Samantha Stainburn

Postgrad: Up to Their Ears in Debt

(The New York Times, 26 July 2009)

Graduate school looks like a cozy place to hide out in times like these. Instead of taking a McJob while waiting for the economy to pick up, you could be working toward a degree that will help you jump the employment line when companies start hiring again. A worker with an advanced degree makes substantially more than one with a bachelor’s — from 15 percent with a master’s in engineering to 54 percent with an M.B.A. to 175 percent with an M.D., according to census data.

But buyer beware. Grants and scholarships for graduate students are limited, and most are based on merit, not need. That makes loans the predominant form of financial aid. While undergraduates can borrow only a fraction of the cost of their degree from the government, grad students can usually cover it all with federal loans — up to $20,500 a year in Staffords (with interest capped at 6.8 percent) and the rest via Grad Plus loans (at 8.5 percent).

Yet it has never been clearer that borrowing money is a risk. Law school graduates, many shouldering more than $100,000 in loans, tumbled into the job market this spring to discover that high-paying firms were not hiring. M.B.A. graduates found themselves returning to their previous employers and pay grades because so many lucrative consulting and banking jobs had disappeared. And that new grad with a master’s in creative writing? She’s pouring coffee rather than poring over book proposals at a publishing house.

So how do you decide if you can afford the grad school gamble in this recession?

“Higher education remains an incredibly good investment,” says Sandy Baum, a senior policy analyst at the College Board and professor of economics at Skidmore College. “You just have to realize there’s uncertainty in the outcome, so it’s better to underestimate your projected earnings.”

Ms. Baum and Prof. Saul Schwartz of Carleton University, in Ottawa, researched the question of how much debt is too much. Income, of course, is key. “When student loan repayments are above 12 to 14 percent of income,” Ms. Baum says, “people start saying, ‘This is really a problem.’ ” Ms. Baum’s study suggests that borrowers earning the median salary, $33,400, will struggle if they spend more than 10 percent of their income on debt repayment, while the wealthiest borrowers will suffer if payments exceed 18 to 20 percent.

The rule of thumb is that you can afford to repay your school loans if the total debt for your education is about the same as your expected starting salary. You can also handle a higher debt-to-income ratio if you are younger, don’t have a family and reside in an inexpensive area.

You may need to be frugal, as it is likely that you will borrow more for a graduate degree now than in boom years. That’s because the pools of money into which grad students have traditionally dipped to help finance their education are evaporating in this dismal economy.

In 2007-8, the National Center for Education Statistics reports, 21 percent of master’s-degree students received some type of financial support from their university, including fellowships (9 percent of students), partial tuition and fee waivers (7 percent), teaching assistantships (5 percent) and research assistantships (4 percent). The average aid package totaled $10,179.

These days, however, state budget cuts and endowment losses are putting the squeeze on institutional aid. For example, the University of California, Los Angeles, with reductions in state financing, is hiring fewer teaching assistants this year. “We simply have less money, and our priority is regular faculty who have tenure and need to be paid,” says Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, vice chancellor for graduate studies.

Universities, anyway, direct a lot of the merit aid and assistantships they do offer to international students. Foreign students don’t qualify for federal loans, and many cannot attend without support — and graduate departments, especially in the well-financed sciences and engineering, are eager to draw top-notch candidates from abroad.

The system has evolved based on the assumption that graduate students have saved some cash in the workplace, or are able to get reimbursed by employers, especially for part-time business programs. A quarter of master’s students get at least some tuition reimbursed by their employer, collecting $5,245 on average. But according to a January survey by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an executive placement firm, about 11 percent of large companies have cut back tuition reimbursement. Some companies have moved to a lottery system in divvying up benefits.

Students are also coming in with reduced savings or accumulated debt from undergraduate degrees and underemployment, says Lisa A. Tedesco, dean of the Graduate School at Emory University: “As jobs have dried up, they are not able to sock away a starting nest egg, so they might be borrowing earlier and more in their graduate career.”

Thanks to the recession, the M.B.A. that Edward Bayer is earning at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, is costing him more than he anticipated. After working at Merrill Lynch as a financial adviser, Mr. Bayer, now 25, decided to go back to school “to better his skill set” and set himself up for new challenges, including starting his own company. He planned to pay for his education with a combination of federal loans and a summer internship at a large company that he expected would generate $12,000 to $15,000.

In normal years, 98 percent of first-year M.B.A. students at Owen spend their summers in such internships, says Joyce Rothenberg, director of its career management center. This year, however, financially strapped companies canceled or shrank their internship programs, leaving business students across the country in the lurch. Only about 80 percent of Owen students found paid internships this summer, and the pay is lower.

Mr. Bayer, who is doing an unpaid internship for college credit at the uniforms division of the VF Corporation, has borrowed from his I.R.A. and taken an additional $6,600 in federal loans to get him through. But he thinks he’s getting his money’s worth from his M.B.A. experience.

“I’m managing a seven-person team at my internship,” he says. “This will be a great thing to have on my résumé.” He sees a silver lining even in the struggle finding work this summer. “I interviewed with so many more people than usual,” he says. “I’ve ultimately built a bigger network.”

Student-Debt Subtractors

PICK PROGRAMS, NOT PRESTIGE

“Apply to multiple schools, public and private, and compare offers carefully,” says Lauren Asher, president of the Institute for College Access and Success in Berkeley, Calif. Two schools with similar reputations may differ in cost significantly when you factor in tuition, housing, transportation and any tuition discounts or scholarships. Resist paying more for a prestigious university, Ms. Asher says. “In grad school, it’s really the reputation of the program itself that matters.”

GO WHERE YOU’LL SHINE

Ph.D. candidates often get first dibs on teaching assistantships, and professors prefer to hire students whose work they know for research assistantships. But universities use the jobs to lure top students, so increase your chances by applying where you stand out academically. Every university is dealing with the recession differently, so contact each to discuss availability and consider those with more opportunities.

Avoid private loans. “For the most part, they have variable rates with no caps and no limits on fees,” Ms. Asher says. “Right now, interest rates look temptingly low, but they won’t stay low.” After a 20- to 25-year term, a private loan is more expensive than a federal one. What’s more, private loans usually lack the consumer protections offered with federal loans, like the right to defer repayment while unemployed or to cancel the debt if you die or become disabled. Yet almost a fifth of graduate students who took out Stafford loans in 2007-8 also had private loans, according to Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of the financial aid site FinAid.org. And nearly a third with private student loans had not borrowed first via a low-interest federal Stafford. Unless you have a big blot on your credit history, like a bankruptcy or foreclosure that makes it hard to get a Grad Plus loan (after maxing out your Stafford), there’s no reason to go private.

PARLAY A SKILL

There may be a market for something you’re learning in pursuit of your degree. Kendra Freeman, a doctoral student at Emory University, learned how to use data analysis software in her sociology program and got a part-time job evaluating grants for a local company. “Thankfully my department has a lot of contact with employers who need data analysis,” she says. “If I had to try to find a job at some place like Borders, first of all there aren’t jobs, and second of all that’s like $7.50 an hour.” Career service offices try to stay on top of local employment options, says Julie Miller Vick, a senior associate director of the career services office at the University of Pennsylvania. “Department coordinators,” she says, “often know about short-term opportunities, a local business that wants a demographer for six months or a community college that needs somebody to teach.”

LOWER YOUR PAYMENT

With the government’s new income-based repayment program, graduates with a high debt-to-earnings ratio may be able to lower their monthly nut to less than 10 percent of their income; those earning one and a half times the poverty level ($16,245 for an individual in 2009) or less won’t have to make any payments. Money owed after 25 years of qualifying payments will be forgiven. Enroll via your lender. The Institute for College Access and Success has more information at IBRinfo.org.

Read this story at the New York Times.

Chicago Teaches the World

(Crain’s Chicago Business, 24 March 2008)

In the past eight years, the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business has established campuses far beyond Hyde Park and the Gleacher Center in downtown Chicago.

The first: a floor in the prestigious Woolgate Exchange office building in central London. The second: an 1885 mansion in Singapore that’s the former home of a Chinese merchant. And, in February, the university announced plans to build another campus, on the site of a former nutmeg plantation in Singapore, which is scheduled to open in 2009.

The students at these campuses are for the most part European and Asian executives who pay comparable tuition to complete the same 21-month executive MBA program as students in Chicago.

“We thought it would expose our faculty to international issues through the students they were teaching, and they could bring that back to their classrooms in Chicago,” says William Kooser, associate dean for executive MBA programs at the GSB, which opened its European campus in 1994 in Barcelona (the program moved to London in 2005) and its Asian campus in 2000. Each has 180 students, who are taught by GSB professors and receive GSB diplomas.

The school isn’t the only one tapping foreign markets. Lots of area business schools have set up shop in other countries, hoping to draw students who can’t move to Chicago, retain faculty members interested in global issues and bolster their brand internationally.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign runs a 15-month MBA program for about 45 Polish executives a year at the University of Warsaw. The executives are awarded U of I diplomas without setting foot on the school’s Chicago campus, although they do spend a week in the United States on a junket to visit companies like Merck & Co. and attend a U of I football game.

“They don’t quite know what ‘Go Illini’ means, but you want them to feel this is their alma mater,” says Susan Cohen, director of the school’s Warsaw executive MBA program.

Professors from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management teach at four universities abroad: York University in Canada, Tel Aviv University in Israel, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and WHU in Germany. Those students receive a joint degree from Kellogg and their home institutions.

Even the lesser-known Dominican University’s Brennan School of Business in River Forest awards diplomas to students in Poland and the Czech Republic. (Loyola University Chicago and Northern Illinois University have study-abroad programs for their Chicago business students but none for foreign-based students.)

COMPETITIVE EDGE

Going abroad offers some business schools another advantage: being No. 1 in the local market. For schools like DePaul University, establishing programs in places like the Czech Republic, Bahrain and Taiwan enabled them to avoid competition from more-prestigious rivals like the GSB and Kellogg.

“We’re not going to go into London or Germany or Singapore, places that already have a lot of strong MBA programs,” says Michael Jedel, associate dean for international programs at DePaul. “We go where we’re perceived as the top-quality provider in that environment.”

DePaul’s part-time MBA programs in Bahrain, which it began in 2001, and the Czech Republic, started in 2002, average 30 students per 18-month session. The university’s program in Taiwan, which started in 2006, draws between 15 and 20 students per session. At each location, the students are taught by DePaul professors flown in from Chicago who use classroom space provided by local executive education centers. All students receive DePaul University diplomas.

DISCOUNT PRICES

Although these foreign programs have yet to become cash cows for Chicago business schools, administrators say they are making a small profit or breaking even despite additional costs like faculty housing and travel. And some charge foreign students less than those in Chicago.

The U of I’s executive MBA program costs the equivalent of $24,000 in Warsaw vs. $74,000 in Chicago (which includes costs that are not part of the Warsaw program, such as room and board during weekend sessions, a laptop and a trip to China). DePaul students in Chicago pay $36,000 to $54,000 in tuition, depending on how many undergraduate business credits they have, for the part-time MBA program. The same degree costs $36,000 in Bahrain, $23,000 in Taiwan and $23,000 in the Czech Republic.

“Because these are people who would not otherwise be coming to DePaul, we feel the tuition is appropriate,” Mr. Jedel says.

The GSB goes the furthest to mix students from its foreign and local campuses. It runs its three programs in tandem and requires students from all three campuses to study together for a week each in London and Singapore. Students at its London and Singapore campuses must also spend two weeks in Chicago. Other schools are moving in that direction.

“I’m starting to promote the idea that our American MBA students could take a few weeks off in the summer and do a course in the Czech Republic, Bahrain or Taiwan,” Mr. Jedel says.

He’s also hoping DePaul’s overseas students can come to Chicago.

Read this story at Crain’s Chicago Business.

The World is Their Classroom

(Crain’s Chicago Business, 24 March 2008)

Schlepping to class on nights and weekends used to be enough travel for executives earning their MBAs while working full time. Not anymore.

Although studying abroad is optional at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, 89% of eligible students in its executive MBA program went overseas in 2007. Ten years ago, 15% did. Twenty years ago, it wasn’t even an option.

During her two years at Kellogg, Asha Banthia, chief financial officer for GE Money’s partnership marketing group in Schaumburg, spent 10 days taking classes in Vallendar, Germany. She visited a tile manufacturing plant and a securities brokerage in Bogotá, Colombia, as part of a four-day trip organized by a classmate whose company has its headquarters there. She also traveled to Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong for a class research project, spending 10 days in China to identify emerging business opportunities for mobile phone entrepreneurs.

“GE is a multinational company and I had worked abroad in Europe and Asia for them before I went to Kellogg,” says Ms. Banthia, 33, who graduated in December. “But this helped me diversify my knowledge.”

For universities, providing MBA students with international experiences like these is no longer a frill, but a necessity.

“Companies are now competing in a global landscape, and education has to give them the skills to be successful in such a world,” says Julie Cisek Jones, director of Kellogg’s executive MBA program.

Administrators at other Chicago business schools agree. The University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Northern Illinois University, the University of Chicago, Loyola University and DePaul University encourage MBA students to get out of town through a variety of international tours, business courses at partner schools and overseas research projects.

TRAVEL TRENDS

To make studying abroad easier, universities are putting together condensed programs, which are cheaper than semester-long stays and fit students’ work schedules better.

The University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, which first sent students to study at the London School of Economics in 1965, began offering two- to three-week trips to Europe in 2001. Last summer, the school ran short courses in Leipzig, Germany; Vienna, Austria; São Paulo, Brazil; Beijing, and Paris.

“Four years ago, our students only wanted to study in places that were considered financial centers — either London or Hong Kong — and it was hard to get them to look at other schools,” says Kari Nysather, the GSB’s director of international programs. “Now a lot of them are interested in emerging markets, so there’s more demand for schools in South Africa, Brazil, Chile and China.”

In the past, the only international MBA degree programs that forced students to travel were the ones geared toward bilingual American students preparing for international careers. Now schools are making exposure to the outside world mandatory.

Starting in June, full-time MBA students at Kellogg must complete a course in international business or study abroad to graduate. Northern Illinois University’s 12-month MBA program requires an international business seminar in either Europe or South America. The University of Chicago requires its executive MBA students to spend a week in Singapore and a week in London analyzing case studies with business students based there. And students in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s executive MBA program are required to complete a nine-month consulting project with companies doing business in China, then travel to Beijing to present their findings to executives there.

The consulting experience would not stretch students’ skills as much if they didn’t have to sit across the table from Chinese executives on their own turf, says Debra Krolick, director of the U of I’s executive MBA program. “A lot of what our program does is take students out of their comfort zone,” she says.

Having been at GE her entire career, Ms. Banthia found that observing other companies’ international operations was particularly instructive.

Among those she met on her travels was the ex-CEO of Wal-Mart China, who explained that the chain initially struggled there because it hadn’t immersed itself in the local culture. For example, chicken sales didn’t take off until Wal-Mart started slaughtering poultry in its stores, an important sign of freshness to Chinese consumers.

“I learned how people have to evolve global business models to fit the local ones,” she says.

Read this story at Crain’s Chicago Business.

MBAs–2nd Tier Degrees, 1st Rate Careers

(Crain’s Chicago Business, 22 March 2004)

Here’s a success story that Northwestern University and the University of Chicago don’t want you to hear. When the new owners of Schaumburg-based Wellmark International needed a president to lead the insecticide company purchased in 1997 from Novartis AG, they tapped an executive who’d climbed the ladder through a series of mergers and acquisitions that formed the company.

Kay Schwichtenberg had the right skills for the job: knowledge of the business, marketing experience, drive and an MBA — from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her degree, earned in 1984, came at roughly half the price of an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management or the U of C’s Graduate School of Business.

Elite business schools like Kellogg and U of C — currently ranked No. 4 and 9 in the nation, respectively, in the latest U.S. News and World Report guide to business schools — contend that the connections and cachet that come with a degree from their programs are a ticket to the top.

Indeed, members of Kellogg’s 2002 MBA class received starting salaries ranging from $36,000 to $200,000, according to the school’s career placement office. The median starting salary for similarly experienced University of Chicago MBAs was $85,000, plus a typical $20,000 signing bonus and $30,000 in other compensation; 80% of these graduates secured their jobs through school connections.

The pitch works. More than 6,000 candidates sent $200 application-fee checks to Kellogg in 2003 to compete for one of roughly 550 places in its one- and two-year MBA programs.

But it’s possible to build a first-rate career with a less-than-gilt-edged MBA, as Ms. Schwichtenberg’s experience shows. Not that she didn’t go for the gold. She applied to Northwestern and UIC, but landed on Northwestern’s waiting list. She went with UIC.

She was unusual. Many of her fellow students at UIC didn’t bother to apply to schools like Northwestern, figuring they wouldn’t be accepted.

“There were a lot of first-generation-American students at UIC with me,” recalls Ms. Schwichtenberg, 51, who isn’t a first-generation American. “They knew what working was like. It was a very hard-driving, aggressive, knowledgeable student base.”

Aside from the networking and hiring opportunities, U of C sells its program as a second-to-none academic experience. “There are some aspects of the academic experience that we offer . . . that I have not seen at any other place,” including a faculty with six Nobel laureates, says Don Martin, associate dean for enrollment management at U of C’s graduate business school.

Still, programs a few notches down on the prestige scale are many executives’ only option. Enrollment at U of C and Kellogg is fiercely competitive. And the price tags put these schools beyond the reach of many.

“My decision was strictly economics-driven,” says James Hussey, who entered UIC’s MBA program in 1982, a few months after getting his undergraduate degree in pharmacy. “I wasn’t interested in going into a lot of debt to get the graduate degree, and I didn’t have anyone to pay for it.”

For Mr. Hussey, the MBA provided the business-side preparation he lacked, and it sent a signal to potential employers. “I wanted to be on the business side of either a big (drug company) or a biotech, (so) I needed to have the MBA as a stamp that I was a business guy, not a pharmacy guy,” he says.

After graduating, Mr. Hussey got a job at Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., where he worked for 11 years. He doesn’t know if he ever beat out a blue-chip MBA for a job. But that’s not to say it hasn’t happened. “Bristol-Myers hired me. Maybe I was different because I had a science background,” Mr. Hussey recalls. “They liked the pharma/MBA combo.”

After Bristol-Myers, he started his own company, and in 1998 became president of NeoPharm Inc., a $500-million-market-cap biopharmaceutical company in Lake Forest that develops cancer treatment drugs.

Not always a good fit

Jack Rooney, CEO of Chicago-based wireless phone company U.S. Cellular Corp. — and a 1969 Loyola MBA graduate — doesn’t believe he’s been held back by the fact that his MBA isn’t from a top 10 school. “An MBA opens the door for you. And maybe (a Kellogg or U of C degree) opens more doors for you quickly,” he says. “But once the door is open, it’s what you do (that counts).”

Mr. Rooney, 61, has worked for Pullman Industries Inc., Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. and Ameritech Corp. He says his MBA helped him ride out many mergers and acquisitions. “You had a check mark next to my name that said, ‘This guy has got ambition and he’s educated,’ ” he says.

Richard Driehaus, founder and CEO of Driehaus Capital Management Inc. in Chicago, earned an MBA from DePaul after five years of study in 1970. He maintains that his innate business acumen and his work ethic, rather than his degree, have made him a success. “You can graduate top of your class and not make money in the market,” he observes.

Mr. Driehaus, 62, was nearer the bottom of his class after he transferred from junior college to DePaul’s undergraduate business school. He was the last in his class to get a job. Today his firm manages about $2.6 billion in assets.

Mr. Driehaus says he’s hired MBAs from blue-chip schools, but it hasn’t always been a good fit. “Sometimes, they don’t work out,” he says. “Investing rewards patience,” he explains, and he says some of these hires have been extremely bright but impatient people, eager to get to the top fast.

But what about those connections that only an elite school offers? Many executives interviewed for this story say they didn’t miss them, since they were already well along in their careers when they entered grad school.

When Ron Daley, now CEO of Oce-USA, the U.S. division of a Dutch digital document management company, started taking MBA night courses at Loyola in 1978, he was 31 and on the management track at R. R. Donnelley & Sons Co., the Chicago-based printer where he’d started as a proofreader at 17.

He wanted to distinguish himself. “I was just one guy of many, and I’m African-American,” says Mr. Daley, 57. “In the business world, I needed every edge.”

Education: When Less is Not More

(Crain’s Chicago Business, 01 January 2007)

The problem: Poor performance by Chicago public school students

The solution: Lengthen the school day

The players: Chicago Public Schools, the teachers union, state government and business leaders

For the current crop of students in Chicago’s public schools, the system has always been in reform mode. Mayor Richard M. Daley took control of the schools when this year’s high school seniors were first-graders. How are they doing?

Not good: Fifty-eight percent of 11th-graders didn’t meet academic standards in reading on the 2005 Prairie State Achievement Exam (PSAE), and almost three-quarters failed to make the grade in math and science. Only 30% of CPS graduates enroll at four-year colleges and, of those, less than half will graduate in six years.

Chicago students are being lapped by kids in the suburbs, who boast some of the highest test scores in the country, and by students in urban districts like Austin, Texas, and New York, who show a better grasp of math, reading and science.

What do these kids have that Chicago students don’t? More time.

Chicago has one of the shortest school days in the country: 5 hours and 45 minutes. That compares with 7½ hours in Evanston Township and seven hours for Austin and some schools in New York.

To be sure, there’s no automatic correlation between more hours and higher achievement, but giving Chicago students the equivalent of one day less of instruction a week is a handicap no one can afford.

At Peirce School, a high-scoring, traditional K-8 school that serves Andersonville and Edgewater, Principal Paula Rossino says her teachers extend the day unofficially.

“They don’t have to be here until 8:30 a.m. but many open up their classrooms at 7:30 to let the kids do independent reading or work in a study group,” she says.

Meanwhile, Chicago’s charter schools, which can create their own schedules with non-unionized teachers, are showing they can achieve the seemingly impossible with extra time. KIPP Ascend Charter School on the city’s Far West Side requires students to spend 9½ hours in school on weekdays and come in for four hours every other Saturday.

When its current eighth-graders arrived as fifth-graders, they were reading at the second-grade level and doing math at the third-grade level. Now they’re reading at the eighth-grade level and doing math at the 11th-grade level.

“There’s no way that would have been possible without the extended day,” the school’s Principal Jim O’Connor says.

The Illinois Network of Charter Schools reports that in the 2004-05 academic year, Chicago’s 19 charter schools taught an average of 45 minutes more each day; all outperformed neighboring traditional public schools on state tests.

Extending the school day will cost Chicago more money, but maybe not as much as the city fears. A 2005 study of eight public extended-time schools by the Massachusetts 2020 Foundation, an education reform group in Boston, found cost increases were not directly proportional to time added: When schools extended schedules by 15% to 60%, their costs went up by as little as 7% to 12%.

CPS officials say they haven’t decided whether a longer school day will be a priority or even part of their negotiations in contract talks with the teachers union in 2007.

Chicago Teachers Union President Marilyn Stewart declines to discuss what it would take for the union to support a longer school day. “How can we say what conditions would need to be met for us to accept a longer school day until we see what the board has determined?” she says. “We would certainly react to their proposal in a way that would ensure our members were properly compensated for the additional time.”

Q&A: How to make school days last longer

Hilary Pennington is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C., think tank, and co-founder of Jobs for the Future, a research and policy development organization. In “Expanding Learning Time in High Schools,” a recent report for the center, she calls upon states and the federal government to promote more systematic experiments with a longer school day.

CRAIN’S: Do you think Chicago’s short school day is holding students back?

MS. PENNINGTON: Yes. Look at it logically: If we decide to raise the standards and expectations for what students should achieve and we keep the time they have to do that constant, that’s a problem. This is particularly true for kids who are behind grade level. I would strongly encourage Chicago to look at expanding time for learning. But that means changing how time is used in the school as well as just extending it.

Q: What do high-performing schools do with extra time that helps kids learn?

A: They spend a lot more time on the core academic subjects like English and math. These schools are all over their students and don’t let them fall behind, and they spend time on early diagnosis systems that might say, “The student’s not on track; we’ve got to make an intervention now.” They have mandatory tutoring.

Q: What else do they do differently?

A: They do a lot of enrichment programs in the arts and sciences that often people in poor communities don’t have and are cut out of shorter school days. Usually, schools provide enrichment activities with outside organizations, which gets kids access to different kinds of adults, including other teachers and parents. It’s beneficial to have a lot of adults caring about the development of individual children.

Q: The evidence that a longer school day results in higher achievement is mostly anecdotal. How can a cash-strapped school district like Chicago’s justify investing in an idea that hasn’t been studied on a large scale?

A: A longer school day was recommended in the 1983 “A Nation at Risk” report by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Commission on Excellence in Education, and it’s the only recommendation that has never been tried in a systematic way because it requires fundamentally transforming the structure of the school day and year. But you don’t have to convert the whole system instantly. You probably need to do something like the Massachusetts Expanded Learning Time Initiative, where the state has allocated $6.5 million to give 10 public schools $1,300 extra per child to experiment with expanding the day by 30%, which is about two hours. Create some kind of systemic experimentation that lets you answer the question of whether it makes a difference.

Q: How do you get teachers’ unions on board with a longer school day?

A: Massachusetts required the teachers unions to approve the extended day at each of the schools in their experiment, and that took time (between three and 10 months, depending on the school) and conversation. The five districts that are participating are all paying their teachers more. (They’ve bumped salaries up by 20% to 30%.) A big issue was whether the extra time would count toward pensions. In Boston, for example, the district didn’t want it to count and the union did. They ended up compromising. They said there would be mandatory participation for all teachers and they would get the time counted toward their pension, but it will be discretionary for new hires.

Q: What other lessons can we learn from the Massachusetts extended-day experiment?

A: You need to provide enough planning time for the district and the schools to figure out what the different schedule is going to do for the school day. Also, having the Massachusetts 2020 Foundation, an outside organization, pushing the extended day initiative helped the process hugely. The organization did research on how high-performing schools throughout the state used extended days and how much it cost, and then they used that to do the draft legislation and the draft request for proposals. Chicago has a lot of good education reform organizations, so you might want to bring one of those into the mix. It’s always good to have more neutral groups engaged.

Read this article at Crain’s Chicago Business.

What’s So Funny ’Bout Peace, Love, and Understanding?

(Teacher Magazine, October 2003)

(Special Citation, 2003 National Awards for Education Reporting)

Colman McCarthy knows an easy way to get people riled up. He merely suggests they consider peace.

One morning this past May found the journalist-turned-teacher attempting to get the 15 or so juniors in his “Alternatives to Violence” class at School Without Walls, an experimental public school five blocks from the White House in Washington, D.C., interested in media literacy. It was an unseasonably hot day two weeks before summer vacation, and the students sitting in the circle of desks just couldn’t get excited about counting the number of articles about violence in the newspapers in front of them. Coming across a story on the Democratic party, McCarthy—a 65-year-old with owlish glasses whose lanky frame was arranged awkwardly in a beat-up chair—decided to pique their interest by making the lesson personal. He started asking rapid-fire questions about the political affiliations of students’ families.

“My mom’s a registered Republican,” one girl answered.

“A registered Republican!” McCarthy exclaimed.

“One of my uncles just converted to become a Republican,” another girl volunteered.

“The whole family hates him now.”

“They hate him now?” said McCarthy. “Well, maybe they should talk to him more, maybe they can bring him back.”

“That’s what I said,” the girl responded.

“What party are you from?” a boy asked McCarthy—a challenge as much as a question. Before the teacher could answer, another student ventured a guess: “Anarchist, right?” she said.

“I am a conscientious nonvoter,” McCarthy revealed. “I don’t cooperate with the voting system because anybody sworn into office is sworn in to uphold and defend a violent constitution. How can you vote for people who believe in armies? As soon as we get a new constitution that says we’re going to solve our problems through nonviolence, I’ll be there to participate.”

Wide awake now, the class erupted into a din of scandalized voices.

“But what could you do by not voting?” demanded Martha, a junior, sitting up and slipping the hood of her black sweatshirt off her head.

“I’m not cooperating with violence,” McCarthy said.

“What if there’s a candidate who says no to violence?” she probed.

“He’s still sworn in to uphold a document that advocates violence!” he responded, his voice rising.

McCarthy’s rationale for teaching students about peace, which he’s been doing at Washington-area high schools, universities, and other educational organizations for the past 21 years, is simple and compelling: “If we don’t teach them peace, someone else will teach them violence,” he says. But his classroom digressions make it shockingly easy to write off his classes as the indulgence of a 1960s liberal who’s unaware that the times they havea-changed. They occur so frequently and stray into such radical territory that he often appoints a student to the post of “digression monitor” with the task of steering the class back on course when it wanders too far afield.

This particular discussion didn’t come back. “Well, what if there’s, like, two candidates, and one would be a violent leader and one would not?” Martha persisted. “By not voting, the more violent one gets elected. How are you helping nonviolence?”

“We’ve had 42 presidents so far, and the military budget goes up, up, up, up, up,”

McCarthy countered. “When are we going to get someone else with all this voting? I haven’t seen it yet.”

“Well, if you’re teaching kids to try to change the whole way this thing is, you need us to vote. You don’t want us to vote?” Martha asked incredulously.

Ellen, a girl in a mismatched Far Side cartoon T-shirt and a dirndl skirt, chimed in: “If more people like you had voted in the last election, we probably wouldn’t have gone to war with Iraq because we wouldn’t have Bush or Cheney or”

McCarthy cut her off. “You don’t think Al Gore, who believes in the death penalty, believes in the military budget, says we’ll have a strong defense—when they talk about a strong defense, we know what they mean: They’re going to bomb you if you disagree, and we’ve been doing that all along.”

“You can’t just eradicate the Constitution,” Martha said.

“Why not?” McCarthy asked.

Martha spluttered, and a boy who’d seemed to be only half-listening to the exchange came to her aid: “A lot of people like it,” he intoned in a deep baritone. Martha nodded fervently in agreement.

“All right. Then I can’t change your mind. Am I getting anywhere?” asked McCarthy.

“No,” Martha answered, sounding annoyed.

The teacher shrugged, seemingly accepting defeat. “I don’t worry about being a success story. I worry about being faithful. And you can dismiss it as, oh, up in the air, idealistic—a fantasy world.” Then his eyes glimmered, and the kids realized the argument was not over yet. “Well, the fantasy world, people, are those who say, ‘Well, one more war, and we’ll have peace.’ I mean, keep voting for people who believe in armies. They want us to vote. They want us to vote!”

MCCARTHY’S belief that peace can only be achieved through peaceful means is what drives him; it underlies every facet of his being. It is, for example, the foundation of his peace studies courses. Post-9/11, after suicidal terrorists attempted to kill as many people as possible with planes turned into bombs, does anyone honestly believe that “evildoers” can be stopped with peace, love, flowers, and not voting? McCarthy does. His courses examine the roots of aggression in the many forms they take—racism, sexual assault, poverty, patriotism, war. In each case, he argues that violence can be defanged with pacifist resistance.

“Peace through peaceful means” also explains McCarthy’s classroom management style. He calls homework, tests, and grades “forms of academic violence.” So, while he typically assigns two papers a semester and asks students to read essays by pacifists such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Leo Tolstoy, and Catholic social worker Dorothy Day, he doesn’t require them to do anything. They don’t even have to sit through his class if they don’t want to be there, he tells them. And at the end of the course, McCarthy lets students choose their own grades.

Peace also informs McCarthy’s lifestyle. He is a vegetarian who does not wear leather because he abhors the killing of animals, and he bikes to his classes from his home in northwest Washington to reduce the harm inflicted upon the environment by gasoline fumes. He deliberately maintains a moderate income to minimize the amount of tax money he gives to a government that, he claims, perpetrates violence. (His examples include capital punishment and the war in Iraq.) He also carries a passport-size copy of the Bill of Rights in his inside-right jacket pocket just in case reminding people of their rights might help him win an argument about nonviolence. And, in a move that indicates the intensity of his commitment to promoting peace, he teaches his high school courses—all electives whose content has been approved by local curriculum committees—for free.

Free or not, you can bet parents complain. A few years ago, McCarthy was teaching a peace course at an all-girls private school in suburban Washington. “At the end of the year,” he recalls, “one of the mothers called me up, a little curious—she didn’t see her daughter slaving over any homework for my class. She said, ‘How did my daughter do in your class?’ I said, ‘How would I know? I’m her teacher.’ ‘Did I hear you correctly?’ she said. I tried to explain what we were doing. I told her Walker Percy’s great line: ‘You can earn all A’s and go out and flunk life.’ That didn’t calm her at all. ‘I want her to go to an Ivy League school where her father went and I went,’ [she stated]. So I said, ‘Listen, I understand your difficulties, but if you want to find out how your daughter did in my class, there’s an easy way to find out: Ask her.'”

While McCarthy balks at classroom conventions, it’s difficult to dismiss him once you hear what his students think. Comments on the evaluation forms he received from one of his classes this past spring would have any rule-following, grade-dispensing teacher breaking open the champagne:

“It was hard to think of arguments to combat other great arguments by my classmates. Even if one didn’t argue, it was hard to hear views against everything in your life, even down to one’s diet. But … I had a lot of fun expanding my mind and realizing that there are other opinions out there.”

“I’m really glad that I had this class with some of my best friends….The discussions we had that were inspired by this class were so real, and I really enjoyed talking about things that matter in life.”

“I can’t explain how much you have changed my way of thinking….There are issues I want to learn about now, and I think I am much less afraid of what might happen if I don’t conform and follow all the rules.”

In an academic year bookended by snipers terrorizing the Washington, D.C., region and an American invasion of Iraq, it appears that McCarthy was able to accomplish something remarkable with these kids: He sent them off into an uncertain world feeling comfortable with uncertainty. Maybe teaching peace is an idea whose time has come—again.

BORN in 1938 into a socially conscious Catholic family in Old Brookville, New York, Colman McCarthy always thought pacifism made sense. But after neglecting his studies at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, while playing professional golf as a senior, he graduated with a yearning to develop his beliefs more fully. He found the time to contemplate his future at a Trappist monastery in Conyers, Georgia, an austere place where he joined cloistered monks in rising at 2 each morning to milk cows. He ended up staying for five years, reading the complete works of a different writer each year: First Tolstoy, then Fyodor Dostoevsky, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, and Gandhi.

In 1966, he left the monastery to try his hand at freelance writing. He wasn’t a freelancer for long: After Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver read a McCarthy article that criticized him, he invited the journalist to join his speechwriting staff in Washington, D.C. It was a lucky break for McCarthy in more ways than one—he met his future wife, Mavourneen, on Shriver’s staff; they married within one month of meeting and, in quick succession, had three sons. In 1969, the Washington Post hired McCarthy to contribute to its editorial page. By 1978, he was writing a syndicated column—marketed by Post execs as the ideas of “an unreconstructed, unrepentant, unyielding liberal”—that often served as the lone pacifist voice in the 70-plus newspapers that ran it.

In 1982, a teacher’s invitation to give a speech about writing at School Without Walls, where two of McCarthy’s sons were students, pointed the journalist in a new direction. He recounts the story in I’d Rather Teach Peace, a memoir about teaching nonviolence published by a Catholic mission movement: “After speaking to the English literature class about writing, I told the teacher how enjoyable her students were during the give-and-take discussion…. The teacher, seasoned and skilled in bluff-calling, said that if I really found the visit to her class so enlivening, why not come back in the fall to offer my own course. Go beyond gushing, was her message. ‘You could teach writing,’ she said. Impulsively I replied, ‘I’d rather teach peace.'”

The course McCarthy designed for the school and taught during his lunch break proved so popular that it became a repeat offering, and it inspired him to also teach peace at his other son’s school, Woodrow Wilson Senior High School in northwest D.C. McCarthy wrote about the classes in his columns and gave speeches at education conferences, which prompted a stream of requests for advice on how to create similar programs. To keep up, in 1985 McCarthy and his wife converted an upstairs room in their home into the Center for Teaching Peace, a nonprofit dedicated to disseminating materials about peace studies.

By the mid-1990s, McCarthy had trained additional volunteers, including his sons John, a baseball coach and former pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles, and Jim, a public interest lawyer, to teach courses locally. But he was devoting more time than ever to peace education, leading classes at odd hours at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, Georgetown University Law School, American University, the University of Maryland honors program, the Washington Center for Internships and Academic Seminars, and the Oak Hill Youth Detention Center in Maryland. McCarthy didn’t ask for a break from the manic pace, but in 1997, executives at the Post gave him one anyway when they killed his column, claiming that declining sales—its syndication had fallen from 73 papers in 1981 to 27 in 1996—demonstrated that “it had run its course.”

By McCarthy’s estimation, he’s taught more than 6,000 students to date, about half at the college level, where peace studies is a growing field. About 300 of the 3,100 colleges and universities in the United States offer courses in nonviolence, and 71 schools offer peace-related majors. Thirty years ago, only one school, Manchester College in Indiana, offered such a major. Schools are responding to student demand for peace courses, according to Abdul Aziz Said, director of the Center for Global Peace at American University. In McCarthy’s opinion, there’s still a ways to go—three times as many colleges and universities offer ROTC courses, he points out—but American institutions of higher learning teach more peace than their tradition-bound counterparts in other countries.

At the K-12 level, though, it’s the reverse. While all Japanese schools require students to take “A-Bomb Education” and most students in Africa, Asia, and South America study the connections between poverty and violence, very few American schools offer courses covering the roots of violence or its alternatives. When they do, they’re rarely required. Ian Harris, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, says administrators are pulled in two directions when considering adding peace to their curriculums. On the one hand, Harris says, it’s getting “harder and harder to have new courses or courses with a different focus that don’t meet No Child Left Behind or standardized test requirements.” On the other, he adds, the problem of student violence and the resulting push to create safer schools has encouraged a proliferation of classes in conflict mediation, which is one element of peace studies.

McCarthy argues that peace should be taught long before college, and American University’s Said agrees. “Oftentimes, when I work with college students, a good deal of time is invested in unconditioning their intellectual condition,” he says. “What they need to unlearn is a way of thinking that does not encourage their creative imagination. They have been acculturated in what I call cultural pessimism, that you really can’t make a difference, that you have to accept things the way they are.”

But by promoting pacifism, are teachers indoctrinating students in a particular political point of view? Harris, who’s done research on how college-level peace classes influence personal behavior, says such concerns are overstated. Very few students become activists, he says, although many attempt to lead more peaceful lives by becoming vegetarians, learning how to mediate, and the like. McCarthy doesn’t look to the research to justify his classes. He claims that teachers are already converting students to a political doctrine—that of violence—by not covering pacifist movements and their leaders in history classes. “We teach the safe, sanitized Martin Luther King—’I have a dream’ and all that,” he says. “Well, he wasn’t a dreamer, he was a doer. But textbooks rarely discuss his opposition to military action in Vietnam.” Peace studies, McCarthy argues, simply presents the other side of the story.

AT the same time, he notes, teaching peace is not just a matter of introducing students to new material; it also requires pushing them to free their minds.

“The first day of every semester, I tell my students that, in this class, no one is allowed to ask questions,” McCarthy says. “Questions are absolutely forbidden. Instead, be braver, bolder, be resilient: Don’t ask questions, question the answers. What answers? The ones that say the answer is violence. Questioning those answers takes imagination and daring. And we can get it by studying and learning the ideas and lives of those who have done it before us.”

This philosophy leads to some wide-ranging discussions— discussions that remain in McCarthy’s students’ minds long after graduation.

“I remember there were some athletes in my class who were strongly competitive and really defined by their sports,” says Chappell Marmon, who has taught high school English and social studies in Colorado and studied peace with McCarthy at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High in Maryland in 1994. “He was always questioning them about the competition and whether that was a form of violence and just getting them to think about their own choices. He asked us, ‘How many of you are slave holders?’ And we were all like, ‘What are you talking about?’ He was talking about having pets, and that pets were a form of slavery…. He was just willing to go that far, and be like, ‘Well, if you believe X, why can’t you believe Y, and then take it even further into Z?'”

Leah Wells, a former student who’s now a consultant at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, a California-based nonprofit group that advocates for the abolition of nuclear weapons, says McCarthy’s willingness to listen is what makes his style of teaching possible. “I was in awe of how he connected with even the most ‘difficult’ students,” she says. Wells accompanied him to some of his classes at the Oak Hill juvenile detention center and recalls how one student there was swearing—”not necessarily at him, but not wanting to participate in the class. His reaction was not to be angry with her but rather to say, ‘Sister, why are you saying those things?’ It was the most disarming and priceless conversation, as she ended up really participating in the class. He was so sincere, not chastising at all.”

McCarthy says much of his work entails trying to lessen students’ cynicism. To do this, he strives to teach peace without hypocrisy, which, to him, means removing coercion from the classroom. “We teach kids mostly by fear—that’s where tests and homework and grades come in,” he argues. “You do away with them, it’s a little risky. They might blow it off. That’s all right. You do a good job in the classroom, they’ll think about it long after the class is over. You don’t do a good job, why should they think about it?”

As rigid as it sounds, McCarthy does not only live by this code—sometimes he dies by it, too.

Near the end of the school year at Wilson High, McCarthy prepared to teach a class about the military’s presence in schools through ROTC programs. But first he asked his students to hand in the essay assignment that was due that day. “If you did not write the paper, take out a blank piece of paper and tell me why you did not,” he said. “I’m always curious.” Five minutes later, he collected many more single pages than completed essays.

Leaning against the teacher’s desk, McCarthy flipped through the stack and read selected excuses aloud: “‘I didn’t write the paper because I came home late from night school and I forgot— seriously.’ ‘I didn’t write the paper because I am so focused on my other subjects.’ ‘I didn’t write the paper because I didn’t desire to do so.'” McCarthy held this page aloft and nodded approvingly. “I admire that.”

He was interrupted by a willowy girl, a student not enrolled in the course, who pushed open the heavy wooden door and walked into the classroom without acknowledging there was a lesson in progress. McCarthy looked at her bemusedly, then said, “Hi, sister, are you a peacemaker?”

“Yes, I am,” she answered distractedly.

“What’s the last peaceful thing you did?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s your name?”

“Alisha.”

“Alisha, I want you in my class next year.”

The girl looked at him skeptically, then giggled. She was just there to pick up her friend so they could walk down to the assembly in the first floor library together, she explained.

“Assembly? What assembly?” McCarthy asked.

Ayanna Mackins, who a few years ago appeared on MTV’s adventure travel show Road Rules, was visiting to talk about self-esteem and the importance of community, the class told him. It was up to teachers to decide whether they wanted their classes to attend.

“Well, as you know, we believe in desire-based learning in this class,” McCarthy said. “If you desire to stay here and learn about peace, stay. If you desire to go to the assembly, go.” The students were packing up their belongings before he finished his sentence, and within seconds, they were clomping out the door in their heavy boots and high heels. A look of regret momentarily crossed McCarthy’s face. Then he called after the departing crowd, “Tell someone you love them on the way down!”

WILSON High’s principal, Stephen Tarason, isn’t bothered by McCarthy’s unorthodox ways. “Colman really challenges those kids to think,” he observes. He says the school also offers courses in peer mediation and conflict resolution. Wilson is a place where real-world experience is valued, according to Tarason, so the opportunity to include a regionally known activist is welcomed. “To have a person of his prestige and experience and commitment touch the lives of our kids is an incredible thing,” Tarason says.

But in other situations, McCarthy notes, peace is a difficult sell. When he publishes freelance opinion pieces and articles about his courses in papers like the Post, the Baltimore Sun, and the Los Angeles Times, he quips, “I get a stack of mail this high from people who call me ignorant—and then I read my negative mail.” He’s equally aware that his teaching methods are out of step with the norms of an era in which schools are encouraging teachers to exhibit more control, not less. “All through school, teachers order [students] around—’Obey us or else,'” McCarthy says. “I don’t want power over people; I want power with them. Very few schools let you teach that way.”

Leah Wells unwittingly stepped over the line in a peace class she taught at a school in California last year. For a unit about power, she screened A Bug’s Life, the 1998 animated Pixar film that deals with issues of exploitation, and invited members of a farm-workers’ union to talk about their struggles to get a contract. “After two innocuous semesters of inviting them to class, I was told that they were not welcome anymore because the school was getting complaints from parents,” she says.

And when America goes to war, administrators’ reluctance to encourage diverse political views becomes only more pronounced. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, this past April, for example, administrators at three different high schools suspended or placed on paid administrative leave five teachers who had displayed antiwar posters in their classrooms, some created by students. Officials claimed they were violating an Albuquerque Public Schools policy that requires educators to maintain a classroom atmosphere free from bias or prejudice. One teacher resigned from the district following the incident. Two others, employed on annually renewed contracts, were not hired back by their school.

Yet hostility toward pacifism—be it from school officials or a government that decides to go to war—doesn’t depress McCarthy. He’s able to find something useful in any form of violence. Take the past school year, for example. “The sniper attacks, preparing to invade Iraq, and then the actual slaughtering, the death penalty stories, the white collar and corporate crime wave—all of this was a hand-delivery of relevance,” he says. “Class discussions were enlivened. The assorted gunmen, the militarists, the executioners, the boardroom frauds— they become your teaching assistants, offering lessons on how not to solve conflicts.”

It’s true that such a positive outlook is relatively easy for McCarthy to maintain: He gets to teach where he’s wanted, as a volunteer unfettered by contractual obligations. But while this situation sets him apart from teachers in the paperwork-filled trenches—and makes him reluctant to offer suggestions on how to work within a grade- and test-driven system—it also makes him the kind of guy who can reignite a teacher’s burned-out imagination at a conference or workshop.

That task is what brought McCarthy to the United States Institute of Peace, a federal organization that promotes international conflict prevention, management, and resolution through a host of educational programs, on a Friday evening in August. He arrived at the downtown Washington office toting a small suitcase full of copies of two anthologies of essays by pacifists; McCarthy edited and published them himself, and he uses the money from their sales to help fund the Center for Teaching Peace. It was the final day of the institute’s weeklong summer workshop on international affairs for high school social studies teachers, and the 24 educators sitting around a wood table in the glass-walled conference room had spent the previous six days listening to presentations on teaching about the Muslim world, war crimes, and the American military. McCarthy’s speech would be on teaching pacifism.

He spoke casually and freely, hitting on provocative ideas that recur throughout his articles and classes. “The United States spends $355 billion a year making war,” he said at one point. “That’s $11,000 a second.” He then counted off a series of seconds: “$11,000, $11,000, $11,000, $11,000—are we up to your salaries yet? Or did we pass that a few seconds ago?”

Later he added, “Here’s a quiz for you: In this list of countries that the U.S. has bombed since the end of World War II”—he held up a list of 22, including long-forgotten raids like “Congo 1964,” “Libya 1986,” “Panama 1989″—”in how many instances did a democratic government, respectful of human rights, occur as a direct result? None.”

And still later, he asked: “Why are we violent, but not illiterate? Because we are taught to read.”

McCarthy reluctantly wrapped up his speech at the 45-minute mark and was mobbed by several teachers who wanted to buy his books. Another group gathered in the back of the room to discuss what they’d just heard. While agreeing that McCarthy’s in-your-face comments wouldn’t fly with most school boards or parents, they excitedly talked about how radical pacifist ideas could enliven their own classes.

An elegant- looking teacher in her 40s wandered up and joined the conversation. The truth, she said conspiratorially, is that when you close your classroom door, you’re in charge and there’s a lot you can get away with. The others nodded in agreement.

Suddenly, the teacher registered with alarm that a reporter’s tape recorder was running. She declared that her comments were off the record and abruptly walked away from the group. Reconsidering their candor, one by one other teachers in the circle requested that their comments, too, be considered off the record. Peace may have a chance in America’s schools. But at least for now, the revolution will not be broadcast.