could law school be shortened, or should those three years of classes have a different focus?

?Read the Discussion ?

David Van Zandt

George Leef

Kevin Noble Maillard

Rose Cuison Villazor

David Lat

Geoffrey R. Stone

Linda Greene

Bryan A. Garner

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Ed Schools’ Pedagogical Puzzle

If it all sounds revolutionary, it’s supposed to. In its promotional materials, Relay uses fiery terms to describe its mission, promising to train schoolteachers in a way that “explodes the traditional, course-based paradigm that has been adopted by traditional schools of education over the past century.” Norman Atkins, the founder of a network of charter schools and the president of Relay, talks about his program as being beyond ideology, a word he believes has a negative connotation.

“The messiah is not going to come in the blink of an eye,” Mr. Atkins said recently. But he hopes, he said, to help bring about a future in which teachers and schools use instructional techniques that are known to work and are held accountable for student performance, two core tenets of Relay.

Mr. Atkins’s goal of upending teacher training stems from a broader diagnosis shared by many who work in public education: that it is failing millions of American children, leaving them without the skills they need to succeed in the 21st century. Vastly improving teacher education, they believe, is critical in fixing that picture.

There are wide concerns that too many teachers are unprepared for the classroom, though they may have more educational credentials than ever before. Master’s degrees are required for permanent certification in only a few states, including New York and Kentucky. But data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics show that 52 percent of kindergarten through eighth-grade teachers have a master’s degree or higher — which often qualifies them for a pay bump. And so graduate school in education is big business. In the 2008-9 school year, the 178,564 master’s degrees in education that were awarded across the country accounted for 27 percent of all the master’s degrees awarded.

Over the years, some of the toughest critics of education schools have been educators themselves. In 1986, the Holmes Group, a collection of deans from education schools, warned that too many schools were indifferent to the importance of hands-on teacher preparation. Their curriculums were outmoded, and their standards for admission and graduation were lax. Major research universities accorded them a low priority. Twenty years later, Arthur Levine, the former dean of Teachers College at Columbia University, argued in a scathing report called “Educating School Teachers” that most of those problems still held true.

“While there are some wonderful teaching schools,” he told me recently, “there are some that place students at failing schools with failing teachers to learn how to teach. There are some in which the professors are really far behind the times. There is enough bad practice to justify getting rid of the bottom of the field.”

But even those calling for reform face a problem, Dr. Levine said: There is little research into what kind of training is most likely to produce a successful teacher, a fact that social scientists are now working to remedy through long-term study.

In the meantime, states, which set the rules for certifying educators, are taking an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to reform, raising the standards for existing schools while opening the door to new kinds of organizations, from online schools to charter school networks to museums, to train their teachers.

For example, New York invited nonacademic institutions to apply for $12.5 million in grants to develop and offer “clinically rich” master’s degree programs in teacher preparation. Among the 11 winning proposals, which were announced earlier this month, are the American Museum of Natural History, which already has a doctoral program in biology, along with Fordham University, Mercy College and two campuses of the City University of New York.

These changes come as large numbers of teachers already bypass traditional education degrees, entering classrooms with temporary licenses after as little as several weeks or months of pre-service training.

Today, about 500,000 of the nation’s 3.6 million teachers have entered the field through these alternative routes, such as Teach for America, mostly to work in public schools in high-poverty areas.

Even Arne Duncan, President Obama’s secretary of education, has joined in questioning traditional teacher education, advising districts in a speech last year to rethink the practice of rewarding teachers with a raise for a master’s degree, because “there is little evidence teachers with master’s degrees improve student achievement more than other teachers.”

Education schools, particularly those that offer top-notch training, might be excused for feeling they are under attack.

“The rhetoric is enormously heated,” Dr. Levine said, speaking from his office at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, where as president he helps universities restructure their teaching programs. “We have a group of education schools that are perplexed at why they are being so criticized,” he said. “We have states saying they are going to create alternate routes to becoming a teacher, and they are going to increase standards for the existing education schools.

“We are simultaneously trying to reform and replace the enterprise.”

Sharon Otterman covers New York City public education for The Times.

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Surge in Number of Indian Students Heading to Canadian Colleges

Besides the country’s positive attitude toward outsiders, the chief attractions for Indian students are the lower costs for both tuition and living expenses, in addition to its lenient visa requirements, according to students and consultants who advise them about overseas study options.

The number of Canadian student visas issued in India jumped to more than 12,000 in 2010, from 3,152 in 2008.

While applications have increased at all levels, growth has been greatest at community colleges, which typically offer career-focused certificate and diploma programs, according to Simon Cridland, a spokesman at the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi.

“They offer very practical training that is very job-market focused,” he said, adding that courses range from highly technical subjects like aircraft maintenance and computer animation to sports management and hospitality.

Shreya Dasgupta, a recent high school graduate from New Delhi, plans to start studying economics and business at Simon Fraser University’s Burnaby campus this fall. Ms. Dasgupta, 18, said that while she did not have a strong preference for any one country, she found Canada’s relatively liberal visa rules attractive.

“I think it’s easier than the United States,” she said. “Plus, you do have job opportunities later on. In the U.S., it’s very expensive and it’s not sure that you’ll get a job.”

Kartik Rao, who has been admitted to an M.B.A. program at Concordia University in Montreal, also said that Canada is more welcoming. “Irrespective of my getting a job, I have a three-year work visa which will allow me to work, which will in turn allow me to pay back my loan,” he said.

Mr. Rao, 25, estimates that his business degree in Canada will cost 35 percent to 40 percent less than what it would cost in the United States or in Britain. Also driving his optimism is the belief that employment prospects in Canada are better.

“The financial downturn has forced people to look for new avenues,” he said. “Canada was not as badly affected, which really tilted people’s views about Canada.”

Also, warming political ties have raised the country’s profile in India. Among the agreements signed during a visit to Canada last summer by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was a pact on broadening ties in higher education. To promote this initiative, 15 university presidents from Canada visited India last November.

Last month, the heads of dozens of Indian universities participated in a high level meeting at Carleton University in Ottawa to explore possibilities for increased collaboration.

“There is increasing awareness of what kinds of experience and expertise are available in the Canadian higher education system,” said Gail Bowkett, the assistant director for international relations at the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada. “Indian students can find pretty much any niche that they are looking for.”

As part of its effort to showcase the variety of academic programs, Canada has launched a program for Indian students to complete three- to four-month paid research internships at leading Canadian universities. In 2010, 105 students from the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology were chosen for the all-expenses-paid program. They travelled to British Columbia, Ontario and New Brunswick to conduct research.

Ms. Bowkett said the positive experience of these elite students has been a huge image booster. “The program exposes them to faculty and facilities, and those students are going back to India and it spreads like wildfire by word of mouth when they go back.”

Also, starting in 2009, the Canadian visa offices in India started to increase the promotion of community colleges. According to Mr. Cridland, the jump in applications to these institutions is a sign that Indians who normally send their children overseas for a university degree are now open to the idea of also sending them to community colleges.

For instance, a course in accounting or public relations “can be an additional qualification that complements a university degree, or it can be a stand-alone qualification, depending on the needs of the student,” he said.

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Union Chief Faults School Reform From ‘On High’

“Let’s refuse to be defined by people who are happy to lecture us about the state of public education — but wouldn’t last 10 minutes in a classroom,” Ms. Weingarten told a crowd of about 2,000 here in kicking off the national conference held every two years by the union, which has 1.5 million members.

In the past year, particularly in Wisconsin and New Jersey, governors and some state lawmakers have castigated teachers’ unions and schools’ performance while slashing budgets and pushing newer education strategies like charter schools and more rigorous teacher evaluation.

Ms. Weingarten, who has long opposed the cuts — both budgetary and rhetorical — made to teachers, told her audience that the current debate on education “has been hijacked by a group of self-styled reformers” from “on high” who want to blame educators’ benefits and job security for states’ notorious budget problems. Calling the union gathering “an affirmation,” she countered that change to the education system should instead come through greater community support for teachers themselves and recognition for the commitment to children they already demonstrate.

The speech, preceded by a youth chorus singing “Money (That’s What I Want)” and ending with Dionne Warwick’s “Say a Little Prayer,” was a formalization of the points Ms. Weingarten has made in editorials and on television as states’ budget crises have landed at the schoolhouse door. It played well with union members like Dan Fray, an eighth-grade social studies teacher in Toledo, Ohio, where State Senate Bill 5 limited the collective-bargaining rights of 350,000 public workers earlier this year.

“We didn’t become teachers for the pay or the benefits or the schedule, and no one’s looking for a pat on the back for staying late to help kids,” Mr. Fray said. “But what’s happened in Ohio and Indiana and Wisconsin and elsewhere is the vilification of the schoolteacher.”

Ms. Weingarten’s speech followed impassioned comments from Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, Democrat of the District of Columbia, who said, “There is no way to be for our children and against teachers.”

Ms. Weingarten did offer conciliatory remarks, acknowledging the success of some charter schools while still expressing fear that they siphon talent and money from established school systems. She implored her members to avoid a “circle the wagons” approach to public skepticism of their value, saying that could cut teachers off from the communities with which they should connect more intimately.

The area in which teachers’ economic and ideological concerns appeared to converge was longevity in the classroom. Ms. Weingarten criticized an environment that discourages people from making education a life’s calling, noting that one-third of teachers leave after three years, and one-half leave after five. That is before they have a chance to reach their potential, she said — and, some detractors would counter, the comfort of tenure that can breed complacency and underperformance.

“I’m not saying that teaching needs to be the only job someone holds in a society where people have multiple careers,” Ms. Weingarten said. “But unless we move teaching from a service project to a sustainable profession, it will exact a huge cost on our schools, our children’s achievement and our progress as a nation.”

Ms. Weingarten did not address two notable subjects: the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers, and recent revelations of cheating among teachers in Atlanta and elsewhere to improve students’ test scores, which are often tied to funding.

In an interview afterward, Ms. Weingarten condemned the Atlanta situation but pointed to the role of the local teachers’ unions in helping uncover it. The cheating itself, she said, was a byproduct of when “targets become more important than learning” and of a teaching climate that in many areas has become “intimidating, fearful and retaliatory.”

“A new reality is what we’re fighting for,” she had told her audience an hour earlier. “One in which we improve the profession of teaching for teachers and outcomes for students.”

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Cash Tempts the Ivory Tower’s Guardians

Under the terms of the contract signed by Deutsche Bank, Humboldt University and the Technical University of Berlin, the bank agreed to put up €12 million, or $17 million, over four years, starting in 2007, to finance the Quantitative Products Laboratory, which would apply advanced mathematical techniques to the world of finance, and to pay the cost of two endowed professorships, one at each university.

In return the bank was allowed a say in the hiring of the two professors. It was also given the right to have bank employees designated as adjunct professors, allowed to grade student work. Appropriate topics for research and research strategy would be decided by a steering committee made up of two academics and two bank employees, with the managing director, a bank employee, casting the deciding vote in the event of a tie.

Deutsche Bank was given the right to review any research produced by members of the Quantitative Products Laboratory 60 days before it was published and could withhold permission for publication for as long as two years. The agreement even specified that the laboratory would be located “in close proximity to the Deutsche Bank” headquarters in Berlin.

Finally, the whole agreement was to be secret, which ensured that when Peter Grottian, a political scientist and emeritus professor at Humboldt, obtained a copy last month after becoming a shareholder in Deutsche Bank, the ensuing scandal produced huge headlines in the German news media.

“You cannot avoid the impression that science is for sale,” Michael Hartmer, director of the German Association of University Professors, told Der Spiegel.

Jorg Steinbach, president of the Technical University of Berlin, repeatedly claimed that such terms were business as usual, but Humboldt’s president, Jan-Hendrik Olbertz, acknowledged that there was cause for concern. He said that in any future contracts entered into by the university, “the independence of science would be articulated clearly and unequivocally.”

Would such an arrangement raise eyebrows elsewhere? Jennifer Washburn said it should. The author of “University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education,” Ms. Washburn said in an interview that while collaboration between the academy and industry is common and often desirable, “no university should ever sign a funding contract that allows the corporate sponsor to control what happens in the classroom.”

“That is corporate training, not education,” she said.

“The financial pressures on universities today are enormous,” Ms. Washburn added. As governments cut financing and university endowments decrease in value because of the financial crisis, “there has been a sea change in the relationship between corporations and universities which, in their eagerness to establish ties with industry, risk losing sight of the need to address the potential for serious conflicts of interest,” she said.

“Withholding publication is never acceptable,” Ms. Washburn asserted, while noting that there “are no hard and fast rules, no accepted codification for such relationships.” In the United States, for instance, “every university can set its own rules,” she said, though government agencies offer guidelines. Those from the National Institute of Health, for example, reflect “a fundamental belief that the role of a university is to rapidly disseminate new knowledge,” she said.

“Many collaboration agreements allow for a short delay on publication to protect intellectual property, so patents or copyrights can be applied for,” she said. “The National Institute of Health recommends that the delay in such cases be no more than 30 to 60 days.”

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The Choice: You're Not Wrong: Colleges Giving More A's

Our colleagues on the Economix blog write today about a study that examined historical data on the letter grades awarded by more than 200 four-year colleges and universities. Their principal finding, according to Catherine Rampell, who wrote the post: “The share of A grades awarded has skyrocketed over the years.” Specifically, the researchers, Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, find that “most recently, about 43 percent of all letter grades given were A’s, an increase of 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988,” Ms. Rampell writes. The full blog post can be found here, and the study, published in the Teachers College Record, here.

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First: No, Seriously: No Excuses

Photo Illustration by Ruud Van Empel/Stux Gallery

In the early days of the education-reform movement, a decade or so ago, you’d often hear from reformers a powerful rallying cry: “No excuses.” For too long, they said, poverty had been used as an excuse by complacent educators and bureaucrats who refused to believe that poor students could achieve at high levels. Reform-minded school leaders took the opposite approach, insisting that students in the South Bronx should be held to the same standards as kids in Scarsdale. Amazingly enough, those high expectations often paid off, producing test results at some low-income urban schools that would impress parents in any affluent suburb.

Ten years later, you might think that reformers would be feeling triumphant. Spurred in part by the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, many states have passed laws reformers have long advocated: allowing for more charter schools, weakening teachers’ tenure protections, compensating teachers in part based on their students’ performance. But in fact, the mood in the reform camp seems increasingly anxious and defensive.

Last month, Diane Ravitch, an education scholar who has emerged as the most potent critic of the reform movement, wrote an Op-Ed for this newspaper arguing that raising high-poverty schools to consistently high levels of proficiency is much more difficult and less common than reformers make it out to be. When politicians hold up specific schools in low-income neighborhoods as success stories, Ravitch wrote, those successes often turn out, on closer examination, to be less spectacular than they appear. She mentioned the Bruce Randolph School in Denver, which President Obama singled out in his 2011 State of the Union address as an example of “what good schools can do,” and the Urban Prep Academy in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, which the education secretary, Arne Duncan, praised in a speech in February. Each school graduates a very high percentage of its seniors, but, Ravitch said, test scores at those schools suggested that students were below average in the basic academic skills necessary for success in college and in life.

The backlash was quick and intense. Duncan said that Ravitch was “insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country who are proving her wrong every day.” Jonathan Alter, a columnist for Bloomberg View, wrote that she was “sliming reformers” and later, when he and Ravitch appeared together on a Denver radio show, accused her of “abusing statistics” in her analysis of the schools’ achievement-test scores.

The Bruce Randolph school, Alter explained, “should not be compared to other Colorado schools in affluent neighborhoods”; to consider Randolph’s scores alongside those of white, middle-class schools was like “comparing apples and oranges.” Instead, he argued, the school should be judged on the “stunning” fact that its ninth-grade writing-proficiency rates had doubled since 2007, improving to 15 percent of the class from 7 percent, and that its ninth-grade math-proficiency rates had risen to 14 percent of the class from 5 percent.

A week later, the founder of Urban Prep, Tim King, took to The Huffington Post to defend his school against Ravitch’s charges. King acknowledged that just 17 percent of his 11th-grade students passed the statewide achievement test last year, while in the Chicago public schools as a whole, the comparable figure was 29 percent. But echoing Alter’s fruit metaphor, he wrote that Ravitch was comparing “apples to grapefruits” by holding the students at Urban Prep, who are almost all black males from low-income families, to the standards of “children from all across Chicago.”

To point out the obvious: These are excuses. In fact, they are the very same excuses for failure that the education-reform movement was founded to oppose. (If early reformers believed in anything, it was that every student is an apple.) And not only are they excuses; they aren’t even particularly persuasive ones. By any reasonable measure, students at Bruce Randolph are doing very badly. The average ACT score at Randolph last year was 14, the second-lowest average of any high school in Denver, placing students in the bottom 10 percent of ACT test-takers nationwide. In the middle school, composite scores on state tests put students at the first percentile in reading and writing (meaning that at 99 percent of Colorado schools, students are scoring better), and at the fifth percentile in math. As for Urban Prep: demographic data show that the school’s students are not, in fact, disadvantaged grapefruits among well-to-do apples when compared with the city’s student population as a whole; 84 percent of its students are low-income and 99.8 percent are nonwhite, while in Chicago public schools, 86 percent of students are low-income and 91 percent are nonwhite.

Paul Tough, a contributing writer, is the author of “Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America.” His next book, “The Success Equation,” will be published next year.

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Law School Economics: Ka-Ching!

The basic rules of a market economy — even golden oldies, like a link between supply and demand — just don’t apply.

Legal diplomas have such allure that law schools have been able to jack up tuition four times faster than the soaring cost of college. And many law schools have added students to their incoming classes — a step that, for them, means almost pure profits — even during the worst recession in the legal profession’s history.

It is one of the academy’s open secrets: law schools toss off so much cash they are sometimes required to hand over as much as 30 percent of their revenue to universities, to subsidize less profitable fields.

In short, law schools have the power to raise prices and expand in ways that would make any company drool. And when a business has that power, it is apparently difficult to resist.

How difficult? For a sense, take a look at the strange case of New York Law School and its dean, Richard A. Matasar. For more than a decade, Mr. Matasar has been one of the legal academy’s most dogged and scolding critics, and he has repeatedly urged professors and fellow deans to rethink the basics of the law school business model and put the interests of students first.

“What I’ve said to people in giving talks like this in the past is, we should be ashamed of ourselves,” Mr. Matasar said at a 2009 meeting of the Association of American Law Schools. He ended with a challenge: If a law school can’t help its students achieve their goals, “we should shut the damn place down.”

Given his scathing critiques, you might expect that during Mr. Matasar’s 11 years as dean, he has reshaped New York Law School to conform with his reformist agenda. But he hasn’t. Instead, the school seems to be benefitting from many of legal education’s assorted perversities.

N.Y.L.S. is ranked in the bottom third of all law schools in the country, but with tuition and fees now set at $47,800 a year, it charges more than Harvard. It increased the size of the class that arrived in the fall of 2009 by an astounding 30 percent, even as hiring in the legal profession imploded. It reported in the most recent US News & World Report rankings that the median starting salary of its graduates was the same as for those of the best schools in the nation — even though most of its graduates, in fact, find work at less than half that amount.

Mr. Matasar declined to be interviewed for this article, though he agreed to answer questions e-mailed through a public relations representative.

Asked if there was a contradiction between his stand against expanding class sizes and the growth of the student population at N.Y.L.S., Mr. Matasar wrote: “The answer is that we exist in a market. When there is demand for education, we, like other law schools, respond.”

This is a story about the law school market, a singular creature of American capitalism, one that is so durable it seems utterly impervious to change. Why? The career of Richard Matasar offers some answers. His long-time and seemingly sincere ambition is to “radically disrupt our traditional approach to legal education,” as it says on his N.Y.L.S. Web page. But even he, it seems, is engaged in the same competition for dollars and students that consumes just about everyone with a financial and reputational stake in this business.

“The broken economic model Matasar describes appears to be his own template,” wrote Brian Z. Tamanaha, a professor at Washington University Law School in St. Louis, in a blog posting about Mr. Matasar last year. “Are his increasingly vocal criticisms of legal academia an unspoken mea culpa?”

A PRIVATE, stand-alone institution located in the TriBeCa neighborhood of downtown Manhattan, New York Law School was founded in 1891 and counts Justice John Marshall Harlan among its most famous graduates. The school — which is not to be confused with New York University School of Law — is housed in a gleaming new 235,000-square-foot building at the corner of West Broadway and Leonard Street.

That building puts N.Y.L.S. in the middle of a nationwide trend: the law school construction boom. As other industries close offices and downsize plants, the manufacturing base behind the doctor of jurisprudence keeps growing. Fordham Law School in New York recently broke ground on a $250 million, 22-story building. The University of Baltimore School of Law and the University of Michigan Law School are both working on buildings that cost more that $100 million. Marquette University Law School in Wisconsin has just finished its own $85 million project. A bunch of other schools have built multimillion dollar additions.

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The Choice: 'Slow Down and Savor Middle and High School'

Dave Marcus, the author of “Acceptance: A Legendary Guidance Counselor Helps Seven Kids Find the Right Colleges — and Find Themselves,” is a reliable source of measured advice on the college admissions process and on the importance of keeping it in the proper perspective. (Regular readers of The Choice know this first-hand from his posts for us, including one last year about a son who marches to the beat of a different educational drummer, which prompted several hundred comments.)

In an interview posted recently on a blog called Teen Life, Mr. Marcus shared three main pieces of advice that I felt were worth passing on to Choice readers, as a new school year beckons. They are:

“Help your kids live their own dreams. If majoring in economics at Princeton is Mom’s ambition, that’s fine. But if art school is the kid’s dream, help him or her do great work.”

“Kids need to slow down and savor the opportunities of middle and high school — in the classroom, in museums, in clubs. Don’t join a group or take on community service because it looks good on an application; do it to make a difference.”

“Realize that a 16- or 17-year-old is far from formed, and so personalities and goals change.”

In the interview, Mr. Marcus fleshes out each of those ideas a bit further. After you’ve read it, I hope you’ll consider using the comment box below to reflect on his recommendations, and to pass on some advice of your own.

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Training of Teachers Is Flawed, Study Says

The National Council on Teacher Quality, an advocacy group, is to issue a study on Thursday reporting that most student-teaching programs are seriously flawed. The group has already angered the nation’s schools for teachers with its plans to give them letter grades that would appear in U.S. News and World Report.

The council’s report, “Student Teaching in the United States,” rated 134 student-teaching programs nationwide — about 10 percent of those preparing elementary school teachers — and found that three-quarters of them did not meet five basic standards for a high-quality student-teaching program.

When the U.S. News rankings are published, the student-teaching programs will count for one-fifth to one-third of an education school’s grade, according to Kate Walsh, president of the council.

“Many people would say student teaching is the most important piece of teacher preparation,” Ms. Walsh said. “But the field is really barren in the area of standards. The basic accrediting body doesn’t even have a standard for how long a student teacher needs to be in the classroom. And most of the institutions we reviewed do not do enough to screen the quality of the cooperating teacher the student will work with.”

Many of the nation’s 1,400 education schools have taken issue with the council’s ranking project.

“This report will generate some attention and discussion, but we don’t know how valid the analysis is,” said Sharon P. Robinson, president of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. “They ask for a lot of documents, reviewed by people we do not know, against rubrics we are not privileged to see.”

In some areas, like the length of student-teaching placement, Dr. Robinson said, the council’s standards are less rigorous than what many education schools require. In others, she said, the standards actually go against the current direction of education overhaul.

“A school can lose points for not having absolute control over the selection of the cooperation teacher,” she said. “But we think these clinical experiences should be crafted in partnership with the schools, not dictated by either the principal or the education school.”

This year, officials from 35 leading education colleges and graduate schools wrote to the editor of U.S. News, criticizing the council’s methodology, and complaining about the “implied coercion” in the initial plan to use open-records laws to get information the schools would not supply voluntarily — or, if the information was unavailable, give the schools an F.

Among the 134 schools in the report, 12 asked not to be included; the council included them anyway, using public records requests to get information about the public institutions, and indicating with an asterisk institutions for which some information was unavailable.

The ranking plan is more popular among state education officials. In 10 states, the chief education officer has specifically endorsed the council’s project.

“This is shaping up to be quite a battle royale, not just between the education schools and us, but between K-12 education and higher ed, since state school officers want this information, but education schools are fighting it,” Ms. Walsh said.

The pushback might delay the rankings, which were to be published late next year, she said.

“Our schedule was predicated on schools voluntarily complying, as they do with all other U.S. News and World projects,” Ms. Walsh said.

Because some of the standards on which the education schools were ranked are subjective, some institutions ranked “poor” said they disagreed with that rating. Ten programs, or 7 percent, were rated as having “model” design; 17 percent had “good” design, and the rest were rated “weak” or “poor.”

Fayneese Miller, dean of the College of Education and Social Services at the University of Vermont, the largest teacher-training school in the state, said she could not understand why her school got a “poor” — worse than the other two Vermont schools ranked — when hers is the only education school in the state that exceeds all state standards, the only one with national accreditation and the one with the longest student-teaching placements.

“We have no problem about being evaluated, but as you can imagine, I am not at all pleased about the way they conducted the study,” Dr. Miller said. “This has major implications for us in terms of our ability to attract and place our students.”

The council, however, said that, like many education schools, the University of Vermont’s did not meet its standards because it left principals too big a role in choosing cooperating teachers, and did not do enough to ensure that they are effective teachers who will be good mentors.

At New York University, rated “weak” — along with CUNY Lehman and SUNY Cortland, the other two New York institutions included in the report — Mary M. Brabeck, dean of the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, also took issue with council’s methodology, saying that she would grade the report “poor.”

“It relies on standards that appear arbitrary and unsupported by research, and it uses them to draw incorrect conclusions,” Dr. Brabeck said in an e-mail.

For example, she said, N.Y.U.’s elementary education students must have four different placements, and 15 weeks of student teaching, more than required to meet the council’s standards. But because of the way the placements are structured, they are counted as not meeting the standards.

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The Critter People

Piotr Redlinski for The New York TimesDoctoral students at the American Museum of Natural History include Edward Stanley (with lizards), Dawn Roje (with flatfish) and Phil Barden (with ants, collected by sucking on tube).

Beyond the noisy throngs marveling at the dinosaurs, the dioramas and the immense blue whale, up on the fifth floor where visitors are not allowed, the American Museum of Natural History takes on an entirely different character.

Pedro Peloso (with frog).

The neatly labeled metal lockers that line the hallway are much like the stacks of a research library, except that instead of books there are many of the museum’s millions of specimens, from ants in amber to dry-mounted birds. Signs point the way to invertebrates, entomology, ornithology. Here, it is the quiet home of the Richard Gilder Graduate School, whose 13 students are earning doctorates in the specialized field of comparative biology, teasing out what fossils from the Gobi Desert and leeches and frogs have to reveal about the evolutionary tree of life. The museum is the first in the nation accredited to offer a doctorate in its own name.

But around the country, all kinds of museums are venturing deeper into the world of education, finding new ways to use their collections in research and teacher training, and bringing in more students, in person and virtually. Many have entered into partnerships with local universities. Last year, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry introduced a master’s in science education with the Illinois Institute of Technology. The Getty Conservation Institute is in partnership with the University of California, Los Angeles, in a master’s in conservation of ethnographic and archeological materials. The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York joins with Parsons, the New School for Design, in a master’s in the history of decorative arts and design.

And it may not be long before others try to follow the Natural History Museum’s lead in offering their own degree. “We’ve had inquiries from quite a few other museums, and they’re watching what we’re doing with interest,” says John Flynn, the paleontologist who is dean of the Gilder Graduate School, in its third year and accredited since 2009. “Many museums already have a lot of what you need — the collections, the curators, the libraries, the tradition of research.”

The Museum of Natural History, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, also has built online graduate courses in science that are used, for credit, by eight colleges and universities, and this month was approved to participate in a state-financed pilot program in which it will develop and offer a master’s in teaching for earth science.

“There’s been a redefinition of the schoolhouse, as the roles of different institutions are being blurred,” says Ellen V. Futter, the president of the museum.

All told, about 100 graduate students, including visiting students from the museum’s longtime partner universities and postdoctoral fellows, roam the fifth floor. Gilder itself accepts only four or five students a year, an eclectic group of American and international scholars, some straight from college, some with master’s degrees and years of work experience as a veterinary technician or a high school biology teacher.

On a sunny morning this spring, the four first-years — and two visiting students from other New York grad schools — gathered for their “Evolution” seminar in a cozy classroom that reflects the museum’s Victorian character. It has a fireplace, bay window with window seats, and huge mounted caribou head with elaborately arching antlers. “Evolution” is one of only three required classes. (The others are “Grantsmanship, Ethics and Communications,” in which students write grant proposals — and sometimes get money — and “Systematics and Biogeography,” which deals with the relationships among species and organization of life, past and present.)

For an hour and a half, Jin Meng, a paleontology curator who team-teaches the class, talked about the morphological differences between New World and Old World monkeys, the history of the research and fossil finds, and how delicately Darwin had to approach the new concept of human evolution.

In many ways, it could have been a graduate seminar at any research university. But the Natural History Museum’s program has some real differences. It is four years instead of the usual five. And most students go on extended field trips around the globe.

Tamar Lewin is an education reporter for The Times.

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The Learning Network: What Interested You Most in The Times This Week?

Questions about issues in the news for students 13 and older.

Our Summer Reading Contest began July 1, and we announced our first winner on July 11 and our second on July 18. Our next winner, who will come from among these entries, will be announced on July 25.

To participate this week, the final one of the contest, just write in below and answer our question — “What interested you most in The Times this week?” —then tell us why you chose what you chose.

Please note that for the month of July, this is the only Student Opinion question we’ll ask.

For more details, and to see our student winners from last year, visit the full description here.

For now, though, here is a quick list of our rules:

You can choose from anything published in the print paper or on NYTimes.com in 2011. And yes, videos, graphics, slide shows, blogs and podcasts count.Feel free to participate each week, but we allow only one submission per person per week.The contest is open to students ages 13 to 25.Each response should be 400 words or fewer. (To check, you can paste yours into an online word-count tool like this one before you submit it.)Don’t include your last name – though feel free to include your age and hometown.

So, students: Tell us below what you’ve read, watched or listened to in The Times recently that got your attention and explain why.

Maybe you liked a piece because you have a personal connection to it, because it reminded you of someone or taught you something, or because it moved you or made you laugh. Or maybe you were annoyed by something you read and want to argue with it. Whatever: we’re just interested in hearing what you’re interested in.

Students 13 and older are invited to comment below. Please use only your first name. For privacy policy reasons, we will not publish student comments that include a last name.

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China makes significant contributions to global food security

China is playing a positive role in improving the agricultural production and food production capacity of developing countries and has made significant contributions to global food security, Han Changfu, minister of agriculture, said during the recent 37th Food and Agriculture Organization Conference of the United Nations. Han also expressed hope that the international community could work together to cope with the challenges brought by the deterioration of global food security.

The conference was recently held at the Food and Agriculture Organization headquarters in Rome, Italy. Han led a Chinese agricultural delegation to attend the conference and made a speech.

China has sufficient grain stocks

The Chinese government has attached great importance and made great achievements in the development of agriculture and rural construction to benefit farmers. Han said that the development of China's food and agricultural production is very stable. China fed nearly 21 percent of the global population with only less than 9 percent of the world's arable land. Therefore, China has made significant contributions to global food security.

Han pointed out that the income of Chinese peasants increased steadily and their quality of life significantly improved. The rural impoverished population also reduced significantly and the living standards of peasants basically reached the moderately prosperous level.

China suffered severe droughts and floods in 2011, which aroused the international community's concerns about China's grain production. Han stressed that China received a summer grain harvest this year and the summer wheat yield is expected to achieve an increase for eight consecutive years. Meanwhile, China's autumn harvest also has a relatively good foundation. Han also said that currently, China has sufficient grain stocks and adequate market supply, and the grain prices are generally stable.

Han said that China has not only ensured its own grain supply but also made contributions to the global food security.

Han said that China has actively conducted international agricultural cooperation and exchanges, and provided considerable agricultural assistance to relevant developing countries within the framework of South-South cooperation. In addition, it has played an active role in helping other developing countries increase their agricultural production efficiency and capacity.

China has built more then 20 agricultural technology demonstration centers in Asia, Africa, Latin America and other regions, and dispatched more than 1,100 agricultural experts and technicians to other developing countries to help them train agricultural talent. Han said that China will further strengthen agricultural cooperation with other developing countries.

Global food prices have risen sharply since last year, leading to social unrest in certain countries. Since the rising food prices have become more than just an economic issue, Han called for the international community to strengthen cooperation, to increase agricultural investments, to enhance the wide application of advanced agricultural technology, to help developing countries achieve food self-sufficiency, to improve the agricultural trade environment, and to ensure global food security.

Han expressed hope that developed countries will fulfill their obligations to ensuring food security. "Food security is a global problem, and all countries should work together to solve it," he said.

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Kan's crisis

? (China Daily 07/09/2011 page5)

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

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Forex: EUR/USD breaks above 1.4200

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Forex: GBP/USD pulls back from 1.6160

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FOREX: Euro Likely to Look Past ZEW Data, Focus on Spain Debt Sale

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6 Ways To Improve Your Portfolio Returns Today

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Vical Gets Some Validation (VICL, BMS, GSK, NVS, SNY, SGEN, DNDN, AMGN, AGEN)

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Forex: EUR/JPY tests resistance at 112.00

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Introduction To Inflation-Protected Securities

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Forex: USD/CAD downside limited at 0.9540

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Forex: EUR/USD returns to 1.4150

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Equity Valuation In Emerging Markets

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An Introduction To Corporate Bond ETFs

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How To Effectively Investigate A Stock

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Introduction To The Series 65 Exam

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An Introduction To Stafford Loans

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Forex: AUD/USD rises to 1.0670

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Citi Still Healing (C, BAC, WFC, USB, BAP, ZION)

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Yemeni Rial - YER

What Does Yemeni Rial - YER Mean?
The official currency of the country of Yemen. The Yemeni Rial is divided into 100 fils, but the fil coins have not been issued since 1990 following Yemeni unification. However, beginning in 1993, the Central Bank of Yemen began introducing coins in one-, five-, 10- and 20-rial denominations. Investopedia explains Yemeni Rial - YER
Following Yemeni unification, both the currencies of the Yemen Arab Republic (northern rial) and the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (southern dinar) remained in circulation as legal tender. However, in 1996 the dinar was officially taken out of circulation leaving the rial as the nation's legal currency. Top 7 Questions About Currency Trading Answered - Whether you're puzzled by pips or curious about carry trades, your queries are answered here.What Are Central Banks? - They print money, they control inflation, and much, much more. All you need to know about central banks is here. A Primer On The Forex Market - Moving from equities to currencies requires you to adjust how you interpret quotes, margin, spreads and rollovers. Currency Exchange: Floating Rate Vs. Fixed Rate - Baffled by exchange rates? Wonder why some currencies fluctuate while others are pegged? This article has the answers.Explosive Gains In Forex – Learn what makes the currency markets move with your exclusive free report!FXCM - Learn to Trade Currency with Free DemoGet a risk-free $50,000 practice trading account at FOREX.com – Advanced trading platform with real-time quotes, charts, news, research.Free Introductory Forex Trading Guide from GFT - Everything a beginner needs to know before entering the exciting & fast-paced forex market – from how to choose a dealer to how to place an orderRate this Term: ?Your Rating: ?? Overall Rating: Vote Now! CURRENT HIGH YIELD SAVINGS RATES

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July 14, 2011 Market Summary

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Germany: ZEW Economic Sentiment drops, Current Situation improves in July

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Getting Started In Stocks

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Fertilizer Stocks Ready To Sprout?

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Adventure Capitalist

What Does Adventure Capitalist Mean?

1. Another word for "venture capitalist", or someone who invests in start-up companies.

2. A specific type of venture capitalist who is more accessible, but who may be harder to find and whose pockets are not as deep as a traditional venture capitalist. Or, a specific type of venture capitalist who is willing to invest in endeavors that would be considered too risky for traditional venture capitalists.

3. A wealthy individual who seeks out exciting experiences.

4. The title of a book in which author and former Wall Street financier Jim Rogers describes his three-year, 116-country road trip. Rogers retired at age 37, and has also toured the world by motorcycle, setting Guinness Book records for both trips.

Investopedia explains Adventure Capitalist

Adventure capitalists invest in smaller upstarts when they are young and in need of funding to expand their operations. They may specialize in investing in particular industries, in which they have specialized knowledge. Adventure capitalists also take on a great deal of risk, but often have a say in company decision making and can earn large returns on their investments if the company succeeds.

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Simple Moving Averages And Volume Rate-of-Change

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Massive Hedge Fund Failures

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Forex Flash: EUR/USD remains entrenched below downtrend at 1.4487 – Commerzbank

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Government Subsidies For Business

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Can You Trust Your Trustee?

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The Flaws Of Using Mass Sentiment To Be Contrarian

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Shield Your Portfolio From Inflation For Real Returns

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How To Create An Effective Retirement Income Strategy

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Investing In The Overlooked SMid-Cap Space (IWM, VXF, ANV, TNB, UGI)

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How To Become A Self-Taught Finance Expert

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Turkmenistan Manat- TMT

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The Island Approach To Credit Card Use

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Forex: GBP/USD extends towards 1.6150

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Critique of Chris Tovani: I Read It, But I Don't Get It

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Silver Standard

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Empowering Spanish Speakers, Author Interview

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Short Leg

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Towards Schooling For The 21st Century

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Risk-on trade returns to European markets

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Will The World Arrive To A Close In 2012?

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Water: The Ultimate Commodity

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Book Review: Gorillas in the Mist, by Dian Fossey

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USDCAD: Another Long Entry Ahead?

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Lectures at Harvard Law School

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EU: Construction Output contracts in May

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Measure For Controlling The Rapid Growth Of Population

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Ralcorp Adds Both Clarity And Confusion (RAH, CAG, THS, KFT, K, GIS)

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Coelocanth Rediscovery

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Textbook Book Review - An Introduction to Business

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The Benefits Of An Investment Club

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Online GED Courses Provide A Fresh Start At Any Age

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5 Inflation-Beating Bond Picks

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Best Civil Engineering Books

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A Guide To Hedge Fund Startup Services

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"Experienced Investors" And Damages Claims

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5 Best Mechanical Engineering Books

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Buy College Textbooks Online and Save Hundreds of Dollars

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Forex: EUR/CHF consolidates above 1.1600

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Biodiesel Fuel Provides Vital Alternative Energy Source

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Trade Forex With A Directional Strategy

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Benefits of International Edition of Textbook

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Accrued Benefits

What Does Accrued Benefits Mean?
Coverage earned by an employee on a pension plan, based on years of service with an employer. Accrued benefits may include vacation, sick or personal time off, or other related benefits. Employees who are laid off, retire or are fired must receive all unpaid accrued benefits. Investopedia explains Accrued Benefits
Accrued benefits are another form of income employees receive, but this income is not paid immediately. For example, a worker will accrue vacation time and still receive a regular salary when off on vacation. Other accrued benefits can include a profit-sharing plan, a stock bonus plan, an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP), a thrift plan, a target benefit plan or a money purchase pension plan. Rate this Term: ?Your Rating: ?? Overall Rating: Vote Now! CURRENT HIGH YIELD SAVINGS RATES

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How Mayan Calendar Anticipates The End Of The Planet In 2012

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Forex: USD/CHF jumps up above 0.8200

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How Biodiesel Centrifuges Work

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How Much Money Students Can Save By Renting Textbooks Online

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Advantage of Buying College Textbooks Online

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How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child: A Book Review

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The Longitude Prize and John Harrison

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The Importance of Learning German

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Optical Telescopes Enable Vital Astrophysical Research

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Corrections Officer Test - Basic Information

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Top Ranking Engineering Colleges in USA

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Things to Know Before Getting College Books

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