The Choice: Application Inflation, and Extra Time on the SAT and ACT for Students with Disabilities

The latest edition of Education Life, The Times’s quarterly supplement, will be published this weekend and, as always, there is lots of “news you can use” for college applicants and their families.

In an article published in collaboration with The Chronicle of Higher Education, Eric Hoover tackles the subject of “Application Inflation” — the efforts by highly-selective colleges to recruit record-breaking numbers of applicants every year, only to reject the vast majority of them.

“Although the tension between mission and marketing has long defined admissions,” Mr. Hoover writes, “many believe the balance has tilted too far toward the latter.” You can read the full article here.

Separately, Abigail Sullivan Moore passes along the latest advice on the testing accommodations for students with learning disabilities and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “Perseverance pays,” she writes, in an article well worth examining in full.

If you’ve got comments on either of these subjects, you can post them here, using the box below.

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Justices Hear Case on Taxing of Students

The case concerned medical residents, who work long hours as part of their studies, providing care to hospital patients. They are often paid more than $50,000 a year.

Under a 2005 Treasury Department regulation, residents are subject to Social Security taxes, notwithstanding a statutory exemption for work performed by students who regularly attend classes, as residents do. The regulation says that students who would otherwise qualify for the exemption lose it if they work more than 40 hour per week, even if they learn from what they do.

According to a brief filed by residency programs that are seeking tax refunds, there are about 100,000 residents in 8,000 programs nationwide. According to a government brief, medical residents are subject to about $700 million in Social Security taxes each year.

Theodore B. Olson, a lawyer representing the programs seeking refunds, told the justices that they are fundamentally educational, including “a rigorous core curriculum” with “hundreds of classes, conferences, lectures, laboratory research, written exams, grades and intensive, hands-on clinical patient training under the supervision of faculty members.”

But Matthew D. Roberts, a lawyer for the government, said residents were “workers who are working between 50 and 80 hours a week over many years for substantial salaries” and so “are precisely the kind of workers whose employers should be supporting the Social Security system and who should be earning credit towards disability and survivor benefits.”

The fact that residents may learn something in the process should not be determinative, Mr. Roberts added.

“Many, many individuals pursue their jobs for the primary purpose of learning, like judicial law clerks, like other apprentices,” he said. “But they are not covered by this exemption.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg responded that the law only allows the exemption to students enrolled and regularly attending classes at schools, colleges and universities.

Mr. Roberts said that helped his case. Since there is no general exemption for wages paid to apprentices, he said, the Treasury Department made a reasonable judgment in interpreting the law so as not to create “a special exemption for apprentices who happen to be employed by schools, colleges and universities.”

The argument in the case, Mayo Foundation v. United States, No. 09-837, also included questions about Supreme Court clinics at law schools, architectural apprentices and work-study programs.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the difficulty of distinguishing among them was a reason to allow the Internal Revenue Service to decide the matter.

“This is basically a very familiar situation of an apprentice who is both an employee and both a student, and to try to draw the line in some categorical way doesn’t make sense,” he said. “The only way you can draw the line is to have somebody say: This is going to be the line. And if anybody is going to say it, it ought to be the I.R.S.”

But Mr. Olson said the particular regulation at issue was arbitrary and counterintuitive. “If you are too much of a student, you are not a student,” he said. “It is backwards.”

Justice Sotomayor, the argument’s most active questioner, said many jobs have an educational component. “Aren’t we learning in every case that we’re hearing?” she asked, referring to the members of the court.

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Proficiency of Black Students Is Found to Be Far Lower Than Expected

An achievement gap separating black from white students has long been documented — a social divide extremely vexing to policy makers and the target of one blast of school reform after another.

But a new report focusing on black males suggests that the picture is even bleaker than generally known.

Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.

Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.

The data was distilled from highly respected national math and reading tests, known as the National Assessment for Educational Progress, which are given to students in fourth and eighth grades, most recently in 2009. The report, “A Call for Change,” is to be released Tuesday by the Council of the Great City Schools, an advocacy group for urban public schools.

Although the outlines of the problem and many specifics have been previously reported, the group hopes that including so much of what it calls “jaw-dropping data” in one place will spark a new sense of national urgency.

“What this clearly shows is that black males who are not eligible for free and reduced-price lunch are doing no better than white males who are poor,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the council.

The report shows that black boys on average fall behind from their earliest years. Black mothers have a higher infant mortality rate and black children are twice as likely as whites to live in a home where no parent has a job. In high school, African-American boys drop out at nearly twice the rate of white boys, and their SAT scores are on average 104 points lower. In college, black men represented just 5 percent of students in 2008.

The analysis of results on the national tests found that math scores in 2009 for black boys were not much different than those for black girls in Grades 4 and 8, but black boys lagged behind Hispanics of both sexes, and they fell behind white boys by at least 30 points, a gap sometimes interpreted as three academic grades.

The search for explanations has recently looked at causes besides poverty, and this report may further spur those efforts.

“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”

Those include “conversations about early childhood parenting practices,” Dr. Ferguson said. “The activities that parents conduct with their 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds. How much we talk to them, the ways we talk to them, the ways we enforce discipline, the ways we encourage them to think and develop a sense of autonomy.”

The report urges convening a White House conference, encouraging Congress to appropriate more money for schools and establishing networks of black mentors.

What it does not discuss are policy responses identified with a robust school reform movement that emphasizes closing failing schools, offering charter schools as alternatives and raising the quality of teachers.

The report did not go down this road because “there’s not a lot of research to indicate that many of those strategies produce better results,” Mr. Casserly said.

Other have a different response. The key to narrowing the achievement gap, said Dr. Ferguson, is “really good teaching.”

One large urban school district that has made progress is Baltimore’s, where the dropout rate for African-American boys declined to 4.9 percent during the last academic year, down from 11.9 percent three years earlier. Graduation rates for black boys were also up: 57 percent in 2009-10, compared with 51 percent three years earlier.

Andres A. Alonso, the chief executive of the Baltimore City Public Schools, said the improvement had little to do with changes at the margins, like lengthening the school day or adding mentors. Rather, Mr. Alonso cited aggressively closing failing schools, knocking on the doors of dropouts’ homes to lure them back and creating real-time alerts — “almost like an electrical charge” — when a student misses several days of school.

“Hispanic kids and African-American kids this year had a lower dropout rate than white kids,” Mr. Alonso said.

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