Twenty-three years may seem like an inordinate amount of time to solve a burglary, but the Gardner case has actually come a long way from the days when it sometimes seemed to sit on the F.B.I.’s investigative back burner — and the robbery has done a lot to change the way that museums protect their art.

The robbery occurred just after midnight on March 18, 1990, when two men dressed as police officers appeared at the side entrance to the museum. There had been “a disturbance on the grounds,” the men told the night guard through an intercom.

One of the guards buzzed the men into the building, and after tying up the two watchmen, the thieves essentially had the run of one of the world’s most beautiful museums for more than an hour. Mrs. Gardner, the art collector and philanthropist who founded the institution, was devoted to the idea that art was powerfully redemptive, and she built intimate galleries to showcase her collection. She felt so strongly about the museum that in her will she insisted that nothing be changed in the galleries, not even the plaster cast of the composer Franz Liszt’s hand. Today the galleries are arranged just as they were when Mrs. Gardner died, in 1924.

On that evening, the thieves moved through the narrow hallways, past the Han dynasty bears and Louis Kronberg’s oil painting “La Gitana.” They ignored the 18th-century Indian bookstand and the 15th-century Italian fresco of Hercules.

They went for some of the museum’s crown jewels, snagging Vermeer’s “Concert” along with three Rembrandts, a Manet and a Degas. The two thieves didn’t seem to be particularly respectful toward art — they sliced two of the Rembrandts out of their frames — but they did manage to sneak away with a haul worth as much as $500 million today.

Over the years, it hasn’t seemed as if federal investigators have always made the case a top priority. When I first started reporting on the theft, for instance, the museum’s director, Anne Hawley, suggested that she had not always been satisfied with the bureau’s commitment to the case. Ms. Hawley, the director since 1989, said that the first agent assigned to the case seemed very green. “Why didn’t the F.B.I. have the capacity to assign a senior-level person?” she asked me in 2007. “Why was it not considered something that needed immediate and high-level attention?”

When the theft occurred, the museum’s security was lax by today’s standards. While the Gardner’s protections were not particularly bad for a modest-size house museum at that time, one of the guards who worked the night of the theft later admitted to having smoked marijuana before arriving for work. The museum also lacked theft insurance, which prevented it from offering a major reward immediately after the burglary.

But these problems were not limited to the Gardner. The idea that art theft is not quite a serious crime has a strange hold in some quarters. Over the years, the F.B.I.’s prioritization of terrorism after 9/11, not to mention numerous violent crimes, also may help account for the length of the investigation. But when crooks steal masterpieces, they steal part of our culture and civilization.

You can replace a wallet, an iPod, even a diamond necklace, but not a Rembrandt. The art world knows this. The Gardner offered a $1 million reward a few days after the theft occurred, and in 1997, it raised the reward to $5 million, believed to be the largest ever offered by a private institution. A few years ago, the museum also brought in a new head of security, Anthony Amore, who has become obsessed with the case. He keeps an electronic copy of his investigation files with him at all times, even outside of work.

Museum security has changed too. The Gardner has significantly upgraded its protections, and because of the theft, the American Association of Museums revamped its guidelines, recommending that institutions be more careful about whom they let in after hours. In 1994, at the museum’s urging, Senator Edward M. Kennedy helped pass a law that made it a federal crime to steal, receive or dispose of any cultural object worth more than $100,000.

The statute of limitations for breaking into the museum has expired, but prosecutors could potentially use the 1994 law to convict someone for possession of the stolen art today. (That said, the museum’s top priority is recovering the art.)

The F.B.I. has also significantly ramped up its efforts to recover stolen art. In 2004, the agency created a national art theft team, which has more than a dozen agents assigned to regions across the country. The bureau also has two agents working on the Gardner case, and last year, they made a high-profile raid on the house of a Connecticut mobster. Since the announcement on Monday, and the increased attention on an F.B.I. Web site devoted to the Gardner theft, tips and new leads have been pouring in.

As for the men who robbed the museum, there’s been some good evidence over the years regarding their identities. In my book on the theft, I pointed the finger at the Boston mobster David Turner. As part of my reporting, I examined F.B.I. files that indicated that Mr. Turner was an early suspect, and he bears a strong resemblance to the composite drawing made of one of the thieves. In a letter to me, Mr. Turner denied any role in the theft, but he also told me that if I were to put his picture on my book’s cover, I would sell more copies.

More important, there are signs that the paintings may hang on the walls of the museum again. At the news conference on Monday, the F.B.I. announced that in the years after the theft, someone took the stolen Gardner art to Connecticut and Philadelphia and offered it up for sale. This suggests that the canvases might still be in good condition.

“I think we’re all optimistic that one day soon the paintings would be returned to their rightful place,” the United States attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz, said. Let’s hope she’s right.

This piece first appeared in the New York Times.

The post Learning From the Gardner Art Theft appeared first on Ulrich Boser.

The FBI believes it knows the identities of the thieves who stole art valued at up to $500 million from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. Richard DesLauriers, the FBI’s special agent in charge in Boston, says the thieves belong to a criminal organization based in New England the mid-Atlantic states. He says authorities believe the art was taken to Connecticut and the Philadelphia region in the years after the theft, and offered for sale in Philadelphia about a decade ago.

First off, kudos to the museum–and the FBI–for continuing to running down leads in this case.

But I think the lede is really buried here. From my perspective, really the biggest news is that the bureau says that someone offered the paintings for sale in Philadelphia. That suggests that the paintings are still in good condition. It also–with less evidence–suggests that the people who control the art are willing to make a deal. Keep in mind that many people have suggested over the years that the paintings have been destroyed. That doesn’t seem to be the case here.

In the end, iIt might take years, decades, even a century, but soon or later, I believe that these paintings will be returned. In the world of art theft, cases often take years to solve. In the 1860s, Union Army soldiers stole North Carolina’s Bill of Rights out of the state Capitol, and the artifact remained missing for 140 years. It popped up in the art underworld a few times, until in 2003, two antiques dealers tried to peddle the work for $4 million—and the FBI picked it up in a sting.

Put more simply, when it comes to art crime, hope springs eternal for good reason.

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But instead of less conversation, she got more. And while the students at UMUC do like to talk, their comments on academic subjects such as business ethics are as thought provoking as those of her instructors, says McCall, now 52 and a program officer at the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit education organization that administers the Fulbright Scholarship program. And perhaps the biggest surprise is that it all happens online: McCall enrolled in the school’s Web-based division. It’s the typing, she says, that often forces mature discussions. “When people write their comments, they pay more attention to detail and get to the meat of the subject,” she adds. “It’s even honed my ability to agree to disagree.”

Students like McCall are driving the phenomenal growth of online education. Enrollment has shot up by almost 20 percent this year; 11 percent of postsecondary students will take at least one course online. And those students have plenty of classes to choose from: Over 90 percent of public colleges offer at least one online course. By 2005, the E-learning market will top $4 billion, predicts Eduventures, a Boston-based educational research firm. With Congress considering removing the last obstacle preventing online students from qualifying for the same federal financial aid dollars as students at traditional universities, the boom in E-learning is likely to continue.

Indeed, almost a third of all academic leaders polled believe that online education will be more effective than traditional classes in three years, according to a survey released last month by the Sloan Consortium, a group of colleges from Johns Hopkins University to San Diego State dedicated to improving the quality of online education. But online student dropout rates are still higher than those for the classroom set. Which leads to the question: What, exactly, works online?

In the beginning–a mere decade ago–early adopters made wide-eyed proclamations about how the Internet would change the nature of education as we know it. Universities and new for-profit schools would rake in millions of dollars by having megastar lecturers create techno-lessons that would reach thousands of tuition-paying students and render the lumpen professoriate obsolete.

It didn’t work.

Instead of downloading cash, respected schools pulled the shutters on their E-learning shops, while new online schools went bankrupt. The now defunct Fathom.com, Columbia University’s for-profit arm, struggled to attract students to courses created by its own professors as well as experts from the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics and Political Science. The fantasy of instructor-less education soon faded as courses with little or no personal interaction–sometimes just the contents of books plunked onto Web sites–posted dropout rates as high as 60 percent.

The survivors have begun to realize that what works online isn’t very different from what works in a traditional classroom. Students need to be actively involved, says Charles Dziuban, director of the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Central Florida. “It’s true in traditional classes, and it’s more true online because you don’t have face-to-face time.” Dziuban found higher pass rates and satisfaction levels in online classes that had more engaging and accessible professors.

While interactive teaching dates back at least as far as Socrates, schools still struggle over the best way to transfer it to the computer screen. “Simply replicating an existing classroom course in an online format isn’t effective,” says John Sener, an E-learning consultant. “It’s roughly the equivalent of taking a VHS tape and making several copies, each losing something in fidelity.” Without a professor to explain the finer points or classmates to add a sense of community, students might as well just read a textbook. “Highly disciplined and motivated learners can succeed on their own in any format,” says Sener, “but many learners cannot.”

Group work. To be sure, creating discussion-heavy, seminarlike courses online isn’t as easy as arranging a few virtual chairs into a circle. Schools such as Baker College in Michigan lowered their online class size to 12, while others like the University of Phoenix and Capella University emphasize collaboration by having small groups of students do research projects and presentations together. University of Maryland-University College requires all professors to complete five weeks of training showing them how to teach online.

Other schools try to make sure there’s always someone online for students to talk to. New York-based Mercy College recently instituted a virtual tutor program called Wizards. Former students who have aced the course are paid to post to class discussion boards, answer E-mails, and tutor students. “Both students and faculty long for closer contact, and this is one way to achieve it,” says Boria Sax, director of online academic services. In a study of the program, students in a Wizard-assisted class received more than half a letter grade higher than students in a class without one.

Of course, not everyone believes that virtual learning is an adequate substitute for the real thing. “Online students may have an experience that feels like bonding, but it won’t approach what happens in a classroom,” says Carole Fungaroli Sargent, an English professor at Georgetown University and author of Traditional Degrees for Nontraditional Students. “It’s the difference between making friends by going to a pub versus making friends by talking to strangers on the phone.”

Flexibility. Still, there are some educational goals that might be met more easily online. For example, Virginia Tech math professors wanted to teach introductory courses like linear algebra, precalculus, and life sciences calculus in ways that best suited their students’ different learning styles. They created a program that allows students to choose a format–videos of the lectures, interactive tutorials, hyperlinked textbooks, or face-to-face group sessions–that works best for them. Periodic quizzes ensure that they’re learning the material. On-campus students, the vast majority, can also drop by for in-person tutoring sessions if they’re stuck on a problem. After five years, the results are positive: Final exam scores as well as longitudinal follow-up studies show comparable results among the different types of instruction.

In general, however, E-learning’s successes stem mostly from the fundamentals. For one thing, online class participation requires students to write extensively and develop their thoughts. “You reflect on what you are writing, before you post it,” says Karen Swan, an educational technology professor at Kent State University. “Reflecting really is what learning’s all about.”

And schools are learning that students want professorial attention. “I need to develop personal relationships, especially if I’m encountering any problems,” says Lia Wright, 26, an M.B.A. student at Baker College. She dropped out of another online program where she felt no rapport with her professors or fellow students. But things are different for her at Baker. When Wright didn’t log on to class for two days last spring because her family was visiting, a professor called her at home to see if she was sick. She wasn’t. In fact, she felt great. “It was awesome,” says Wright. “I never knew that a professor would ever call you just to see if you were sick.” And that is perhaps E-learning’s biggest irony: Even with the best technology, it will always need the human touch to be effective.

This article originally appeared in US News and World Report.

The post Working on What Works Best appeared first on Ulrich Boser.

William M. V. Kingsland left artworks but no will.

There didn’t seem anything particularly unusual about the sale of William Kingsland’s art collection, at least at first. A well-known New York art connoisseur, Kingsland died in 2006, and the auction house Christie’s was hired in the months after his death to sell many of his paintings and sculptures. But it turned out that Kingsland was not his given name. His birth name was Melvyn Kohn, and dozens of the artworks in his collection had been stolen from museums and galleries. The most notable include canvases by Pablo Picasso and John Singleton Copley and an Alberto Giacometti sculpture worth as much as a million dollars. “It appears that during a period of time in his life he went into galleries and took things that caught his eye,” says New York Public Administrator Ethel Griffin, who is overseeing the case.

So whom did the auction house call for help? The FBI. One of its art theft investigators, Special Agent Jim Wynne, has been working the case since the beginning, researching the provenance of the stolen pieces and interviewing galleries believed to be the last verified owners. “[I wanted] to try and recover this stuff for the victims,” Wynne says. And while the rightful owners of some of the pieces have been determined, most of the works still sit in a sort of legal limbo, their exact ownership unclear. The bureau recently posted images of the stolen objects on its website at www.fbi.gov, just a few clicks away from its list of the most wanted terrorists, under the headline: “Stolen Art Uncovered. Is it Yours?”

Meet the nation’s art cops, assigned the long and often difficult task of returning stolen masterpieces to their owners. Art theft has become one of the world’s most lucrative illegal activities, an estimated $6 billion black market business, with more than 50,000 heists occurring each year. The FBI has taken significant steps to fight the trend in recent years, creating a team of agents dedicated to recovering hot van Goghs and pilfered Monets. “Art is one-of-a-kind history that can never be re-created,” says Special Agent Brian Brusokas. “If you take a piece off the wall and hide it away for 40 or 50 years, you’re potentially depriving an entire generation, the whole world for that matter, of ever being able to view such a piece.”

Federal art crime investigators are not new. The FBI has long had individual agents in New York and Los Angeles focused on museum robberies and art fraud. But after the massive looting of Iraq’s National Museum in 2003 in which some 14,000 works were stolen, the bureau decided for the first time to form an art theft team, which now has more than a dozen agents assigned to regions in the United States. The unit aims to recover any illegal cultural property and often works with foreign law enforcement agencies. The squad has posted some major successes, recovering works by Matisse and Goya and one of the original copies of the Bill of Rights. “Art easily moves across state and international boundaries,” says Bonnie Magness-Gardiner, manager of the art theft program. “Having this network of agents has been very effective.”

To join the art theft team, agents must receive special training in art and art recovery. They learn the difference between an etching and an engraving; they learn how criminals forge documents to help slip fakes into the legitimate art market. “Art is different. It’s not like cars, where there are registries with license plate numbers and registration numbers,” says Sharon Flescher, executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research, a nonprofit that specializes in art crime. “There is no one place where every work of art that has ever been created can be found, and it’s not easy for the uninitiated to differentiate between different media, whether it’s types of prints or paintings or works on paper. It helps to have a trained eye.”

Art law is different, too. While thieves can be prosecuted under stolen property statutes, specific laws have been enacted to counter art crime. After the 1990 heist of a Vermeer and three Rembrandts from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Sen. Edward Kennedy pushed through Congress the Theft of Major Artwork statute. The law makes it a federal offense to own or conceal any artwork that is stolen from a museum and is more than 100 years old or worth more than $100,000. The penalties include fines and as much as 10 years in prison.

But for law enforcement, and the art world, the return of a missing object often holds more significance than a conviction. “I don’t think many people realize that missing art is as important as it is. What’s being stolen and secreted away is staggering,” says Virginia Curry, who worked art crimes for the bureau for more than a decade and retired in 2006. “For me, the first priority is to recover the art. The second consideration is to identify the most culpable person involved.”

Still, recovering stolen art isn’t easy. Part of the problem is figuring out the exact motivation; people steal art for all sorts of reasons. Some thieves are gangsters hoping to pilfer a trophy. Some are disgruntled security guards looking for revenge. Sometimes curators pocket artifacts because they believe that they can take better care of them than the museum or gallery that owns them. A thief once swiped a Chagall painting from New York City’s Jewish Museum, and a few days later the institution received a ransom note, saying that the canvas would not be returned until Israel and the Palestinians made lasting peace. (Some months later, the Chagall was recovered in a postal center in Topeka, Kan., and investigators now believe that the thief tried to get rid of the work by sending it as a dead letter.)

For the most part, though, the crooks are motivated by cash. While the art market has slumped in recent months along with the rest of the economy, a top painting still can fetch tens of millions of dollars, with a rare Impressionist work sharing the same value as a corporate jet or a small technology firm. During an FBI sting operation to recover a stolen Rembrandt self-portrait a few years ago, an undercover agent asked the seller if he had any interest in the old master canvas. “No,” the man baldly replied. “I’m in it for the money.”

But is there really money to be made in art theft? For the most part, the answer is no. Criminals have few options when it comes to profiting from art crime. Auction houses have no interest in selling looted art; legitimate collectors have no interest in purchasing it. Even keeping stashes of stolen art for pleasure is unlikely. Investigators have never found any evidence of a so-called Dr. No (named after the villain from the James Bond movie), a shady, art-loving millionaire who snaps up stolen paintings for late-night viewing in the basement of his Caribbean mansion. “Art theft is a crime of opportunity,” says Agent Wynne. “The problem for the thieves is that you can’t sell the stuff. If it is so noteworthy and so valuable, it’s extraordinarily hard to sell.”

Most stolen art ends up slipping into the criminal netherworld. Crooks will hide the item in an attic and wait for a good time to sell it, or an enterprising rogue might trade the pilfered work to other criminals for guns and drugs as a sort of underworld currency. And through dedicated investigative work and good relationships with art dealers and collectors, the bureau has been able to track down more than 1,000 stolen objects over the past four years.

The FBI often recovers artworks when they come up for sale, as oblivious criminals regularly bring hot art into Christie’s or Sotheby’s not knowing that the auctioneers vet objects before they go under the hammer. It helps, too, that crooks don’t typically have much of an understanding of art and art history. A handyman once swiped a painting from a home in Connecticut and sold the canvas to a local antiques dealer for $100. He later told investigators that he was hoping to make a little cash. But it turned out that French artist Henri Fantin-Latour had created the work, and it was worth more than $1 million.

Still, many art theft cases take years, decades, even more than a century, to crack. During the final days of the Civil War, Union Army soldiers stole North Carolina’s Bill of Rights out of the state Capitol. Commissioned by President George Washington, the document was one of only 14 copies created after Congress proposed the first amendments, and for more than 140 years, it remained missing. Then, in 2003, two antiques dealers tried to peddle the work for $4 million. A millionaire philanthropist showed interest in the document, claiming that he would buy the artifact on behalf of Philadelphia’s Constitution Center. But the philanthropist was actually an undercover FBI agent, and investigators seized the document. “It was like touching history,” one agent said.

As for the Kingsland paintings, Wynne continues to look for the rightful owners. The caper grew more curious when, after Kingsland’s death, a mover hired by New York State to haul the collection from Kingsland’s apartment to a warehouse stole two Picasso sketches, each valued at $30,000. “Those works had been stolen themselves. They had been stolen in the ’60s and they were in Kingsland’s apartment, and then the movers came, and then they were stolen again,” says Wynne. After some sleuthing, agents learned that a Manhattan-based art broker had tried to sell one of the drawings, and law enforcement eventually recovered the works from the mover’s mother-in-law. And so, at least for now, there’s one art world mystery fewer waiting to be solved.

This article originally appeared in US News and World Report.

The post Crime and Picasso: The Shadowy Underworld of Art appeared first on Ulrich Boser.

The Family Federal Educational Loan, which has been subsidizing private lenders for years, is at the center of the debate. Under the program, taxpayers cover the cost of a loan if a student can’t pay it back, and so banks are essentially guaranteed a hefty return on their investment. The House passed a reform bill last year with support from President Obama that would revamp the current system and make loans more directly to students. The change would not alter services, and according to the Congressional Budget Office, the proposal would save $87 billion over the next 10 years, which would be reinvested into grants for low- and middle-income students and other critical aid for education.

The Senate has begun working on a similar bill, but the student loan companies have tried to torpedo the entire initiative by arguing that it would wreak economic havoc, and that it would cost tens of thousands of jobs. But the industry plays loose and fast with the facts of loan reform—and the negative economic effects are significantly less than they claim.

For instance, the lenders have argued in lobbying documents that as many as 35,000 jobs would be cut under the proposal, even though their own research shows that the program employs only about 30,000 people. The banks also provided Congress with state-by-state employment counts that appear to overstate the program’s economic reach by including jobs such as technology providers that also support other lending programs. One lobbying document lists two people working with the program in Kansas. However, a communications representative from USA Funds—which is the only loan guarantor in the state—said that the firm had only one employee. “I’d like to know who the other person is,” he told me.

To be sure, student loan reform will lead to some lost jobs—and for those limited number of families, the change in employment status will cause deep and significant turmoil. But ending the program doesn’t mean that all these employees will become jobless. Far from it. Loan companies offer a number of different products, including consulting services and private loans, and Darren Hurlburt, CEO of Maine Education Services, told me that his organization stopped participating in the program in March 2009 and has yet to lay off any staff. “So far all those people were absorbed,” he said.

But what’s more important—and often lost in the debate over the effect on jobs—is that the proposal goes a long way in making college affordable for all students. And that’s key to economic growth. More than $40 billion of the proposal’s projected savings would be reinvested into the federal Pell grant program, which helps low- and middle-income students pay for higher education. Pell grants covered as much as half of tuition and fees 30 years ago. But because college costs have exploded, Pell grants now cover only about one-third of charges. The bill aims to change that so that students would soon receive nearly $7,000 per year to help pay for their degree.

Congress should ignore the weak rhetoric of the loan companies and end the massive government subsidizes paid to student lenders. The bill will cut waste and improve educational opportunities for low- and middle-income families without costing taxpayers an additional penny. Indeed, for policymakers, it’s a simple choice: Deepen the pockets of the student lending industry—or help American students, their families, and the long-term health of the nation’s economy.

This article originally appeared in US News and World Report.

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Maybe, but it turns out that Hogan’s workload is just about average. According to a study released last week, most kids in this country spend less than an hour each day studying; almost 40 percent of high schoolers surveyed had done no homework the night before; and most college freshmen report that they spent just an hour a day–an all-time low–on homework during their last year of high school. “It’s expected that kids are going to do some complaining about homework, but many need to do more,” says Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution and author of the report. “For high school students, watching TV and partying are right up there with homework.”

So why do so many people think kids are collapsing under backbreaking amounts of work? Partly, because they may not remember working at all as kids, but Loveless says a major culprit is a key piece of data from a 2000 study that was misinterpreted. It was widely reported that homework more than doubled from 1981 to 1997 for children ages 6 to 8. But in fact, says Loveless, the increase included some students who went from having zero homework to having a little bit, inflating the overall average. While it might have been easy to find individual cases of students up to their red-rimmed eyeballs in schoolwork, those kids tend to be high achievers or students in ambitious school districts, says Loveless. “That’s not the average student.”

Recess. Take Khristyne Miller. A self-described perfectionist, the eighth grader slogged through three hours of homework each night until her mother pulled her out of an honors program at Housel Middle School in Prosser, Wash. “Kids need to be allowed to be kids,” says Roberta Miller. “I didn’t want her to be burned out before she hits high school.” Khristyne now maintains her 4.0 GPA on two hours a day.

Overwhelmed by complaining parents, a number of suburban school boards in New Jersey and Northern Virginia have placed homework limits on teachers. (Typically, they allow no more than an hour for elementary school children and up to three hours for high schoolers.) And it’s not just a case of too much work being too hard: “Homework is school reform on the cheap,” argues John Buell, a journalist whose book Closing the Book on Homework is forthcoming from Temple University Press in January, pointing out that smaller class sizes and preschool attendance are more likely to improve performance than are two hours of work sheets.

Yet common sense seems to dictate that more work leads to better grades. Students from Russia, for instance, spend twice as much time on their homework and score significantly higher than American children on international math tests. But the research doesn’t show conclusively that homework increases achievement, only that the two are linked. And in elementary schools, homework isn’t even correlated with high grades. Why? Because the kids with poor reading and math skills (and thus lower grades) are often the ones assigned the most homework to get them caught up with their classmates.

Still, high schoolers accustomed to copious free time face a rude awakening when their college professors expect them to study three hours or more a day. At many state universities, most freshmen end up in remedial courses; nearly half don’t manage to land a college degree. “The question we should be asking,” says Loveless, “is, `Are these kids being adequately prepared for college?’ ”

This story appears in the October 13, 2003 print edition of US News and World Report.

The post Overworked and underplayed? appeared first on Ulrich Boser.

And why should you listen to Carter? Because he designed these very letters you’re reading right now–plus dozens of other fonts that appear everywhere from Sports Illustrated and the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible to muffin-mix packaging and the white pages of the Verizon phone book. His revision of some of the New York Times headline typefaces may soon debut; meanwhile, businessWeek will release its redesign on September 26, featuring three fonts fashioned by Carter, two of them custom-made for the magazine.

It’s with good reason, then, that Carter has been hailed as the world’s most well-read man. At 65, he is the elder statesman of type design, as well as one of its most skilled technical innovators. “He has a phenomenal sense of both history and technology,” says Peggy Re, an associate professor of visual arts at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County and curator of the exhibit “Typographically Speaking: The Art of Matthew Carter,” a traveling show that opens this week at the University of Pennsylvania. “He will be considered one of the foremost type designers of the 20th century, if not also the 21st century.”

A life in type. Born in London, Carter began his career making type the 15th-century way. His father, a famous English type historian and book designer, landed his 17-year-old son an internship at a Dutch type foundry. There Carter cut metal punches much as Gutenberg once did. In 1955, he was accepted to Oxford University–but opted to stay with type instead.

Since then, the arc of his career has followed that of the modern type revolution. In 1966, working for a New York-based type foundry, he created Snell Roundhand, one of the first faces to connect script letters. And in 1981 Carter cofounded the first digital type company, Bitstream, where he designed an early font for laser printers. Later, in 1996, he would develop Verdana, one of the most widely used fonts on the Internet.

And yet some of his most famous works have looked back, not forward. Carter’s Galliard, which you’ll probably find in many of the books on your shelf, was based on a 16th-century font. “Eighty percent of type design is unaffected by technology,” he explains. “Letters are a straitjacket, really. You can’t on a whim redesign a b so that it ceases to be a b.” This tension between the functional and the aesthetic continues to keep Carter, one of 20 or so full-time type designers in the United States, planted in front of a computer screen for hours at a time. “You always have to find some variant which will cause a typeface to be different,” he says.

Carter’s work cannot be said to have a recognizable style. “Matthew is the quintessential craftsman,” says Steven Heller, a design critic and graphic artist. “He is not an artist or experimentalist. He is interpreting conventional forms, and his genius is to take the classical, the traditions of typography, and bring them into the 21st century without seeming trendy. He has a knack for continuing the continuum.” While the essence of individual letters hasn’t changed for centuries, the digital age has made it far easier to make–and use–new type designs. In the 1950s, there were only a few hundred fonts in the Latin alphabet. Today there are more than 40,000. Microsoft Office XP alone comes with 170 standard fonts. “I used to be afraid of people asking me at dinner parties what I do for a living,” Carter says. “Now it amazes me that I can have a perfectly intelligent conversation about fonts with a 9-year-old.”

Of his many works, Carter’s design for the phone book may have been the most grueling. In 1974, AT&T asked Carter, who was working for Mergenthaler Linotype at the time, to create the smallest legible type that could be printed on low-grade paper. Carter’s creation, Bell Centennial, has notches at each right angle to prevent ink blotting. The font also has flat, short curves on the sides of g and s in order to increase the white space in the characters and make them more legible.

Letter by letter. Old books and gravestones as well as letters from the Hindi script Devanagari have all served as inspiration for new designs, and Carter’s Cambridge, Mass., office is stuffed full with books. But perhaps the most impressive resource for design inspiration comes from his own memory: He can recall, for example, the alphabet his mother cut from linoleum during World War II to help him learn to read. They were a variation of Gill Sans, he says, and the first letters he thought of as objects.

Carter typically starts a new font by sketching the lowercase letters h and o on his Mac. Then he creates related straight letters like i from the h and round letters like c from the o, keeping a close eye on their weight and overall form by often printing them out; the resolution on a computer screen isn’t high enough to see the smallest details. He works last on more “capricious” characters, like the lowercase g and uppercase Q, whose curlicues allow for more artful flourishes. (Experts typically identify fonts by the traits of these letters.) An entire alphabet can take months of painstaking work, with fractions of a millimeter making the difference between an artful letter and an ugly one. “Watching me work is like watching a refrigerator make ice,” Carter says.

But individual letters aren’t enough to make a good font. “It’s only when three or four letters are set together,” he says, “that one can start to compare them: `Look, your h is too big alongside the o. Or, `it’s too thin’ or `it’s falling over.’ A letter only has properties relative to the letters around it.” One reason that Carter designed the h to hang over the T in the Miller font that you’re reading is to ensure that the uppercase letter doesn’t overwhelm the word. “It’s purely an aesthetic judgment,” he says of the feature.

Some of Carter’s most innovative recent work has been playing with the space between letters. The Walker typeface, which Carter created in 1995 for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, allows users to modify letters by adding what he calls “snap-on serifs.” An E, for instance, can be connected by extending its crossbar to an O. Still, as 21st century as that work may seem, Carter refuses to prognosticate about the next big thing: “I’ve heard so many people talk about the future of type–and none of it’s come true–that I’ve learned to shut up about it.”

This article originally appeared in US News and World Report.

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“Yeah,” I say. “And I got 104 keys on my keyboard–including one that says `escape.’ ”

“Clam it,” she snaps. “I want you to check out one of those online classes. I hear they’re making trouble, big time. I need answers, and I need them now.”

“All right, boss,” I say to her back as she walks out the door. My computer winks at me like a small-time hood in a police lineup. Does it know something I don’t? I reach down into the bottom drawer of my desk where I keep the help, pour two fingers into a dirty coffee mug, and toast the screen. I swig it down and log on.

Such are the how-did-I-end-up-here imaginings of a reporter who spent hours poring over the hard-boiled prose of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler for an online class in mystery fiction. And after six weeks as a digital college student, I can say that online education can be as rigorous and interesting as old-fashioned learning–though a lot more lonely.

A is for anywhere. Perhaps the biggest mystery about online classes is how to find the right one: More than 2,000 universities offer E-learning classes ranging from Basic Refrigeration Theory to courses on Web graphics or public speaking. Once you’ve found a subject, figuring out the tech requirements and course structure, to say nothing of scheduling the class, isn’t always easy. Despite the “whenever, wherever” E-learning mantra, many universities still operate their Web-based courses on a semester schedule. Luckily, a few schools are more accommodating and offer self-paced classes–like the one I chose, the University of California-Berkeley Extension Online. Students who sign up for the online classes offered by Berkeley’s adult ed branch can begin a class anytime and take as long as six months to finish. Indulging a guilty pleasure, I picked a three-credit literature class called Mystery Fiction. The course traces the history and philosophical themes of the mystery novel, from Edgar Allan Poe’s early detective stories to the female PI novels of Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, at a cost of $525 plus about $6o for reading materials.

A few technical issues slowed the start of the course. My books were late from Berkeley’s partner online bookstore, Specialty Books, so I had to purchase the first novel locally. I also had some difficulties entering the message board portion of the class, but Berkeley’s technical support staff solved that case within 24 hours.

My instructor was Mary Ann Koory, a visiting lecturer in Berkeley’s English department. For each class she posted lecture notes online, along with photos and corresponding assignments. Her style was funny and engaging–and almost like an individual tutor. I would E-mail my assignments to Mary Ann (unlike my college professors, she always used her first name), and she typically would grade my work within three to four days, and with considerable attention to detail.

Despite distance learning’s often-lackluster academic reputation, the course required old-fashioned schoolwork and intellectual creativity. We read 10 short stories and five books, watched two movies, wrote a 10-page research paper, and took a final exam. Other assignments included writing a short essay on the motivations of a character in the 1990 book Bones and Silence by Reginald Hill and translating a portion of John Milton’s Paradise Lost into gumshoe prose.

Discussion with other students was supposed to take place on Web-based message boards. Yet since every student was at a different point in the course, and rarely did anyone–including me–ever return to earlier postings, there was almost no back-and-forth among students. As a result, student remarks seemed largely for the benefit of the professor. The course also offered a real-time chat option, but it was not required–and I never found anybody in the chat room the few times I visited.

Would I take an online class again? Sure. Would I take an online class instead of one offered at the local university? Probably not. While I learned a lot and I was able to vacation in Germany without missing a “lecture,” the personal attention of the professor was no substitute for having classmates with whom to toss around ideas (and gossip). Much as detectives–and reporters–need to do face-to-face research to perform their jobs well, I think I prefer my classes up close and personal.

This article appeared in the October 28, 2002 print edition of U.S. News and World Report.

The post The Secret Agent appeared first on Ulrich Boser.

Our analysis of a national database found, for instance, that 37 percent of fourth graders say that their math work is often or almost too easy. More than a third of high school seniors report that they hardly ever write about what they read in class. And in an increasingly competitive global economy where the mastery of science is crucial, 72 percent of eighth-grade science students say they aren’t being taught engineering and technology.

These findings come at a crucial moment for the education reform movement, and researchers increasingly believe that surveys of students can provide important insights into the process of schooling. When the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation released findings from their Measures of Effective Teaching Project last year, they found that student feedback was a far better predictor of a teacher’s performance than more traditional indicators of success like whether a teacher had a master’s degree or not.

In many ways, the practice of using student surveys to learn about American classrooms is not new. The practice dates back to at least 1896 when students in Sioux City, Iowa were asked to provide input on their teachers. But the student surveys of today are far richer and more sophisticated, capturing a far more robust view of the classroom experience. In fact, next-generation student questionnaires are so detailed that it can take a student more than 30 minutes just to fill one out.

Given this growing body of research, we decided to examine one of the richest sources of national student survey data, the background questionnaire of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Known as the Nation’s Report Card, the assessments are administered every two years by the federal government, and we looked at the most recent student questionnaire, which includes state-by-state information on a student’s academic experiences.

And even for jaundiced observers, the results of our analysis were surprising. We found, for instance, that a significant percentage of students across grade levels say that they don’t clearly understand what their teacher is saying. Almost a third of eighth-grade students report reading fewer than five pages a day either in school or at home.

Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are also less likely to have the same access to robust learning opportunities as their more advantaged peers. Consider, for example, that 74 percent of higher-income fourth-grade students report that they often or always understand what their science teacher is saying, compared with just 56 percent of lower-income fourth-grade students.

For their part, educators have been taking action, using the new research on student surveys to improve schools, and some districts like Memphis, Tenn. already count student surveys for as much as 5 percent of a teacher’s overall evaluation. Another 11 states—along with some districts—have been working hard to figure out the best way to include the student voice in the evaluations of individual teachers. But what’s clear is that far more needs to be done to better understand the role of student surveys, and a number of key questions remain unanswered. How can the results be used to improve teacher practice? If a student knows that her survey will be included in a high-stakes evaluation of her teacher, will her or she answer the questions differently?

At the same time, the research also suggests that policymakers must continue to push for higher, more challenging standards. Many states have been trying to ratchet up the rigor of their education systems by adopting new academic standards known as the Common Core. This is clearly a step in the right direction.

This article originally appeared in US News and World Report and was written with Lindsay Rosenthal.

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In his book, Silverglate posits that federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from legal tradition and that prosecutors can now pin crimes on anyone for almost nothing at all. The problem, he says, is modern criminal laws, which have exploded in number and become impossibly broad and vague.

I don’t know if I buy all of Silverglate’s arguments. Some seem a touch overblown, and conceptually, I don’t believe all of his exceptions make the rule. And there is something to be said for laws that improve social policy, even if we think they’re overly intrusive or burdensome. For instance, I don’t like speed limits. Indeed, I probably go over the speed limit every time I take the car out. But the data strongly show that speed limits save lives–they generally make us go slower, a good thing.

Still, Silveglate’s thesis is important and well-argued, and he shows without question that some laws have become painfully vague. And while his book occasionally reads more like a legal treatise than a popular text, it’s one that prosecutors should be forced to read, if only to understand how easy it is to go to far.

I emailed Silverglate a few questions recently. His answers are below.

Why did you decide to write this book?

Sometime in the mid-1980s I started to notice a change in the nature of the federal criminal prosecutions that I was handling during the course of my criminal defense and civil liberties law practice. I started to represent more and more indicted clients where neither I nor other lawyers in my firm could figure out quite what the client/defendant had done to deserve to get indicted (or, if we got the case pre-indictment, what the client had done to get investigated or targeted). The client’s conduct seems to me to conform to normal standards and expectations, even if sometimes a bit aggressive or “sharp.” I started to keep notes on this phenomenon.

As the years wore on, the problems got more frequent and more acute. I was representing more and more federal criminal defendants who had done the deeds charged against them, but I did not deem what they did to constitute a crime. In the late 1990s I co-authored another long-gestating book, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, about disciplinary proceedings on college campuses on the basis of vague speech codes. I vowed that someday I would write a book on this other phenomenon of federal criminal prosecutions on the basis of vague statutes, directed against innocent people.

Why is it important? 

As a civil liberties matter, a government which has the ability to prosecute innocent citizens at will, is a government which has achieved the power that has characterized all tyrannical governments throughout history. Such prosecutions, because they can be pre-textual, tend to fly under society’s and the news media’s radar. Professor Alan Dershowitz has written a trenchant Foreword to my book, in which he notes how the Soviet system of “justice” used this technique to control and terrorize dissidents. Indeed, post-Soviet Russia uses the same techniques today – using bogus “tax” prosecutions to imprison critics of the regime. In my view, this is a crucial civil liberties issue, and I’ve seen no one else write about it in any kind of systematic fashion, and so I’ve undertaken to do it. My book could not be written by a scholar or a law professor, but only by a practitioner.

How did the Code of Federal Regulations grow into such a morass?

More and more responsibility for defining and elucidating the law was put, by the Congress, into the hands of bureaucrats, and the inevitable has occurred.

Can you walk me through how exactly you estimated that someone commits three felonies a day? 

The “three felonies a day” is really a figure of speech, hardly an exact count. People who are very active in certain fields likely commit more than three arguable federal felonies a day. People who are less active in life and in commerce probably commit fewer. I would imagine that lawyers, accountants, and securities dealers commit more, while fruit-stand vendors commit fewer. But my point was that an active member of our society goes about his or her busy workday not realizing the potential for committing arguable federal felonies in a wide variety of business and personal endeavors on a typical day.

Do you think that there a danger that federal laws can be too specific? That if a law is too particular about details, that someone guilty might be let off on a technicality? 

In the first place, I do believe that it is better that a few miscreants go free than that an innocent person be convicted.

Second, if an action is sufficiently bad, then Congress can simply outlaw it in terms sufficiently clear so that ordinary people understand what they may not do. There is surely a golden mean between being too general and too specific. After all, our state common law systems manage to enact and enforce criminal laws that are fairly well understood by the populace. But the federal criminal law is divorced from our common law traditions, and we are suffering the consequences.

Third, a central problem with federal criminal law – especially the laws that fall most frequently in the category of prosecutions I criticize in my book – is that our fraud statutes focus upon the means rather than the substance of a crime. We have, for example, “mail fraud” – fraud committed by the use of the mails. Or “wire fraud” – fraud committed by the use of the means of interstate communications (phone, email). Or “securities fraud” – fraud committed in connection with the purchase or sale of securities. But these statutes do not define what “fraud” means! And often Congress, at the urging of the executive branch and of federal prosecutors, has intentionally kept such definitions vague. See, for example, my discussion in my book, at pp. 114-122, of the federal government’s intentional effort to keep the “insider trading” laws and definitions vague, so that they can prosecute whomever or whatever seems appropriate at the time. This is a veritable formula for tyranny.

What can be done to reform the system? 
I have devoted nearly my entire book to exposing the problem, but have only a very few pages devoted to suggesting, in general terms, the remedies. I do not actually propose remedies, but, rather, I propose directions in which we have to travel, and coalitions that we have to create in order to fight this largely under-the-surface tyranny. I decided to do what I do best – tell the world what I’ve learned, from my experience, is going on. I want to start a public discussion. From that discussion I believe remedies will emerge. That’s what democracy is all about, after all.

This item originally appeared in The Open Case magazine.

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