School Funding CenterCentral source of expertise on school improvement issues

MOBILE, Ala. — The University of South Alabama reached a record fall enrollment with 15,007 students, USA President Gordon Moulton announced today.

In the past decade, said Moulton, the university’s enrollment has risen 30 percent.

“It’s a strong indicator of the quality of the university and faculty,” Moulton said.

Moulton also attributed the increase to the variety of majors USA offers. “Combine that with a great cost factor and you could see how” the school could set another new record enrollment, said Moulton.

The school also set a record number of undergraduate students, 11,658, and a record number of students residing on campus.  

USA’s 2010 fall freshman class came from 200 high schools around the nation.

BREWTON, Alabama — The Brewton City Board of Education has named Mary Bell as principal T.R. Miller High School, replacing Donnie Rotch, who was killed in a car wreck on Aug. 11.

Bell had served as assistant principal at the school. “This has been a very difficult week and a half,” Superintendent Lynn Smith was quoted as saying in a report in the Brewton Standard. “(The teachers and staff) have done a great job.”

Rotch was killed tonight when a man fleeing Brewton police collided head-on with his car. The fleeing man also was killed in the accident that shook the Brewton community.

There are 3 core requirements for success in “any endeavor that involves risk and responsibility,” writes Atul Gawande in his book Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance.

1. Diligence (“giving sufficient attention to detail to avoid error and prevail against obstacles”)

2. Doing right (dealing with “human failings, failings like avarice, arrogance, insecurity, misunderstanding”)

3. Ingenuity (“thinking anew…a willingness to recognize failure, to not paper over the cracks, and to change…obsessive reflection on failure and a constant searching for new solutions”).

Since we’re obsessed with performance – exactly how good are the teachers who come out of our program – we look for ideas outside of the normal K-12 world, like Gawande’s.

I asked my colleague Laura how she thought our teacher preparation follows Gawande’s precepts, and she replied:

1. Diligence

We are hyper-attentive to detail in every way. We show our trainees the “right” way to do everything: from shaking a kid’s hand at the door, to circulating, to having a difficult conversation, to giving feedback on tests and assignments, to writing a blackboard configuration. We leave very little to chance in their teaching because we believe details can make or break a class period or a year.

2. Doing right

We assume good intentions amongst our trainees. But when we see our people doing something that doesn’t seem right, we call them on it right away and try to identify the error or misunderstanding.

I would add: very few future teachers are guilty of “avarice.” But insecurity (theirs) and arrogance (ours; inherent in any prescriptive training program is the obvious belief that our way is effective) are possible pitfalls.

3. Ingenuity

We use outside evaluators to blindly observe our program graduates to see how they do compared to other rookie teachers.

We compile survey data on every hour of training (i.e., data on several hundred hours of training over the course of the year); every Tuesday, we pore over it, and make changes for the coming week.

When someone has figured it out better than us – like Lee Canter and “real-time coaching” – we adopt their methods quickly.

In addition to these 3 precepts from Better, Gawande advances another “Big Picture” idea in a different book that we’ll examine soon: The Checklist Manifesto.

Many prospective college students and their parents believe that an ethnically diverse student body enhances the education of every pupil on campus. A university is truly diverse if there are many different ethnic groups enrolled on campus and those groups have around the same percentage of students enrolled. In other words, if a college has only one ethnic group that makes up the vast percentage of its entire student body, it’s not very diverse, even though it might have many other ethnic groups represented in very small percentages.

[See our list of Great Schools at Great Prices.]

We have published the lists of the most and least ethnically diverse colleges on our Web site; the lists are broken down by college category:

National Universities

National Liberal Arts Colleges

Regional Universities: North | South | Midwest | West

Regional Colleges: North | South | Midwest | West

How we determine diversity: Using 2009-2010 academic year data, our campus ethnic diversity mathematical formula produces a diversity index that ranges from 0.0 (entire enrollment is of one racial/ethnic group) to 1.0 (school’s enrollment is equally distributed over all racial/ethnic groups). The closer a school’s index number is to 1.0, the more diverse its student population Many schools have diversity indexes of around 0.10, which means that approximately nine of 10 people you are likely to meet at that school will be of the same race.

[Read the campus ethnic diversity methodology.]

Using this approach, we concluded that, for the third year in a row, the most diverse school in the country is Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey—Newark, with a diversity index of 0.74. That means that nearly three out of every four people you run into there will be from a different ethnic group. Other schools that have a diversity index of 0.70 or higher are:

University of Houston

Nova Southeastern University (Florida)

SUNY College—Old Westbury

St. Peter’s College (New Jersey)

CUNY—City College

CUNY—Baruch College

CUNY—Brooklyn College

CUNY—Hunter College

CUNY—John Jay College of Criminal Justice

La Sierra University (California)

Houston Baptist University

California State University—East Bay

California State University—Dominguez Hills

Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology (New York)

CUNY—New York City College of Technology