HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019432.jpg

LEDA has been very successful. Of the 500 or so students who have graduated from the program, three quarters have gone on to top-tier colleges, 30 percent of them to the Ivy League. Among LEDA’s 2012 graduates alone, 19 gained admission to Princeton, 11 to Georgetown and 6 to the University of Pennsylvania.

Last week I took a walk around Red Hook, Brooklyn, with Joshua El-Bey, a LEDA graduate who was leaving in a few days for his sophomore year at Yale. His family struggled as he grew up, moving often and ultimately landing in the Red Hook Houses, the borough’s largest public housing development. His first memories of book learning, he told me, were the readings his mother delivered from Genesis when he was 2. What was disconcerting about Mr. El-Bey’s otherwise incredibly inspiring trajectory was how much of his success had depended on opportunities outside the public education system.

Bullied in middle school for his studiousness, Mr. El-Bey hoped to gain admission to one of the city’s elite specialized public high schools, but he did not do well enough on the entrance exam. The free tutoring provided by the city for the test was insufficient, he said.

He ended up at Edward R. Murrow in Midwood, Brooklyn, a good school whose academics were nevertheless surpassed by the supplemental training he received as a scholar at Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, an organization begun 50 years ago by Manhattan lawyers and advertising executives as a mentoring program to get poor minority students into good colleges. Today it essentially provides a shadow education. In school, Mr. El-Bey told me, he simply learned to “regurgitate facts.”

Programs like LEDA and S.E.O. are popular with wealthy, supremely educated donors, precisely because of outcomes like Mr. El-Bey’s. Just this May, the financier Henry R. Kravis pledged $4 million in matching gifts to S.E.O.

And in a city as dense with talent and money as New York, the effects of such philanthropy can be effortlessly observed. Walking through his neighborhood, Mr. El-Bey ran into another alumnus of S.E.O., Luis Hernandez, who was about to begin his freshman year at the University of Southern California. In a precocious accomplishment more typical in other neighborhoods, Mr. Hernandez had won a screenwriting contest for a film about obesity that had already made its debut on the Showtime cable channel.

As a society we have begun to pay increasing and essential attention to gaining access to the top, but the brightest among us might do well to apply equal focus to how we might enhance the middle.

Most students, rich or poor, will not go to Harvard, while plenty of working-class and poor students will go to colleges that serve them not nearly well enough. Not long ago, our son’s caregiver, who is taking classes at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, showed me a paper she had written for a class in English composition taught by a teacher who was consistently late and twice absent. It was on Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and my husband had helped her. It incisively analyzed the play’s theme of 19th-century marital oppression and was impeccably written.

When our nanny received her grade, she was shocked not to have done as well as she had expected. Her formatting had been imprecise, the teacher told her. And there was a problem with spacing. Content seemed not to matter much at all.

Back to top

Obama goes for college ‘datapalooza’
Nick Anderson – Washington Post

In President Obama’s plan to overhaul higher education, which envisions using new federal ratings of colleges to determine levels of student aid, there is a deep faith in the power of information and innovation to catalyze change in colleges and universities.

Ultimately, the belief is that these forces will make college more affordable.

Yet academia has witnessed and taken part in many waves of innovation in the past half-century, and affordability remains elusive.

The administration’s faith is encapsulated in a word the White House used this week in a fact sheet about the plan:

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019432