Q: What conclusions can we draw about students’ sex lives from these columns?

A: These are wonderful sociological treasures in defining this sexual generation. The quote I love most is, “We’re not Baby Boomers. We’re not part of Generation X. We’re generation sex.” They’re speaking to students in their own language. They cover every extreme possible but primarily grapple with how confusing the current social, sexual landscape is on campus. The general sentiment seems to be that all rules have been thrown out the window. Chivalry is gone, dating is pass?, gender roles reversed. There’s no blueprint for how students are supposed to act with each other. The columnists are asking, “Is this really good for us?”

Q: Extremes, huh? Do you believe everything you read?

A: I would truly say with full confidence that the columns are giving attention to issues students are engaged in. They’re compressing the campus culture into 600 to 800 words a week. They’re trying to be sarcastic to retain readers. There is an element of the exaggerated or sensational embedded in some of the pieces. But it’s coming from students themselves.

Q: Did you find censorship?

A: It’s unfortunately fairly common and still tends to happen behind closed doors. In most cases, students are realizing they can and do fight back. The censorship comes into play 99% of the time when a single outside reader, an alumni or parent or administrator, sees the word “sex” and simply reacts. They don’t take time to really read the pieces. In a lot of cases, they would find they’re on the columnists’ side.

Q: What would you say to parents who are surprised or concerned by what they read?

A: I’ve told parents there are three things all students tend to have in common: They complain about parking. They figure out how to coordinate sleep and school. And they have to make choices related to sex. Students, whether we want to admit it or not, are wrestling with these issues. We all have sex in common, even those who remain chaste. And the columns deal as much with the abstinence side of things. I’d much rather put my kid on a campus in which discussion about it is allowed openly among peers.

Q: What has changed since the first campus sex advice columns appeared a decade ago?

A: Sex columns are truly no longer thought of as novelty items. They’re in all 50 states, all across Canada and in parts of Asia. They continue to cause controversy. As for the columnists, a growing camp seems to be using pseudonyms. In my interviews with columnists, the first wave never expressed regret over the writing but at times had moments of regret that their names are so easily searchable — by graduate schools, by potential employers, even first dates. It’s not something they can escape.

Sex columns ‘revolutionize’ college media?

Sex columns ‘revolutionize’ college media?

Starting next year, for-profit schools, including some of the nation’s biggest online colleges–like the University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, and Strayer University–will have to provide graduation rate and job placement figures to new students and applicants, the Department of Education has ordered. That’s a sample of more than a dozen reforms the government will impose on for-profit schools beginning July 1, 2011. Students will now be able to make more informed decisions, the Department says. “These new rules will help ensure that students are getting from schools what they pay for: solid preparation for a good job,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in an Oct. 28 press release.

[Online programs have respect to gain among employers.]

The regulations were announced amid scrutiny of for-profit schools from the Senate Health, Labor and Pensions Committee, a damning report from the Government Accountability Office, and investigations into abuse of taxpayer funded loan money by state attorneys general. In October, for instance, Oregon’s treasurer and attorney general sued Apollo Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix, claiming that the school was eager to boost profits with little regard for its students. A motion filed in federal court claims that the school “concocted a scheme to fraudulently inflate revenues and boost profitability by exploiting well-intentioned and often lower-income students, including veterans of the U.S. armed forces, who were hoping to improve their qualifications and employment prospects,” adding that “students often withdrew early or failed to complete degree programs.”

The firm dismisses the claims and plans to fight the suit. “Apollo Group takes its disclosure obligations very seriously and intends to defend this lawsuit vigorously,” company spokesman Manny Rivera said in a written statement. “Apollo Group is a leader in enhancing the student experience, expanding student protections and working to help students succeed in completing their degree programs.”

[Learn more about online education.]

Last week, the office of Florida’s attorney general also announced that it launched an investigation into the for-profit sector. These suits come on the heels of recent legal action against for-profit schools in Texas, Ohio, and Wisconsin. “Federal scrutiny has unearthed a whole set of questionable practices that conscientious AGs across the country start wondering ‘what’s happening in my state?’” says Christine Lindstrom, higher education program director at the nonprofit Public Interest Research Group. “It makes absolute sense that they’re looking into these programs.”

Deanne Loonin, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, works regularly with students–including several that enrolled online–at for-profit schools who have amassed seemingly insurmountable debt and has heard first hand of the dubious practices alleged by federal and state regulators. While she can’t mention specifics due to confidentiality agreements, she says it’s common for poorer people with limited or no Internet access at home to be persuaded to sign up for an online programs, hoping to rely on libraries to complete their coursework. Once they realize they can’t fulfill the time requirements because of their limited access or that the material is simply too advanced for them, they complain to the school or try to pull out altogether. She claims they’re typically met with limited feedback–almost all of which is intended to keep them enrolled in online programs as they amass more loan debt. “They’re told, ‘don’t worry about it. We’ll figure things out,’” she says. “It’s hard to beat all of these problems, even for people who recognize there’s a problem.”

[Learn more before you enroll in an online program.]

Though the new Department of Education regulations have been put in place to help prevent just what Loonin describes, a more significant battle looms on the horizon. Regulations, which will be based on data, will judge an institution’s ability to prepare students for jobs comparable to the cost of their education, have yet to be finalized. They will target so-called “workforce programs” which include for-profit schools, community colleges, and some state universities. If schools’ students are unable to meet adequate loan debt, loan repayment, and career earnings thresholds, the institutions could be denied federal funding, which supplies a vast majority of revenue at most for-profit online programs. The rules are intended to weed out schools that don’t prepare students for their working lives, which, in theory, would benefit students and perhaps shut the doors of several institutions not up to par. Given the severity of the regulatory threat, the industry is expected to put up a fight, experts say.

Rivera, of Apollo, refuses to speak for the sector regarding the potential for a lawsuit, but Lindstrom at PIRG believes litigation will be inevitable–possibly on the grounds that the new rules unfairly discriminate against the already much-maligned sector. “We absolutely anticipate that as soon as the final rules come out the Department of Education will be met with a lawsuit,” Lindstrom says. “The sector will sue.”

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Online Universities: Government Cracks Down on For-Profit Schools (U.S. News & World Report)

Online Universities: Government Cracks Down on For-Profit Schools (U.S. News & World Report)

It is a question on the minds of so many high school seniors at this time of year: How can you raise your chances of getting into your No. 1 college choice?

Early Action Could Aid in Admission, Report Finds

Charter schools are all the rage these days. The public is increasingly smitten with them – in this year’s Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup education poll, 68% of respondents said they support charter schools, up from 42% in 2000 – but few people know what charters are. When the education journal Education Next asked Americans some basic questions this summer about charter schools, such as whether they can charge tuition or hold religious services, fewer than 1 in 5 respondents knew the correct answer (which was no in both cases). The confusion is so pervasive that more than half of the teachers surveyed couldn’t answer the questions correctly either.

Quick primer: Charters are public schools that generally operate independently of traditional school districts. Since 1992, they have grown in number from one in Minnesota to about 5,000 in 40 states and the District of Columbia. (Ten states don’t have laws allowing charter schools.) Collectively, they serve about 1.6 million students, and an estimated 420,000 kids are on various waiting lists to get into them. By law, when more students apply to a charter than there are seats available, the school has to hold a lottery to determine who gets in.

(See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.)

Scenes of these lotteries are currently being used to wrenching effect in two documentaries, Waiting for ‘Superman’ and The Lottery, but the process of randomly selecting which kids get a better shot at life in high-performing charters has a troubling echo in the policy world: In too many states, charter schools are treated in a similarly random way. The mantra from charter-school opponents is that charters are no better, on average, than other public schools. The implication is that consequently there is little to be learned from charters and less reason to have them.

For instance, a recent and widely cited study from Stanford University of charter schools in 15 states and Washington found that students in 17% of charters do better than surrounding schools, 37% do worse and the remainder do about the same. Interestingly and generally overlooked: Those numbers are not fixed. Students do better the longer they stay in charters, and the results varied by state. (Read TIME’s special report on what makes a school great.)

These results surprised few who follow charter schooling closely. What was surprising was how little interest there was in figuring out what can be learned from the 17% and how to create more schools like them. Instead, critics wrote them off as flukes or cherrypickers and rushed to pronounce the entire charter experiment a failure.

But the best charter schools are not random at all; they significantly and consistently outperform the averages, and they have a lot in common with each other in their ethos and operations. In particular these schools – which, in some states, have opened reverse achievement gaps with low-income minority students outpacing state averages – have tight controls over who teaches in them, a relentless focus on results, and an intense use of data to inform decisions. There is also solid evidence that their successes can be reproduced and scaled up in networks such as KIPP (99 schools in 20 states), Uncommon Schools (24 schools in three states), Achievement First (17 schools in Connecticut and New York) and Aspire Public Schools (30 schools in California). Overall, the consistency of performance among the top tier of charter networks as well as many individual schools, including the Preuss School at the University of California San Diego and the MATCH Charter Public School in Boston, helps explain why the Obama Administration awarded $50 million in replication funding for high-quality charters last month.

Low-performing charters have some things in common as well. In a 2007 analysis of charter schools across 12 states and cities, my colleague Sara Mead and I found that charter quality is linked to state policy and support. Put plainly: While some failure is inevitable, low-performing charter schools are not a randomly occurring phenomenon, and there are steps policymakers can take to increase or decrease the quality of their charter sector. Those steps include strong oversight and adequate finance. Sounds obvious, but in many states charter school oversight and accountability are an afterthought. A recent analysis from Ball State University found that charter schools receive, on average, 19% less funding per student than regular public schools.

I have long been an advocate of charters as a way not only to open more great schools in communities that need them, but also to create much-needed customization in public education. I was a founding board member of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, have researched and written about these schools, and served on the board of directors for a charter school near where I live. For me, the biggest question today is whether policy makers will continue to make the same mistakes or get serious about leveraging the top tier of charter schools into something much larger and life-changing for more students. It’s a tough question from a political standpoint, but it is most certainly not a question of chance.

Andrew J. Rotherham, who writes the blog Eduwonk, is a co-founder and partner at Bellwether Education, a nonprofit working to improve educational outcomes for low-income students. School of Thought, his education column for TIME.com, appears every Thursday.

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• Obama Lays Out Education Priorities
• Can Charter School Execs Turn Around Failing Public Schools?
• What Makes a School Great
• Michigan and Other Cash-Strapped State Schools Look to Privatize
• Public Bailout. Private Agenda?

Charter Schools: The Good Ones Aren’t Flukes (or Cherrypickers) (Time.com)

Charter Schools: The Good Ones Aren’t Flukes (or Cherrypickers) (Time.com)

Online classes are meant for those who cannot give up their time with families and jobs. Balancing the both however, can be a challenge. Studying online has become very popular for adults who don’t have the time to sit in class everyday. While online classes can be attended and studied for online, often, the study time gets interrupted. Spouses and children have a hard time understanding what “alone time” means especially after getting used to having the parents’ undivided attention. Listed are a few suggestions to help maintain a good relationship with your families while furthering your education online.

1. Set ground rules for everyone. There is no doubt that you will need peace and quiet. Setting a schedule for you’re your study time and making sure your families stick to it, is a good form of common understanding. By setting notes around on either a room calendar, schedule board or even the fridge, your families will know when you need time to study, and when you will be ready to spend time with them. Make sure your families know that when you’re studying, that you cannot be distracted. Give them perhaps a sign on the door, letting them know that you’re busy. At the same time you want the children to give you your studying space, make sure that they know when they are able to come to. In such events like they had an accident, or that they’re bleeding. You must be able to respect your families needs also, they will always need you so make sure to give them the needed attention. You want your children to know that when you say you will be there for them, or that you will play with them, that you will be. They tend to be a bit more patient when they know that eventually, they will get their playtime with mommy
or daddy.

2. Don’t forget your own fun time. Online if you are a student enrolled in more than one course, the study load can become a little too much to handle. As much as you should be studying, or focusing on your families, don’t forget about yourself. You too, need to have a little fun, if it’s by yourself or with your family. Set aside a night in your busy schedule, to have a game-night, or date night with your loved ones. Doing so will result in giving your brain a little rest from all the hard work, and your families can appreciate seeing you, all while having a great time.
3. Set a good example. If your children happen to be in school at the same time you are, set an example for them as to how they can succeed. Try studying with your children, and keep them relaxed. Give them a snack or two (preferably something healthy like a granola bar) and keep them focused right next to you. Children love to mimic grown-ups and adults because you influence them in just about everything. Mimicking your good study habits also mean that their grades are in good shape. All while doing this, you’re able to keep your kids in good study habits at home with you, and getting your own education completed.

4. Keep your family involved. Families don’t want to see other members stressed out or unhappy. Being locked away in a room in front of a computer screen for hours can make you want to pull your hair out. Make sure your family know that what your doing is all for good reason. Let them know that you are working to achieve something that is very important to you. All the same, your spouse and your children would love to tell you about their days, their discoveries and adventures, so keep an ear out and listen.

Ways to balance family and PC Pro School online schools

Startups Started By Former Yahoo Employees [Graphic]: Oh Quora! You’ve done it again. This time with…

One morning last winter I watched a middle-school teacher named Al Doyle give a lesson, though not your typical lesson. This was New York City, a noncharter public school in an old building on a nondescript street near Gramercy Park, inside an ordinary room that looked a lot like all the other rooms around it, with fluorescent lights and linoleum floors and steam-driven radiators that hissed and clanked endlessly.

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James Paul Gee, the guru of the games-and-education movement, takes reader questions. His answers will be posted on Sept. 20.

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Screen Test A Sports for the Mind class. Instead of grades, students receive report cards with levels of expertise like â??â??noviceâ??â?? and â??â??master.â??â??

Learning by Playing: Video Games in the Classroom

“Surprise, surprise,” Legend said, as cell phones came out and cameras flashed. “I’m glad you didn’t skip class today.”

Legend, 31, was guest professor as part of an mtvU program called Stand In, in which big names such as Bill Gates and Madonna show up unannounced and teach a class on a subject they care about.

For Legend, a Grammy Award winner who grew up in poverty, that subject is education reform — a key theme of the just-released Waiting for Superman documentary, for which he wrote a song. So it made sense to arrange with professor Greg Carr to appear in Carr’s class, which was discussing the education of ex-slaves when the knock at the door came.

Equal access to quality education is “the civil rights issue of our time,” Legend told students. Noting that next week marks the 53rd anniversary of the day nine black students were escorted by federal troops into the all-white Little Rock Central High School, he said “minorities today are still fighting for access to quality schools.”

He warned against the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” decried high dropout rates at schools in black and Latino neighborhoods, and, responding to one question, suggested that merit-based admission programs can perpetuate inequities.

“(You can’t) break that cycle of poverty if you only educate the ones who have been best-educated already,” he said. “I think you can have a better education no matter who you are.”

Carr called the session “a candid exchange between a group of black students and a performer with a global profile who also shares their experience.”

Students said Legend’s appearance was a great way to start the day.

“What he said is extremely key,” sophomore marketing major Stephen Baiyewu, 19, said after class. “John Legend is one of the most respected African-American R&B artists.”

And here are two of many tweets that circulated throughout the morning:

• @ATLsBishopCrazy day, MTVU in the classroom, John Legend teaching…cant ask for much more.

•@johnlegend: Had a great time @ Howard. Thanks to Prof Carr and his students. Great discussion. And yes they were surprised.

John Legend surprises class with lesson on race, education

John Legend surprises class with lesson on race, education

NEWARK — Shortly after landing at Malcolm X Shabazz High School as a Teach for America recruit, Dominique D. Lee grew disgusted with a system that produced ninth graders who could not name the seven continents or the governor of their state. He started wondering: What if I were in charge?

In a New Role, Teachers Move to Run Schools

Some think that developments since the last buying cycle, particularly the arrival of Apple‘s iPad computing tablet, might foreshadow an especially good year for electronic texts. CourseSmart, an e-textbook consortium comprising five major publishers, says it has sold four times more e-textbooks in 2009-10 than it did the previous year (although it would not provide the number of copies). CourseSmart would not disclose how e-book sales are going so far this season, saying it was too early, but that it is optimistic. “We expect triple-digit growth to continue,” says Heather Shelstad, director of the consortium.

Others are more skeptical about whether e-books will finally boom after years of stalled progress. “They’ve been saying that for the last 10 years,” says Nicole Allen, an advocate for the Student Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs).

One reason it is difficult to parse the prospects for e-books this year is that many other things are happening in the textbook market that make “traditional textbook vs. e-book” a false dichotomy. These days, traditional books have electronic supplements; some electronic texts have print-on-demand options; and for many students, textbook decisions have more to do with renting vs. buying than print vs. digital.

The iPad and the e-book

It has been a truism for years that e-books are massing at the gates. For the most part, officials are no longer arguing if the college library will transform from a warehouse of bound volumes to a nexus for accessing various digital resources, but when; in last year’s Campus Computing Project survey, 76% of senior campus technology officials predicted that e-books “will be an important source for instructional resources in the next five years.” The explosive growth of online education seems to imply a mainstream acceptance of the computer screen as medium for instruction. And then there is the widely accepted argument that printed textbooks, like other analog vessels, belong to an economic model that no longer makes sense (at least not to many students).

Despite the hype, e-books have remained on the fringes of higher education. In 2008, the first year the Campus Computing Project survey started asking about e-book use, respondents said the electronic texts were used in 2.2% of classes. Last year, that percentage “jumped” to 3.5. According to the Student Monitor, a group that does market research on student behavior, e-books accounted for only 2% of textbook sales last year. And while publishers have been increasing the number of titles available in digital, half of students surveyed last spring remained unaware that e-books are even an option. What’s more, the percentage of students who were aware of e-books actually dropped from the previous spring, according to that survey.

Digital add-ons, such as Pearson’s Mastering software, have become very popular among professors and de rigueur among publishers. But for the most part, professors are using them alongside print textbooks, not e-textbooks. The only places where e-books are dominant are for-profit institutions such as University of Phoenix, where administrators have required instructors to assign them. (Neither the Campus Computing Project nor Student Monitor data account for students at those institutions.)

However, the e-book market has seen some auspicious developments in recent months. In July, Blackboard announced changes to its popular learning-management platform that would allow professors to assign electronic texts more easily — a potential coup for e-books, since Blackboard boasts by far the most popular learning-management platform in the industry and is well-positioned to influence how professors provide course materials to students.

But the most buzzed-about development with implications for e-books has been the unveiling of the iPad, which, among many other functions, is popular as a reading device. The last version of Amazon‘s Kindle e-reader was ill-suited for academic reading, according to a handful of institutions that tried it out. But the iPad is touted as a more hip, versatile breed of e-reader — one that college kids are apt to buy for general purposes. And once they own e-readers, they will be more likely to buy e-books, suggested Eric Weil, managing director of Student Monitor, in a July interview with Inside Higher Ed.

Half the students who responded to Weil’s spring survey either already owned an e-reader or were interested in buying one. The CourseSmart consortium of publishers, for its part, sees the iPad as a “game-changing” device, equating it to the laptop. “As the iPad captures the imagination of the next generation of students, it will raise additional awareness for the digital benefits and cost savings related to e-textbooks,” says Shelstad.

In addition to the iPad’s cachet, Apple‘s arrival on the e-reader scene portends an avalanche of apps, including ones that could offer academic readers that elusive “added value” that many — including Campus Computing Project director (and Inside Higher Ed tech blogger) Kenneth C. Green — argue are absent from the current generation of e-books. Nick Bilton, a technology writer for The New York Times and adjunct professor at New York University, last week wrote about a new app, called Inkling, that lets students interact around passages of digital text. The app also supports dynamic content from publishers; for example, a three-dimensional model of a molecule that students can navigate via the touch screen. Allen, the Student PIRGs advocate, says that a lack of such features — that is, the tendency of e-textbooks to be “flat representations of print books” — has contributed to students’ apathy toward them in the past.

Still, it would be easy to overestimate the effect devices such as the iPad will have on e-book adoption, especially in the short term, says Joseph Esposito, a longtime scholarly publishing consultant. Professors will not assign e-textbooks simply because of the values added by iPad apps, since the majority of students (at institutions that have not arranged iPad giveaways) will not have the iPad, and no professor in his right mind would require his students to buy the $500-and-up device, Esposito says. E-books will probably see a bump in adoption — perhaps a significant one, if CourseSmart is moving as many digital copies as it says it is. But if e-books do win significantly more users this year, it will be primarily because there are significantly more titles available, says Esposito. “We shouldn’t be dismissive of incremental gains by digital text,” he says, “but we shouldn’t be looking for revolutionary gains.”

Analog innovations

Actually, the textbook-delivery trends that stand to see the greatest gains in 2010-201 have less to do with technological innovation than with economic creativity. Textbook rental services — which give students the option of securing the savings of temporary ownership upfront, rather than taking their chances in the fickle buy-back market — have been around for a while, but they are now viral. The National Association of College Stores says rental programs have increased fivefold among its members since last fall, with about 1,500 campuses now offering the rental option. In a recent press release, the association dubbed 2010 “The year of the rental.”

Another novel mode of delivery for dead-tree textbooks that appears to be gaining traction is print-on-demand. Flat World Knowledge, a company that offers digital copies of its customizable textbooks for free and printed versions for relatively low prices, has dramatically broadened its reach, winning over at least one professor at each of 800 different colleges this fall, up from 400 a year ago. Flat World uses generous royalties to persuade “top authors” to write textbooks that subscribing professors can then add to and tweak to their liking; students are then given the choice of getting access to an HTML version of the customized textbook for free, buying a color PDF version for $25, ordering a black-and-white paperback version of the textbook for $30, or ordering a color version for $60.

Just like the mainstream publishing houses, Flat World offers a buffet of digital add-ons, such as interactive quizzes, digital flash cards, and the like. These supplements have proven popular among Flat World customers, as they have among users of Pearson and others — a reminder that while e-books might still be on the fringes of academe, e-learning tools have made substantial inroads.

This is not to say e-textbooks will fail to become increasingly relevant, even to people like Frank. This fall, Flat World is introducing an e-book version formatted for e-readers. It will cost almost the same as its analog opposite, the black-and-white printed version. Frank says Flat World will be watching with interest to see which option students pick more.

As far as how Flat World users have opted to receive their textbook content so far, the least fancy formats have been the most popular. Half have chosen the free, HTML version. Of those who choose to pay, about 70% chose the $30 black-and-white printout, while 15% sprang for the $25 color PDF, and only 3% bought the $60 color paperback.

It’s the sticker price, stupid

What to make of those decisions? On the one hand, the popularity of the HTML version suggests that students are willing to use screen-borne texts. On the other hand, the HTML version was free. Price, not format, is still the top driver of student textbook-buying behavior, says Allen.

E-books have not caught on simply because they are not, in most cases, the cheapest option, Allen says. “From what I’ve been able to tell, the print rental prices are [generally] lower than the e-book rental prices,” she says. And since all e-textbooks are essentially rentals — with access typically expiring after one or two semesters (sometimes less) — they offer no added value over renting a printed textbook as far as permanence of ownership.

That, more than a lack of built-in frills, is why rentals are blowing up while e-books are merely slouching toward wider adoption, says Eric Frank, the co-founder of Flat World. “[Textbook companies] are saying, ‘We need all these bells and whistles — then we’ll sell more,’ ” Frank says. But that’s not the key, he says; bells and whistles are fine for the students who are willing to pay for them, but currently that is a decision most publishers are either making themselves or putting in the hands of professors. Students should only have to pay for the frills they want, agrees Allen. Accordingly, Student PIRGs is throwing its weight behind the Flat World model, she says.

One major public system is exploring the idea of reducing the cost of textbooks to students by limiting student choice, rather than broadening it. The California State University System announced on Monday a pilot program in which professors in 32 course sections would require their students to buy e-textbooks. As a result, the system would be able to make larger purchases from the publishers at a discount, which would then be passed on to the student. This strategy of buying e-books in bulk in order to save students money on course materials has been used by for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix, and community colleges such as Rio Salado have pursued similar strategies with printed textbooks.

In effect, students involved in the pilot would not have the choice between print or electronic, but they would be spending less than if they were allowed to choose.

For now, the California State move is just an experiment, and a spokesman would not speculate on whether it could lead to broader proscriptions against printed textbooks in the name of savings. But if there comes a time when California State and other institutions decide to address the high cost of course materials by mandating bulk purchases of electronic texts, that would be a bully year for e-books indeed.

For the latest technology news from Inside Higher Ed, follow @ IHEtech on Twitter.

Students face new textbook picks: Rent vs. buy, print vs. e-book

Students face new textbook picks: Rent vs. buy, print vs. e-book