Education Week - February 27, 2013 - 5

EDUCATION WEEK

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OBITUARIES

COMPLETING HIGH SCHOOL

Disadvantaged Youths’ Advocate
In New York City Dies

“2013 Building a Grad Nation:
Progress and Challenge in Ending
the High School Dropout
Epidemic”

RICHARD L. MURPHY, a former
youth-services director in New
York City who created the advocacy organization that evolved
into the Harlem Children’s Zone,
died Feb. 14 of complications from stomach cancer, The New York Times
reported. He was 68.
The Rheedlen Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by
Mr. Murphy in 1970,
first worked with families in Harlem to stem truancy. In
1990, after 20 years of working
with Rheedlen, Mr. Murphy was
appointed commissioner of the
New York City Division of Youth
Services by then-Mayor David
N. Dinkins. Through the Safe
Streets, Safe City program, Mr.
Murphy spearheaded the Beacon Schools initiative, which let
community agencies use space in
schools to coordinate social, educational, health, and recreational
programs for children and their

With a national graduation
rate of 78.2 percent, the United
States is on track to meet a goal
of achieving a 90 percent fouryear high school graduation rate
by 2020, according to the latest
annual report from the Building
a Grad Nation campaign.
Since 2001, that rate has risen
by 6.5 percentage points, according to the report released this
week by a coalition of national
education groups, including
Civic Enterprises, the Everyone
Graduates Center, the America’s
Promise Alliance, and the Alliance for Excellent Education.
The report attributes much of
the growth to improved performance by Latino and AfricanAmerican students. Between
2006 and 2010, the Hispanic
graduation rate grew from 61
percent to 71.4 percent, while the
rate for black students rose from
59.2 percent to 66.1 percent.
Five of the 10 states with the
greatest progress since 2006
were in the South, as were the
seven states with the biggest
drop in “dropout factory” high
schools.
Overall, 1,424 schools were
deemed “dropout factories” in
2011 (those in which 12th grade
enrollment is 60 percent or less
of 9th grade enrollment three
years earlier). That’s 29 percent
less than in 2002. —CARALEE ADAMS

Good Shepherd Services

families outside of school hours.
One of the first Beacon centers
was opened, in partnership with
Rheedlen, in a public school in
Harlem, and later became the
Harlem Children’s Zone,
according to the hcz
website. The nationally
watched effort now serves
some 14,000 children and
adults in the neighborhood.
After Mr. Dinkins’ term
ended and Rudolph W.
Giuliani took office in 1994, Mr.
Murphy’s tenure with the city
ended in controversy, the Times
reported, though an investigation into allegations of mismanagement of the youth division
found no wrongdoing. Later, Mr.
Murphy helped open a culinaryarts high school in the city, and he
served as the director of the Center for Youth Development and
Policy Research at the Academy
for Educational Development, in
—ROB BOCK
Washington.

Education Scholar Was Union Critic
tion professor, author, and prominent critic of teachers’ unions,
died of natural causes Feb. 6 in
Chevy Chase, Md., his
son said in a statement.
He was 94.
During a 60-year career that included positions at more than half a
dozen colleges and universities, Mr. Lieberman
emerged as a serious
critic of the national teachers’
unions and of common collective
bargaining tactics, culminating
in his 1997 volume The Teachers’
Unions: How the NEA and AFT
Sabotage Reform. His insights
were based in part on personal
knowledge of the two unions, to
which he had belonged and represented in contract negotiations
early in his career. Mr. Lieberman also made a onetime run for
the presidency of the American
Federation of Teachers in 1972.
oral candidates that their concerns
about job protection would be heard
after this year’s election.
Just 152,000 of New York City’s
1.1 million public schoolchildren ride
school buses, but many are disabled
or have no easy way to get to school.
The school bus strike was the first
in the city since 1979. About 5,000 of
the city’s 7,700 routes were affected.
The cost of busing students has
risen from $100 million in 1979
to $1.1 billion today, prompting
Mayor Michael Bloomberg to insist the city must seek new bus
contracts to cut costs.
–AP

But Mr. Lieberman also
charged would-be education reformers with failing to confront
resistance to change from other
education players, such
as governors and state
education departments.
He reserved particular
ire for the nation’s more
than 14,000 local schools
boards, writing in a 2007
Education Week Commentary essay that such
board members’ private interests
and lack of expertise in labor relations gave unions an advantage
in collective bargaining.
In addition to serving on the
faculty or as an administrator at
the University of Oklahoma, the
University of Pennsylvania, the
University of Southern California, and the City College of New
York, among others, Mr. Lieberman acted as a chief negotiator
during many school districts’ contract renewals. —STEPHEN SAWCHUK
Lieberman Family

MYRON LIEBERMAN, an educa-

CORRECTIONS:
A story on discipline policies in
charter schools in the Feb. 20, 2013,
issue of Education Week included an
incorrect first name for Adele Fabrikant, the deputy chief in the office of
youth engagement for the District of
Columbia public schools.
A story in that edition on creating
uniform discipline policies for charter and noncharter schools in New
Orleans mischaracterized the International School of Louisiana. It
is a language-immersion charter
school.

FEBRUARY 27, 2013

“Are Countries Moving Towards
More Equitable Education
Systems?”

“9th Annual AP Report to the Nation”

Nearly one in five public high school graduates in the class of
2012 passed an Advanced Placement exam, reflecting a steady
increase in performance over the past decade, data released last
week by the College Board show.
In last year’s class, 19.5 percent of all graduates scored a 3 or
higher, which is considered a passing grade on the exams’ scale of
1 to 5. That is up from 18.1 percent who passed in 2011 and 11.6
percent in the class of 2002.
The ap program is expanding as well. There were 954,070 public
school students who took at least one ap exam last year (32.4 percent of 2012 graduates), compared with 904,794 (30.2 percent) the
year before and 471,404 (18 percent) in 2002, according to Trevor
Packer, the senior vice president for ap and college readiness for
the College Board, the New York City-based nonprofit organization that sponsors the exams.
Among ap test-takers, 60.1 percent received a score of 3 or
higher, compared with 59.8 percent for the class of 2011. The percentage of students who scored a 5 was the highest in a decade
(14.2 percent), Mr. Packer said.
One explanation for the increase in performance, he said, may
be that more students are not only enrolling in ap courses but
also taking the exams—a reflection of the increasing competitiveness of higher education and the rising value of ap scores in the
application process. Also, the College Board’s efforts to audit and
redesign ap has improved the quality of course instruction that
may have led to better scores, Mr. Packer added.
The report notes that minority students are still much less likely
than white or Asian students to take the ap exams—and also less
likely to perform at high levels on them. Of the successful 2012 testtakers, nearly 62 percent were white, while 16 percent were Latino
—CARALEE ADAMS
and 4.4 percent were African-American.

prove significantly. Some other
countries such as Germany and
Chile significantly improved both
overall performance and educational equity during that time.
—SARAH D. SPARKS

“Dual Credit and Exam-Based
Courses in U.S. Public High
Schools, 2010-11”

Several countries that consistently top U.S. performance on the
Program for International Student Assessment also have more
equitable education systems, but
American schools are making
progress on that front, according
to a study by the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers pisa.
The study found that in 2009,
countries often held up as educational role models, including
Finland, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, had significantly higher pisa
reading performance as well
as smaller socioeconomic gaps.
The socioeconomic status of the
15-year-old test-takers was measured using an index of parents’
education and careers, as well as
educational and other resources
available in the children’s homes.
From 2000 to 2009, the United
States reduced the gap in reading performance between students of higher- and lower-socioeconomic status, but its students’
overall scores on pisa did not im-

Opportunities for students to
earn college credit while still in
high school are expanding, according to a new report.
The study from the National
Center for Education Statistics
found that, during the 2010-11
academic year, 82 percent of public high schools enrolled students
in dual-credit courses, and 69
percent reported enrollments in
International Baccalaureate or
Advanced Placement courses for
which college credit is contingent
on exam results.
In 2002-03, the nces reported
71 percent of high schools offered programs in which students earned credit at both the
high school and college levels
for the same course, known as
“dual credit.” Another 67 percent
of public high schools had exambased ap courses, while 2 percent
enrolled students in ib classes.
One driver behind the increased participation in collegelevel courses is a school’s expectations. Nearly 63 percent
of schools with dual-enrollment
programs made enrolling in such

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Report Points to Steady Increase
In Passing Rates for AP Exams

TRANSITION TO COLLEGE
INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS

a course a requirement for students, the report says.
—C.A.

LATINO STUDENTS
“Deflecting the Trajectory and
Changing the Narrative: How
Self-Affirmation Affects
Academic Performance and
Motivation Under Identify Threat”

Latino middle school students
whose academic performance
may have been undermined by
“stereotype threat”—an anxiety that can stem from being
a member of a racial, ethnic, or
gender group associated with
negative stereotypes—earned
higher grades after participating
in classroom assignments meant
to boost their confidence, a new
study has found.
Researchers from Stanford
University and the University of
California, Santa Barbara, had
a group of students, both Latino
and white, participate in “values
affirmation” classroom assignments throughout the school year.
The students were asked to select values and write brief essays
about why they were important
to them. The Latino students who
completed the exercises earned
higher grades than their Latino
peers who did not, and those effects persisted for three years.
Little impact was seen on white
students’ academic performance.
The study is published online
this month by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
—LESLI A. MAXWELL

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Education Week - February 27, 2013

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