Schools wake up to benefits of teenage lie-in
TEENAGERS who struggle to get out of bed in the morning could soon have an excuse. The first experiment to test whether pupils perform better after a lie-in is expected to be approved this week.
The £1m project would involve more than 20 British schools and 30,000 pupils. Schools willing to allow pupils aged 11-16 to start class anytime from 10am onwards — and from 11am or 11.30am for sixth-formers — are being recruited by Professor Russell Foster, director of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at Oxford University. His team will learn tomorrow whether its application for funding from the Wellcome Trust has been successful.
The Plot Against Merit
In 2004, seven-year-old Ting Shi arrived in New York from China, speaking almost no English. For two years, he shared a bedroom in a Chinatown apartment with his grandparents—a cook and a factory worker—and a young cousin, while his parents put in 12-hour days at a small Laundromat they had purchased on the Upper East Side. Ting mastered English and eventually set his sights on getting into Stuyvesant High School, the crown jewel of New York City’s eight “specialized high schools.” When he was in sixth grade, he took the subway downtown from his parents’ small apartment to the bustling high school to pick up prep books for its eighth-grade entrance exam. He prepared for the test over the next two years, working through the prep books and taking classes at one of the city’s free tutoring programs. His acceptance into Stuyvesant prompted a day of celebration at the Laundromat—an immigrant family’s dream beginning to come true. Ting, now a 17-year-old senior starting at NYU in the fall, says of his parents, who never went to college: “They came here for the next generation.”
College Graduates Don’t Always Out-Earn High School Grads
One of the biggest arguments in favor of a college education is that college grads make more money than do those with only a high-school diploma or a few years of college. The difference in earning power over a lifetime—the college wage premium—has been well-documented: One of the most popular recent sources, a paper by Christopher Avery and Sarah Turner, estimated the gap at more than $500,000, on average.
Those last two words are more important than anyone gives them credit for. Focusing on the average college wage premium puts the emphasis on the expected gains from education, which is not a bad thing if you’re trying to persuade lots of people to go to college. But it’s only part of the story. College tuition is expensive, and plenty of students take on tens of thousands of dollars of debt in pursuit of that wage premium—when what matters just as much is how risky it is relative to other ways they might spend their money or time.
When we look at distribution of the college wage premium—how much more the lowest-, middle-, and highest-earning quartiles make relative to high-school grads, the picture of risk becomes clearer. At every level short of graduate school, there’s a not-insignificant chance that a successful high-school graduate will out-earn you. The chances are greatest for college dropouts—the people who spend some time and money but don’t walk away with a degree.
Concerns rise about cheating by Chinese applicants to U.S. colleges
The application essay from a student in China sounded much like thousands of others sent each year to the University of Washington at Seattle.
“ ‘I did this,’ ” admissions officer Kim Lovaas remembers the essay saying, and, “ ‘I did that.’ ” Then she came to a phrase that stopped her short: “Insert girl’s name here.”
“I thought, ‘Did I just read that?’ ” said Lovaas, associate director for international student enrollment, admissions, and services. “To me, that was a really big red flag.”
The obvious clue in the essay was an indicator of a serious problem that’s not always so easy to detect: fraudulent applications from Chinese students seeking to get into U.S. colleges and universities.
In NSA-funded (taxpayer) initiative, Palo Alto students sharpen their Mandarin skills
As Americans debate revelations about sweeping data collection by the National Security Agency, the secretive federal department has funded a seemingly more benign agenda at Ohlone Elementary School in Palo Alto.
In a summer program known as STARTALK, 20 fifth- and sixth-graders are honing their Mandarin speaking, listening, reading and writing skills through in-depth study of the centuries-old Chinese folk tale “The Magic Paintbrush.”
Students have read the text in Mandarin, sung its stories, incorporated its lessons into their own 21st-century versions of the folk tale and created iMovies of the rewritten versions. On Thursday, July 3, they were to perform the original story in colorful, hand-made costumes for their parents.
The Ohlone program is one of more than 100 similar summer initiatives across the country aimed at boosting Americans’ abilities in Chinese languages and other “less commonly taught languages,” said Duarte Silva, the Stanford University-based executive director of the California World Language Project.
Those “strategic languages” include Arabic, Russian, Hindi and Farsi, with Korean soon to be added to the list.
Since the federal program began in 2006 Silva has been securing summer STARTALK grants, $90,000 of which this year is funding the four-week Ohlone program as well as a program for Sunnyvale middle school students that began this week. Later in the summer Silva and Stanford colleague Helene Chan will present their research about language training in a workshop for language teachers from across the nation.
Filling the Autism Gap
BBC:
John Waite investigates why scientists say autism research receives a fraction of the funding invested in other conditions and that as a consequence, there are very few effective interventions to treat the disorder. Meanwhile, parents of autistic children say they face a long wait for treatment provided by their local authority, and have instead turned to unproven methods offered by nutritionists and psychotherapists.
The Parent Trap
WHEN I was about 9 years old, I graduated to a Little League whose diamonds were a few miles from our house, in a neighborhood that got rougher after dark. After one practice finished early, I ended up as the last kid left with the coach, waiting in the gloaming while he grumbled, looked at his watch and finally left me — to wait or walk home, I’m not sure which.
I started walking. Halfway there, along a busy road, my father picked me up. He called my coach, as furious as you would expect a protective parent to be; the coach, who probably grew up having fistfights in that neighborhood, gave as good as he got; I finished the season in a different league.
The Prison Boom and the Lack of Black Progress after Smith and Welch
More than two decades ago, Smith and Welch (1989) used the 1940 through 1980 census files to document important relative black progress. However, recent data indicate that this progress did not continue, at least among men. The growth of incarceration rates among black men in recent decades combined with the sharp drop in black employment rates during the Great Recession have left most black men in a position relative to white men that is really no better than the position they occupied only a few years after the Civil Rights Act of 1965. A move toward more punitive treatment of arrested offenders drove prison growth in recent decades, and this trend is evident among arrested offenders in every major crime category. Changes in the severity of corrections policies have had a much larger impact on black communities than white communities because arrest rates have historically been much greater for blacks than whites.
5 Reasons Modern-Day Parenting Is in Crisis, According to a British Nanny
I generally am quite an optimistic person. I tend to believe that everything will work out for the best unless the evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary, and anyone who knows me will tell you that I am not prone to drama. That’s why when I say that modern parenting is in serious trouble — crisis, even — I hope you’ll listen, and listen carefully. I’ve worked with children and their parents across two continents and two decades, and what I’ve seen in recent years alarms me. Here are the greatest problems, as I see them:
1. A fear of our children.
Education Issues & The Wisconsin Governor’s Race
As governor, Burke said she would seek to improve the high school experience for students to decrease the number of students who drop out or leave without much direction.
“I see too much — we have either students who are not graduating or not engaged in their learning along with students who graduate but have no clear direction about their next step, and it doesn’t serve them well and it doesn’t serve the economy well,” she said.
Walker’s campaign said the governor’s approach to education is influenced by several of his closest friends who are teachers, and “each of them give the governor a unique perspective on education.”
The Republican Party of Wisconsin has highlighted Burke’s Madison School Board vote in June 2012 to increase property taxes by 4.95 percent. Later that year, after state aid came in higher than expected, she supported a 1.75 percent property tax increase, the maximum increase allowed under state law. She has not voted in favor of a school district budget since.
Related: The Common Core Commotion.
Both Genders Think Women Are Bad at Basic Math
Think women can’t do math? You’re wrong—but new research shows you might not change your mind, even if you get evidence to the contrary. A study of how both men and women perceive each other’s mathematical ability finds that an unconscious bias against women could be skewing hiring decisions, widening the gender gap in mathematical professions like engineering.
The inspiration for the experiment was a 2008 study published in Science that analyzed the results of a standardized test of math and verbal abilities taken by 15-year-olds around the world. The results challenged the pernicious stereotype that females are biologically inferior at mathematics. Although the female test-takers lagged behind males on the math portion of the test, the size of the gap closely tracked the degree of gender inequality in their countries, shrinking to nearly zero in emancipated countries like Sweden and Norway. That suggests that cultural biases rather than biology may be the better explanation for the math gender gap.
To tease out the mechanism of discrimination, two of the authors of the 2008 study, Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales, economic researchers at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Illinois, and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in Illinois, respectively, teamed up with Ernesto Reuben, an experimental psychologist at Columbia Business School in New York City, to design an experiment to test people’s gender bias when it comes to judging mathematical ability.
The more people are exposed to socialism, the worse they behave
“UNDER capitalism”, ran the old Soviet-era joke, “man exploits man. Under communism it is just the opposite.” In fact new research suggests that the Soviet system inspired not just sarcasm but cheating too: in East Germany, at least, communism appears to have inculcated moral laxity.
Lars Hornuf of the University of Munich and Dan Ariely, Ximena García-Rada and Heather Mann of Duke University ran an experiment last year to test Germans’ willingness to lie for personal gain. Some 250 Berliners were randomly selected to take part in a game where they could win up to €6 ($8).
Confronting Our Permanent Public University “Austerity”
This post focuses on the University of California’s budget situation, but it is broadly applicable to public colleges and universities across the country. More evidence of the national pattern came in this week, with reports of Moody’s negative outlook on higher education’s finances. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Don Troop provided highlights of Moody’s view of the overall sector. UC reflects the convergence of all but the fourth of these trends.
Growth in tuition revenue remains stifled by affordability concerns, legislative ceilings on tuition levels, and steep competition for students.
State financing of higher education will increase, on average, just 3 to 4 percent—not enough to meet the growth in expenses.
Already stiff competition for sponsored-research dollars is getting stiffer, with success rates for proposals dropping from 19 percent in 2008 to below 15 percent last year.
Fascinating given the tuition cost + student loan explosion.
Millennials Favor Private Accounts for Social Security Even if Benefit Cuts to Current Seniors Required
Millennials aren’t optimistic about Social Security: 53% say Social Security is “unlikely” to exist when they are 67 years old, while 45 percent say it probably will remain.
But if it does exist at that time, even fewer millennials believe government will provide them with the same level of benefits that today’s seniors receive. Only 34 percent say they are confident that government will provide them with the same level of retirement benefits as it does for today’s retirees; 64 percent say they are not confident.
Education decreases the likelihood one believes Social Security will continue in the future. A majority (54%) of those with high school degrees or less expect Social Security to exist when they retire, compared to 36 percent of college graduates.
Mommy Police With Real Handcuffs
You can argue that driving is necessary, but it seems to me that raising independent children is also necessary. Arresting parents who allow any child younger than a college freshman to spend time alone amounts to a legal mandate to keep kids timid and tethered. This should not be an object of public policy.
What is truly bizarre is that the cops cuffing these women were most likely raised with exactly the freedom they are now punishing. Do they think their parents should have been put in jail? Or have the intervening years rendered tweens unable to figure out how the car doors work?
I’m not saying that parents should take their toddlers into the wilderness and leave them there to hike their way out. What I can’t understand is how our society has lost the ability to distinguish between that and letting your pre-teen hang out in the car for a half-hour or spend some time in a nearby park. As Jessica Grose says, if this had been illegal in 1972, every single mother in America would have been in jail. Yet millions upon millions of us lived to tell the tale.
New Jersey’s Special Education Task Force
Regardless of how long it took to appoint a new state task force on special education, the 17 members will have less time to come up with recommendations.
Formally called the Task Force for Improving Special Education of Public School Students, the group appointed by Gov. Chris Christie met for the first time on July 1 to begin its work looking into the needs of students with disabilities — assessing everything from programs to costs.
But as complicated as that job may be, the law creating the task force — enacted in spring 2013 — calls for final recommendations by the end of this calendar year.
That’s a tall order. New Jersey’s schools face some vexing issues, such as how to best pay for services for special-needs students, how to implement and monitor those services, and how to balance the sometimes-conflicting needs and wants of families, districts, and the state.
Laura Waters has more.
Student Housing Gets Swanky and Investors Salivate
From the front lobby, it could easily be mistaken for a spa hotel—the blue wave lighting on the wall behind the concierge desk, the sleek sofas and flat screen monitors. But this is no hotel. It is student housing—millennial style—and it may be one of the best under-the-radar real estate plays of the decade.
“This is an industry that is ripe with opportunity,” said Bill Bayless, CEO of American Campus Communities, the largest student housing REIT (real estate investment trust) in the nation and developer of Drexel University’s Chestnut Square, a 361,000-square-foot luxury dormitory for 861 students on the Philadelphia campus. “If you look at the student housing sector, it was ignored by the mainstream real estate industry for more than 40 years.”
Impatient children are more likely to become lawbreakers
IN HIS “Odyssey”, Homer immortalised the idea of resisting temptation by having the protagonist tied to the mast of his ship, to hear yet not succumb to the beautiful, dangerous songs of the Sirens. Researchers have long been intrigued as to whether this ability to avoid, or defer, gratification is related to outcomes in life. The best-known test is the “marshmallow” experiment, in which children who could refrain from eating the confection for 15 minutes were given a second one. Children who could not wait tended to have lower incomes and poorer health as adults. New research suggests that kids who are unable to delay rewards are also more likely to become criminals later.
David Akerlund, Hans Gronqvist and Lena Lindahl of Stockholm University and Bart Golsteyn of Maastricht University used data from a Swedish survey in which more than 13,000 children aged 13 were asked whether they would prefer to receive $140 now or $1,400 in five years’ time. About four-fifths of them said they were prepared to wait.
Best state in America: Massachusetts, for its educational success
That’s according to the Education Week Research Center, a nonpartisan group that measured indicators such as preschool and kindergarten enrollment, high school graduation rates, and higher education attainment. The yearly study also considered family income and parental employment, which are linked to educational achievement.
In almost every category, the Bay State beats the national average: More than 60 percent of Massachusetts children have a parent with a post-secondary degree, 14 points higher than average, and nearly 60 percent of 3- and 4-year-olds are enrolled in preschool, more than 10 points above the national average.
No surprise, nearly half of Massachusetts fourth-graders are proficient on National Assessment of Educational Progress reading tests, and more than 54 percent of eighth-graders get proficient scores on NAEP math tests — both the highest rates in the country.
The underlying reason is a bipartisan commitment to education reform. Massachusetts passed a major school reform package in 1993, increasing spending, particularly in poorer districts; raising assessment standards; and making licensure exams for new teachers more difficult. Several other states improved their standards around the same time. But when partisan priorities shifted in other places, Massachusetts Republicans and Democrats alike continued investing heavily in education.
Improving scores, particularly among low-income and minority students, is still a challenge, and Massachusetts has done no better in closing the achievement gap than most other states.
Wisconsin took a very small step toward Massachusetts’ content knowledge requirements by adopting MTEL-90 for elementary English teachers.
Wisconsin results are available here.
Get a liberal arts B.A., not a business B.A., for the coming artisan economy
Editor’s Note: In Making Sen$e’s report on “the artisan economy” Tuesday evening on the NewsHour, Paul Solman speaks with two exterminators and a dementia coach. Not what you typically think of as “artisans”? Well, how about operators of a fresh fruit Popsicle company or a line of handmade dog leashes, both crafted in a repurposed Brooklyn factory? Any of those jobs can be artisan says Larry Katz, the Harvard professor who’s coined the term “artisan economy.” What makes them artisan is that they’re not standardized occupations; they involve what he calls “personal flair” in each stage of the job.
But this movement is about a lot more than hipsters bucking a traditional career path. Katz believes the artisan economy can help shore up the American middle class by creating new jobs to replace those mass production and middle management jobs lost to outsourcing or new technology. And he thinks that a firm grounding in the multidisciplinary liberal arts is the best preparation – better even than a business degree – to taking advantage of the artisan economy that he hopes will be a path to upward mobility for the average American. His extended interview with Paul Solman, edited and condensed for clarity, is below.
Commentary on School Choice in Sweden
very three years, Americans wring their hands over the state of our schools compared with those in other countries. The occasion is the triennial release of global scholastic achievement rankings based on exams administered by the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tests students in 65 countries in math, science, and languages. Across all subjects, America ranked squarely in the middle of the pack when the tests were first given in 2000, and its position hardly budged over the next dozen years.
The angst over U.S. student performance—and its implications for the American workforce of the near future—is inevitably accompanied by calls for education reform: greater accountability, more innovation. Just as inevitable are the suggestions for how more accountability and innovation could be realized: more charter schools, more choice, less bureaucratic oversight.
Advocates for choice-based solutions should take a look at what’s happened to schools in Sweden, where parents and educators would be thrilled to trade their country’s steep drop in PISA scores over the past 10 years for America’s middling but consistent results. What’s caused the recent crisis in Swedish education? Researchers and policy analysts are increasingly pointing the finger at many of the choice-oriented reforms that are being championed as the way forward for American schools. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that adding more accountability and discipline to American schools would be a bad thing, it does hint at the many headaches that can come from trying to do so by aggressively introducing marketlike competition to education.
Year after Rocketship’s scrutinized Milwaukee launch, signs point to progress; Status Quo in Madison
What were the highlights of Rocketship’s first year here?
Strong growth. Rocketship set a goal of having 65% of its Milwaukee students meet the national average for reading and math growth over the course of the year. In fact, 72% of the school’s students, almost all of whom are low-income and Hispanic or black, learned as much as a typical American student in English and language arts. In math, 87% of Rocketship students met or exceeded that average growth target.
New style. Rocketship introduced children to spending part of the day doing reading and math exercises on the computer, using software that adapts to each child’s skill level. Sessions are overseen by an aide rather than a teacher, which is one way Rocketship keeps costs down. Most teachers also specialize by subject matter.
Parent involvement. A Rocketship hallmark is involving parents in schools, not only to help their children with homework and goal-setting, but also to advocate in the community. Kinser said almost all teachers had 90% of their parents meet the 30-hour goal of interacting with the school.
Enrollment. This year’s enrollment goal is 487 children in kindergarten through fifth grade, and the school on its way to meeting it, Kinser said.
Rocketship’s challenges
The turbulent first year in Milwaukee also set Rocketship on its heels at times. Some challenges included:
Special education. About 17% of Milwaukee Rocketship children had special needs last year, which is close to the district average in Milwaukee Public Schools. Venskus said Rocketship went about $500,000 over budget to serve those students.
Teacher turnover. Rocketship, like other demanding urban charter schools with long hours and high expectations, was not a good fit for some teachers who left early in the school year. Rocketship did not renew some others. This fall there will be four new teachers at the school from Teach For America, the alternative teacher certification program from which Rocketship frequently recruits.
Political challenges. Rocketship leaders had to negotiate with lawmakers in Madison to try to clear a path for their staff with out-of-state teaching or administrator credentials to be recognized in Wisconsin.
Rocketship has a charter agreement with the Milwaukee Common Council to open up to eight schools serving 500 students each.
Links:
Madison’s disastrous long term reading results.
A majority if the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School.
Commentary on structural change.
Via Molly Beck.
2008 was a terrible year to graduate college
College graduates in the class of 2008 had it rough. They started college when the economy was thriving and took on more student loan debt than anyone before them.
Then, they graduated just as the Great Recession rushed in. The Class of 2008 was blindsided by an economic reality that they hadn’t planned on and weren’t prepared to handle.
Get Thee to Physics Class
There’s a great anecdote one often hears from professional dancers: As a kid, I could never sit still, they’ll say. My teacher wanted to put me on Ritalin, but my parents put me in dance class.
I think we ought to tell a similar story for a different kind of troubled adolescent, the kind more burdened by angst than by ADD. You know the type: sullen, apathetic, bored. Perhaps she’s dressed all in black. Perhaps he’s failing geometry. This child’s teacher wants to put the rebel in detention. I say, Put the kid in physics class.
Despite the stereotype of the lovable nerd being embraced by popular culture in TV shows like The Big Bang Theory and on T-shirts like “Talk nerdy to me,” the truth is that physics is the rebel’s subject. It’s for those who reject all authority, even that of our most basic assumptions, those who know in their bones that the world is not what it seems and who refuse to take the common, easy route of living unquestioningly on the surface.
Turning College Into a No-Thought Zone
Last September, Vincenzo Sinapi-Riddle, a student at Citrus Community College near Los Angeles, was collecting signatures on a petition asking the student government to condemn spying by the National Security Agency. He left the school’s designated “free speech area” to go to the student center. On his way there, he saw a likely prospect to join his cause: a student wearing a “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirt. He stopped the student and they began talking about the petition. Then an administrator came out of a nearby building, informed them their discussion was forbidden outside the speech zone, and warned Sinapi-Riddle he could be ejected from campus for violating the speech-zone rule.
Sinapi-Riddle has now sued Citrus College, a state institution, for violating his First Amendment rights by, among other things, demanding that “expressive activities” be confined to the 1.34 percent of campus designated as a “free speech area.” Perhaps the most outrageous part of his experience is how common it is. The vague bans on “offensive” language and other “politically correct” measures that most people think of when they imagine college speech codes are increasingly being joined by quarantine policies that restrict all student speech, regardless of its content.
Students paying extra for business skills they say they haven’t learned on campu
Ben Wei was already paying hefty tuition to earn a sociology degree from Bowdoin College, which charged nearly $57,000 at the time, but worried his classes weren’t teaching him skills he needed in the workplace.
So he gave up his winter break just a semester before graduating and paid another $3,000 to take a three-week business boot camp designed to teach him how to work a full-time job.
The course, offered by a company called Fullbridge, covered problem-solving, collaboration and communication—the kinds of skills employers say they want but aren’t getting from college grads.
“You can sit in a room and learn economic theory from a professor or a textbook, but at the end of the day, it’s still just theory,”said Wei, who now works as a data analyst. “They don’t really teach you how to apply that theory.”
All Children Should Be Delinquents
IN the late 1970s, in the Mississippi River town of Dubuque, Iowa, the threat of summer boredom was real. The nearest theme parks were hours away, and the best video games (Space Invaders, Asteroids) were coin guzzlers, fueled by hard-earned lawn-mowing or paper-route funds. While we had the requisite tennis courts and public swimming pools, which we used to exhaustion, our best resources were our rawest ones — hilly streets, undeveloped woods, local streams and hours of unstructured, unsupervised playtime.
As a 6- to 8-year-old, when I wasn’t searching for sticks to whittle with my collection of X-acto knives (or giving myself the scars to remember them by), I was getting lost in ragtag gatherings of kids. We played afternoon-long basketball games and twilight sessions of kick the can that could span three streets and involve 30 or more screaming kids.
Commentary on Student Loan Debt Practices
Last week, after years of being on the financial precipice and facing accusations of improper recruiting practices by authorities in several states, Corinthian Colleges, a for-profit education company with 74,000 students in more than 100 locations around the country, began to wind down its operations. In an agreement with the federal Department of Education, Corinthian said it would halt admissions and try to sell 85 of its campuses.
At another 12 Corinthian campuses, students can continue their studies until they graduate. Certain students who choose to stop attending classes will receive refunds, the company said.
Even as the company’s fortunes faded in recent years, Corinthian’s five top executives piled up real money: Over the last three years, they’ve shared $12.5 million in salaries and cash bonuses.
But taxpayers and Corinthian students — a vast majority of whom have borrowed to finance their educations — will be the biggest losers. When Corinthian eventually vanishes, its graduates will be left holding degrees from a defunct institution. This will make it even tougher for them to get jobs, resulting in higher default rates on their federal student loans.
Related: NYU’s student debt stories.
Why Middle School Should Be Abolished
America should do away with middle schools, which are educational wastelands. We need to cut the middle out of middle schools, either by combining them with the guidance and nurturing that children find in elementary school, or with the focus on adult success that we expect from our high schools.
For much as half of middle schools across the country, national statistics show substantial performance gaps, especially in math and reading achievement, between middle school and high school. It’s time to admit that middle school models do not work—instead, they are places where academics stall and languish.
via Marc Eisen.
Mr Eisen wrote “My Life & Times with the Madison Public Schools” in 2007. Well worth reading.
World University Rankings
The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings 2014 employ the world’s largest invitation-only academic opinion survey to provide the definitive list of the top 100 most powerful global university brands. A spin-off of the annual Times Higher Education World University Rankings, the reputation league table is based on nothing more than subjective judgement – but it is the considered expert judgement of senior, published academics – the people best placed to know the most about excellence in our universities.
Study: Half of black males, 40 percent of white males arrested by age 23
Nearly half of black males and almost 40 percent of white males in the U.S. are arrested by age 23, which can hurt their ability to find work, go to school and participate fully in their communities.
A new study released Monday (Jan. 6) in the journal Crime & Delinquency provides the first contemporary findings on how the risk of arrest varies across race and gender, says Robert Brame, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina and lead author of the study.
The study is an analysis of national survey data from 1997 to 2008 of teenagers and young adults, ages 18
TV Watching and Computer Use in U.S. Youth Aged 12–15, 2012
Were there differences by sex in the percentage of youth who watched TV or used a computer for 2 hours or less daily?
Were there differences by race and Hispanic origin in the percentage of youth who watched TV or used a computer for 2 hours or less daily?
Were there differences by weight status in the percentage of youth who watched TV or used a computer for 2 hours or less daily?Nearly all (98.5%) youth aged 12–15 reported watching TV daily.
More than 9 in 10 (91.1%) youth aged 12–15 reported using the computer daily outside of school.In 2012, 27.0% of youth aged 12–15 had 2 hours or less of TV plus computer use daily.
Among youth aged 12–15, girls (80.4%) were more likely to use the computer 2 hours or less daily when compared with boys (69.4%).
Fewer non-Hispanic black youth aged 12–15 (53.4%) reported watching 2 hours or less of TV daily than non-Hispanic white (65.8%) and Hispanic (68.7%) youth.Excessive screen-time behaviors, such as using a computer and watching TV, for more than 2 hours daily have been linked with elevated blood pressure, elevated serum cholesterol, and being overweight or obese among youth (1–3). Additionally, screen-time behavior established in adolescence has been shown to track into adulthood (4). The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute-supported Expert Panel and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommend that children limit leisure screen time to 2 hours or less daily (5,6). This report presents national estimates of TV watching and computer use outside of the school day.
American Teens Achieve Mediocrity In Financial Literacy, Local math & reading background
When it comes to financial literacy around the world, American teens are middling.
The United States may fuel the world’s largest economy and operate its most robust financial system. But compared to the financial prowess of teenagers in 17 other countries, U.S. teens come off downright mediocre.
That’s according to a new study published Wednesday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development as part of its Program for International Student Assessment, conducted once every three years.
The OECD, a 34-nation organization based in Paris, surveyed 15-year-old students in 13 member nations and five other nations throughout 2012 to ascertain their level of familiarity with the financial system as they neared adulthood.
“Finance is part of everyday life for many 15-year-olds, who are already consumers of financial services, such as bank accounts,” the report said. “As they near the end of compulsory education, students will face complex and challenging financial choices, including whether to join the labor market or continue with formal education and, if so, how to finance such study.”
Unfortunately, this is unsurprising. Read two useful articles on local math difficulties and long term disastrous reading results.
The OECD report.
Building a Community for High Schoolers Who Code
Last September, the day before PennApps 2013f, a 48-hour, 1,000+ student hackathon at the University of Pennsylvania, I created a Facebook Group called “PennApps HS Hackers” for the dozen or so high school students who were also attending the event.
If the words “hacker” and “hackathon” evoke mental images of scary-looking criminals breaking into computers, I can assure you we’re nothing like that. Hackers, in the original spirit of the term, are programmers and designers who use technology to build things — not destroy things. Hackathons are events where hackers of all kinds come together to collaborate on new projects and compete for prizes, often on college campuses.
Turns out I picked an incredible time to start a community — the hackathon scene exploded in rhythm with my Facebook Group. In the course of a school year, the group would grow to include high schoolers from all 50 states and more than a dozen countries, organizers from nearly every major U.S. college hackathon, founders of high school hackathons and hacker meetups, and even the president of the well-known startup incubator, Y Combinator.
For years we’ve been telling kids to sit still and pay attention. That’s all wrong.
Today’s educational technology often presents itself as a radical departure from the tired practices of traditional instruction. But in one way, at least, it faithfully follows the conventions of the chalk-and-blackboard era: EdTech addresses only the student’s head, leaving the rest of the body out.
Treating mind and body as separate is an old and powerful idea in Western culture. But this venerable trope is facing down a challenge from a generation of researchers—in cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, even philosophy—who claim that we think with and through our bodies. Even the most abstract mathematical or literary concepts, these researchers maintain, are understood in terms of the experience of our senses and of moving ourselves through space.
This perspective, known as “embodied cognition,” is now becoming a lens through which to look at educational technology. Work in the field shows promising signs that incorporating bodily movements—even subtle ones—can improve the learning that’s done on computers.
Self-Delusion Spreads from Professional to Graduate Education; Consternation Curiously Absent
I want to be clear at the outset: I love literature. I was an English major, and I’ve never regretted it for a moment. I seriously considered pursuing a Ph.D. in English. I could not have a deeper faith in the liberal arts as a path to the betterment of all mankind.
So imagine my dismay at some recent reportage in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Graduate programs in languages and literature are suffering troubles all too familiar to the readers of these pages: In these straitened times, the tenure-track academic appointments for which a doctoral degree is the traditional and necessary preparation are available for only about 60% of the recipients of doctorates in language or literature (a number chillingly reminiscent of the 56%-57% of the last two law-school graduating classes who managed to find a full-time, long-term job requiring a law license within 9-10 months of graduation, though when you exclude school-funded and self-employed positions as well as a few other confounders and irrelevancies, that number is closer to 53%). The Modern Language Association (a trade group for college and graduate educators and scholars in language and literature analogous to AALS) recently released a report conceding “[w]e are faced with an unsustainable reality.”
The solution? Simple—dismiss the “reality” as “wrong”:
At Sea in a Deluge of Data
Alison J. Head and John Wihbey:
This spring, more college students than ever received baccalaureate degrees, and their career prospects are brighter than they were for last year’s graduates.
Employers responding to this year’s National Association of Colleges and Employers’ “Job Outlook 2014 Survey” said they planned to increase entry-level hiring by almost 8 percent. But what they may not realize is that these seemingly techno-savvy new hires could be missing some basic yet vital research skills.
It’s a problem that we found after interviewing 23 people in charge of hiring at leading employers like Microsoft, KPMG, Nationwide Insurance, the Smithsonian, and the FBI. This research was part of a federally funded study for Project Information Literacy, a national study about how today’s college students find and use information.
Nearly all of the employers said they expected candidates, whatever their field, to be able to search online, a given for a generation born into the Internet world. But they also expected job candidates to be patient and persistent researchers and to be able to retrieve information in a variety of formats, identify patterns within an array of sources, and dive deeply into source material.
Why People Used to Have Children
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been characterized by a massive decline in fertility, beginning in rich Western countries and spreading all over the world. It is a transformation that is still underway in poor countries today.
Technological advances have, over the same period, radically decreased child mortality and increased life span. Modern parents need not have many children to ensure that one or two survive; almost all children survive to reproductive age. But Darwinian genetic interests cannot explain the modern decline in fertility (if Darwinian interests dominated, fertility should increase with increased survival, as observed in many historical elites). Rather, the fertility decline to present levels is mostly an economic response to the changing value of children, and to the changing economic relationship of parents and children. The economic transformation is not spontaneous, but the product of cultural transformation through education.
The economic value of children has decreased, but this is not the most important cause of the fertility decline. The transformation of countries from predominantly agricultural to predominantly urban reduced the value of children, especially where the industrial employment of children was restricted. Each child’s labor contributed positive value to a family farm or cottage industry, but in an urban setting, children began to have negative economic value. Indeed, the fertility decline correlates somewhat – though not perfectly – with the transformation from agrarian to city life.
But the fertility decline is not merely the product of a price effect – of people having fewer children because children are more costly. Children are not normal goods (or even inferior goods, as might be surmised from low fertility among the highest income groups): they become not goods at all, but rather bundles of claims on their parents. This transformation is a culturally-controlled change in direction of the flow of resources. Before the fertility decline, resources flowed from children to parents (and even up to grandparents and kin); after the transformation, resources flowed from parents to children. In Mass Education as a Determinant of the Timing of the Fertility Decline, John Caldwell argues that the vector of this cultural transformation has been mass education. He characterizes it as the replacement of “family morality,” in which children are expected to “work hard, demand little, and respect the authority of the old,” with “community morality,” in which children are dependent on their parents to become future productive citizens (perhaps even upwardly mobile) for the good of the country.
Why the cool kids from middle school may have trouble down the line
It was, of course, a popular mean girl who made my life miserable in middle school.
She made a point to ask me, in front of whatever audience she could rally around her, if I had attended the big party from the weekend. (I never had.) If I had found a boyfriend. (Nope.) If even I had a clue about the fantastic life she and her friends led. (Not really.)
While her needling seemed like the end of the world when I was 11 and 12, it taught me to have a great deal of compassion for the marginalized as I grew up. I’ve wondered what happened to my young tormentor as the years passed. A new study out of the University of Virginia suggests she should have been nicer.
Published last month in the journal of Child Development, it followed the “cool kids” from middle school for a decade. It’s true what they say about peaking too young. The socially precocious teens in middle school fell lower on the social hierarchy by high school. And in their early 20s, they had more problems with drugs and alcohol, more trouble with the law and were less competent in their friendships.
What’s surprising is that the middle school “fast-track,” as measured in this study, seems tame compared to the images put forth in current pop culture. One of the markers identified middle schoolers who reported becoming seriously romantically involved at this age, as in making out with a boyfriend or girlfriend but not going further than that.
Politics & University Admissions
Speaker Joe Straus and two of his top lieutenants in the Texas House, Reps. Dan Branch and Jim Pitts, sent more letters to the president of the University of Texas on behalf of applicants than anyone else whose correspondence was included in a recent inquiry into admissions favoritism.
Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa’s office recently reviewed 86 “recommendation” letters, almost all of them from lawmakers, sent to UT President Bill Powers instead of through the proper channels.
The inquiry wasn’t exhaustive — those were just the letters uncovered by UT Regent Wallace Hall. Lawmakers launched impeachment proceedings against Hall last June, just two weeks after he began investigating whether the university was giving special treatment to the friends and family of lawmakers.
An update, here.
The Economics of Fake Degrees
It’s surprising how many house pets hold advanced degrees. Last year a dog received his MBA from the American University of London, a non-accredited distance-learning institution. It feels as if I should add “not to be confused with the American University in London,” but getting people to confuse them seems like a pretty basic feature of the whole AUOL marketing strategy.
The dog, identified as “Peter Smith” on his diploma, goes by Pete. He was granted his degree on the basis of “previous experiential learning,” along with payment of 4,500 pounds ($7,723). The funds were provided by a BBC news program, which also helped Pete fill out the paperwork. The American University of London required that Pete submit evidence of his qualifications as well as a photograph. The applicant submitted neither, as the BBC website explains, “since the qualifications did not exist and the applicant was a dog.”
In state tuition rules tighten
Figuring out how to pay in-state college tuition for a college student who grew up elsewhere is the ultimate money hack.
At desirable flagship universities in states like Michigan and Colorado, the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition for students who get no financial aid can now approach $100,000 per undergraduate degree. And some families may also enjoy thumbing their noses at state legislators who expect affluent parents’ out-of-state tuition to subsidize the ever-lower budget allocations those representatives provide to higher education.
So it should come as little surprise that a service like In-State Angels has emerged to help high school graduates establish residency in another state. This is legal, though complicated, so once the company succeeds, it asks for roughly 10 to 15 percent of the ultimate savings as a fee.
The Misguided Freakout About Basement-Dwelling Millennialist
More than ever, young people are living in their parents’ basements.
You’ve surely heard that one before. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the New Republic, Salon, and others have repeated it over and over in the last few years. More than 15.3 million twentysomethings—and half of young people under 25—live “in their parents’ home,” according to official Census statistics.
There’s just one problem with those official statistics. They’re criminally misleading. When you read the full Census reports, you often come upon this crucial sentence:
It is important to note that the Current Population Survey counts students living in dormitories as living in their parents’ home.
When you were adjusting to your freshman roommate, you were “living with your parents.” When you snagged that sweet triple with your best friends in grad housing, you were “living with your parents.” That one time you launched butt-rattling bottle rockets at the stroke of midnight off your fraternity roof? I hope you didn’t make too much noise. After all, you were “living with your parents,” and mine definitely went to bed around 11.
The Changing Economic Advantage from UK Private Schools
Francis Green , Stephen J. Machin, Richard Murphy & Yu Zhu :
Despite its relatively small size, the private school sector plays a prominent role in British society. This paper focuses on changing wage and education differentials between privately educated and state educated individuals in Britain. It reports evidence that the private/state school wage differential has risen significantly over time, despite the rising cost to sending children to private school. A significant factor underpinning this has been faster rising educational attainment for privately educated individuals. Despite these patterns of change, the proportion attending private school has not altered much, nor have the characteristics of those children (and their parents) attending private school. Taken together, our findings are consistent with the idea that the private school sector has been successful in transforming its ability to generate the academic outputs that are most in demand in the modern economy. Because of the increased earnings advantage, private school remains a good investment for parents who want to opt out, but it also contributes more to rising economic and social inequality.
“And the dream at Berkeley is to do social work and then go work for Google or Facebook”
The Chancellor of UC Berkeley, Nicholas Dirks, formerly spent years as a professor at Columbia University. In an Aspen Ideas Festival* panel on the state of the humanities, he summed up the difference between Ivy Leaguers in New York City and graduates of the institution he now runs. “You know, the tradition at Columbia is that you read Aristotle and then you go to Goldman Sachs,” he said. “And the dream at Berkeley is to do social work and then go work for Google or Facebook.”
He added, “All the stereotypes have a lot of truth to them. What I do find interesting is that at Berkeley, about 70 percent of students are taking some computer science across the curriculum. And this, I think, is a national phenomenon. At Stanford I think it’s 90 percent, but that’s Stanford. But we’re actually trying to introduce data science and data analytics into the core arts and sciences curriculum.”
He also noted the decline in English majors at his rival institution:
Wealth by degrees The returns to investing in a university education vary enormously
IS A university degree a good investment? Many potential students are asking the question, especially in countries where the price of a degree is rising, as a result of falling government subsidies. Recent research suggests that the conventional wisdom remains true: a university degree pays handsomely. In America and the euro zone, for example, unemployment rates for graduates are far below average. Yet the benefit of university varies greatly among students, making an investment in higher education a risky bet in some circumstances.
9 Things I Learned as a Software Engineer
Three years ago I was working in a neuroscience lab in Barcelona, busy putting electrodes on people and teaching classes on cognitive systems. Today I design and write software for a living.
Of course back in science I wrote a lot of software — if you want to make any sense of 40 GB of brain scan data you’ll have to roll up your sleeves and write scripts to crunch those numbers, and I was always a good programmer. But it wasn’t until I quit my job (and possibly my future) in academia and started working for a small and ambitious start-up that I understood what being a software engineer — and more importantly, being in the business of software engineering — is really about. It’s not knowing more programming languages, libraries, algorithms, and design patterns. It’s a mindset.
Poor progress of UK disadvantaged pupils a waste of talent, says Alan Milburn
England’s education system is wasting young talent “on an industrial scale” because of poor progress made by the brightest disadvantaged children once they leave primary school, Alan Milburn, chair of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, said after publication of a report detailing the educational differences that emerge by the age of seven.
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The report found that children from poor or disadvantaged backgrounds who achieve the highest levels at primary school have in most cases fallen behind their less able but better-off peers by the time they sit GCSE exams five years later.
Of almost 8,000 disadvantaged students who achieved top grades in English and maths standardised tests at age 11, only 900 went on to study at an elite university. But if disadvantaged children performed as well at secondary school as their better off peers, another 2,200 would later study at the likes of Oxford or Manchester universities.
Related:“They are all rich white kids & they will do just fine – not”.
Why Teenagers Act Crazy
ADOLESCENCE is practically synonymous in our culture with risk taking, emotional drama and all forms of outlandish behavior. Until very recently, the widely accepted explanation for adolescent angst has been psychological. Developmentally, teenagers face a number of social and emotional challenges, like starting to separate from their parents, getting accepted into a peer group and figuring out who they really are. It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to realize that these are anxiety-provoking transitions.
But there is a darker side to adolescence that, until now, was poorly understood: a surge during teenage years in anxiety and fearfulness. Largely because of a quirk of brain development, adolescents, on average, experience more anxiety and fear and have a harder time learning how not to be afraid than either children or adults.
Facebook has conducted a secret massive psychology experiment on its users to find out how they respond to positive and negative messages – without telling participants
Over 600,000 Facebook users have taken part in a psychological experiment organised by the social media company, without their knowledge.
Facebook altered the tone of the users’ news feed to highlight either positive or negative posts from their friends, which were seen on their news feed.
They then monitored the users’ response, to see whether their friends’ attitude had an impact on their own.
“The results show emotional contagion,” wrote a team of Facebook scientists, in a paper published by the PNAS journal – Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists of the United States.
Anatomy of a Swim Meet
I have three kids, and they all swim on a swim team every summer. I decided to capture my experience at a morning swim meet, for those of you not in the water cult.
6:00 a.m.: Wake up, drink coffee. Wake up grouchy children.
6:45 a.m.: Arrive at pool. Parking lot is already full. Let the kids out and park far away. Carry/drag chairs, bags and a cooler as if I were large pack animal. It occurs to me suddenly that as mother of three there is no denying that I am a large pack animal.
6:58 a.m.: Small miracle occurs. I find a great place to set up chairs, etc. Next to friends. With a good view of the pool. In full shade. Wish I’d brought a sweatshirt actually, it’s kind of chilly.
7:00 a.m.: Kids jump into the freezing cold pool for warm-ups and exchange looks with each other like — WHY DO WE DO THIS AGAIN?
7:30 a.m.: Children begin harassing me for money for the snack bar. I try to hand them something healthy from the cooler. Suddenly every other kid at the swim meet is eating large, chocolate-frosted doughnuts.
Over 100,000 African-American Parents Are Now Homeschooling Their Children
We hear so much about the plight of Black children and their low test scores. We have not heard that African American children who are homeschooled are scoring at the 82% in reading and 77% in math. This is 30-40% above their counterparts being taught in school. There is a 30% racial gap in schools, but there is no racial gap in reading if taught in the home and only a 5% gap in math.
What explains the success of African American students being taught by their parents? I believe that it’s love and high expectations. I am reminded of Booker T. Washington High School. They were honored several years ago for producing the greatest turnaround as a Recovery school. The principal had the opportunity to pick and choose her staff and emphatically stated, “If you want to teach in this school you must love the students”. Researchers love promoting that the racial gap is based on income, marital status, and the educational background of the parents. Seldom, if ever, do they research the impact of love and high expectations.
Since the landmark decision, Brown vs. Topeka in 1954, there has been a 66% decline in African American teachers. Many African American students are in classrooms where they are not loved, liked, or respected. Their culture is not honored and bonding is not considered. They are given low expectations – which helps to explain how students can be promoted from one grade to another without mastery of the content.
There are so many benefits to homeschooling beyond academics. Most schools spend more than 33% of the day disciplining students. And bullying has become a significant issue. One of every 6 Black males is suspended and large numbers are given Ritalin and placed in Special Education. These problems seldom, if ever, exist in the Homeschool environment.
Another major benefit is the summer months. Research shows that there is a 3 year gap between White and Black students. Some students do not read or are involved in any academic endeavor during the summer. Those students lose 36 months or 3 years if you multiply 3 months times 12 years (grades first -12) Homeschool parents do not allow academics to be forsaken for 3 months.
Finally, in the homeschool environment, parents are allowed to teach their children
Related: Madison’s long term disastrous reading results.
Wealth by degrees The returns to investing in a university education vary enormously
IS A university degree a good investment? Many potential students are asking the question, especially in countries where the price of a degree is rising, as a result of falling government subsidies. Recent research suggests that the conventional wisdom remains true: a university degree pays handsomely. In America and the euro zone, for example, unemployment rates for graduates are far below average. Yet the benefit of university varies greatly among students, making an investment in higher education a risky bet in some circumstances.
The value of a degree, like so much else in economics, boils down to supply and demand. The gap between average pay for university graduates and those with secondary-school degrees is commonly called the “college wage premium”. When firms are hungry for skilled workers their demand for university graduates grows, and the premium tends to rise. When the supply of graduates grows faster than that of less-educated workers, in contrast, the premium will stabilise or fall.
The Rise Of The A**hole Sports Dad (And How To Avoid Turning Into One)
Children, in general, suck at sports. And as a parent, watching them suck evokes all kinds of emotions—fierce protectiveness, embarrassment, self-loathing (Oh God, I gave them those genes)—which many of us have difficulty handling. My kid played second-grade basketball this winter, and when she failed to make a shot the entire season, it took everything in my power not to storm the court, clear out an area around the basket with police tape, and let her shoot until she got the fucking thing in.
Being a sports parent is a remarkable test of self-restraint. We’re so used to being sports fans and watching pro and college sports played at a high level that it’s jarring to witness children flail as they learn the idea of sports: competing, knowing the rules, positioning yourself to make a play, etc. This is assuming your child even wants to learn. Half the time, my kid stood at midcourt chatting with friends, only to have the ref come up and say, “Hey, guys, you have to actually play now.” And this is before you factor in all the other parents and coaches acting like dicks and raising your blood pressure even more.
That’s when the yelling begins. That’s when you go from silently clapping to breaking the ice with a “Get back on D, son!” to going Full Pitino. That crazy dad next to you, drenching everyone in frothed spittle? He was you once. And if you aren’t careful, you could become him. Here’s how to keep that from happening.
1. Only the coach gets to coach. He (or she) is the one who volunteered his time for the gig. He’s the one who planned the practices and coordinated the schedule and reserved court time at the nearby Sportsthunderplex. He’s the one who drags that big-ass mesh bag filled with balls from his car every weekend. If you’re not willing to make that sacrifice, you don’t get to show up on game day and act like you’re Nick Saban.
2. Don’t get too jealous of that one good kid on the field. Every kiddie game features at least one child who is a genetically superior mutant sent from the future. She can make shots. She plays tight defense. She runs fast. She never gets distracted by shiny whistles. This mini Bron-Bron will NEVER be your kid. Your kid will look like an invalid by comparison, and that is (deep breath) okay. At this level, every sports league is an experiment. Some kids get the hang of it right away. Some kids are late bloomers. And some kids want practice to end so they can go watch Frozen for the sixtieth time. So don’t get discouraged when a ringer comes along. Chances are that kid will burn out and become an alkie by 17, and you’ll have the last laugh!
Creative destruction: A cost crisis, changing labour markets and new technology will turn an old institution on its head
HIGHER education is one of the great successes of the welfare state. What was once the privilege of a few has become a middle-class entitlement, thanks mainly to government support. Some 3.5m Americans and 5m Europeans will graduate this summer. In the emerging world universities are booming: China has added nearly 30m places in 20 years. Yet the business has changed little since Aristotle taught at the Athenian Lyceum: young students still gather at an appointed time and place to listen to the wisdom of scholars.
Now a revolution has begun (see article), thanks to three forces: rising costs, changing demand and disruptive technology. The result will be the reinvention of the university.
Off campus, online
Higher education suffers from Baumol’s disease—the tendency of costs to soar in labour-intensive sectors with stagnant productivity. Whereas the prices of cars, computers and much else have fallen dramatically, universities, protected by public-sector funding and the premium employers place on degrees, have been able to charge ever more for the same service. For two decades the cost of going to college in America has risen by 1.6 percentage points more than inflation every year.
The $124,421 Man How to pay off a mountain of student debt in six (long) years
The debt began the same way all debts do: in the hollow space between what one wants and what one has.
I picked Tufts University because it seemed impressive enough. Friends like me—Jewish, precocious, pimpled—were already enrolled, and they liked it just fine. Plus, the grounds were well kept during my visit. What else does a 17-year-old, especially one who’s prone to making inarticulate decisions, need? For whatever reason, Tufts felt like somewhere I should stay for a while.
In December 2002, the winter before graduation, Tufts agreed, tossing in a freshman-year grant of $12,000 based on my financial need. I happened to be on a bus heading for Boston when I got the good news. I sank down in my seat, relieved that it could be that easy.
Months later, in the basement of my house in a middle-class town in Fairfield County, Connecticut, I found a letter addressed to me that I hadn’t seen before. Someone had already opened it, and there was a notice inside.
eBooks vs Paper
Choosing books to take on holiday has got more difficult in recent years. Now it is a question not just of what to read but how – on paper, tablet, e-reader, or perhaps even a phone – and people have strong opinions on which is best. But is there any more to the decision than cost and convenience? On this question, the answer suggested by numerous studies into the neuroscience and psychology of reading in different formats is an emphatic yes.
There is no shortage of people warning of the risks attendant on the rise of “screen culture”, as the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield calls it. Greenfield has repeatedly expressed concern that, as technology takes us into unknown territory, “the brain may be adapting in unprecedented ways”. Though she tends to stress that these changes might be good or bad, that hasn’t stopped her more negative speculations being picked up in the media and amplified in far more strident terms.
On the other side of the two cultures divide, the novelist and critic Will Self recently argued that the connectivity of the digital world was fatal for the serious novel, which requires all the reader’s attention. Looking ahead 20 years, he posed a question: “If you accept that by then the vast majority of text will be read in digital form on devices linked to the web, do you also believe that those readers will voluntarily choose to disable that connectivity? If your answer to this is no, then the death of the novel is sealed out of your own mouth.”
E-reading is certainly on the rise. The Pew Research Center reports that, as recently as 2010, hardly anyone in the US had an e-reader or tablet. Now half do. The proportion of the population who have read an ebook in the past year rose from 17 per cent in 2011 to 28 per cent just three years later. In the UK, figures from Nielsen, which monitors book sales, showed that one in four consumer titles bought in 2013 was an ebook, up from one in five a year earlier.
Surprising Findings on Two-Year vs. Four-Year Degrees Return on Investment Holds Steady at About 15% for Recent Graduates
A college degree is worth it even as the cost of going to school rapidly escalates and real wages decline for graduates, WSJ’s Mark Peters reports on Lunch Break with Tanya Rivero. Photo: Getty
Who earns more, a recent graduate from a flagship state university with a bachelor’s degree or one who finishes a two-year program at a little-known community college?
The answer isn’t so clear.
As states for the first time mine graduates’ salary data from public colleges, they are finding that paychecks for holders of associate degrees in a technical field are outstripping many grads with four-year degrees, at least early in a career.
The growing body of data, from states including Texas, Colorado and Indiana, provides a sober new look at the value of a postsecondary education in a slowly recovering economy.
Overall, the findings reinforce the belief that a college degree is worth the investment. But they highlight the reconsideration of a long-held article of faith that a four-year college degree guarantees at least a middle-class life, while an associate degree is its poor country cousin.
In Indiana, figures show that after a year in the workforce there, a graduate of Ivy Tech Community College makes more on average than a graduate of Indiana University.
Beauty in Ugly Dorms
Apartment-style dorm rooms are the Hot New Thing at some colleges nowadays. Single rooms instead of doubles or even quads, exterior doors instead of crowded hallways, private bathrooms instead of gang showers and those icky shared toilets, even mini-kitchens instead of the noisy dining hall – all have an undeniable appeal for incoming freshmen looking to maximize the more adult features of undergraduate life.
Many contemporary students grew up with their own bedrooms, and perhaps even their own bathrooms, and may recoil from sharing their personal spaces with that mysterious stranger, the roommate or hallmate. So colleges and universities, particularly sensitive to the preferences of full-pay students, are starting to move away from traditional long-hallway dorms to more individualized rooms, some with generous amenities. Prospective students seem to love the idea.
Do the Benefits of College Still Outweigh the Costs?
Jaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz:
In recent years, students have been paying more to attend college and earning less upon graduation—trends that have led many observers to question whether a college education remains a good investment. However, an analysis of the economic returns to college since the 1970s demonstrates that the benefits of both a bachelor’s degree and an associate’s degree still tend to outweigh the costs, with both degrees earning a return of about 15 percent over the past decade. The return has remained high in spite of rising tuition and falling earnings because the wages of those without a college degree have also been falling, keeping the college wage premium near an all-time high while reducing the opportunity cost of going to school.
Locked up in America
The Reality of Student Debt Is Different From the Clichés
The deeply indebted college graduate has become a stock character in the national conversation: the art history major with $50,000 in debt, the underemployed barista with $75,000, the struggling poet with $100,000.
The anecdotes have created the impression that such high levels of student debt are typical. But they’re not. They are outliers, and they’re warping our understanding of bigger economic problems.
In fact, the share of income that young adults are devoting to loan repayment has remained fairly steady over the last two decades, according to data the Brookings Institutions is releasing on Tuesday. Only 7 percent of young-adult households with education debt have $50,000 or more of it. By contrast, 58 percent of such households have less than $10,000 in debt, and an additional 18 percent have between $10,000 and $20,000.
Changing Fertility Regimes and the Transition to Adulthood: Evidence from a Recent Cohort.
Andrew J. Cherlin Elizabeth Talbert and Suzumi Yasutake:
Recent demographic trends have produced a distinctive fertility regime among young women and men in their teenage years and their twenties — a period sometimes called early adulthood. Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort, show that by the time the cohort had reached ages 26-31 in 2011, 81% of births reported by women and 87% of births reported by men had occurred to non-college graduates. In addition, 57% of births had occurred outside of marriage for both men and women. Moreover, 64% of women (and 63% of men) who reported a birth had at least one child outside of marriage, a figure that rose to 74% among women (and 70% among men) without 4-year college degrees. It is now unusual for non- college-graduates who have children in their teens and twenties to have all of them within marriage. The implications of these developments are discussed in light of the differing transitions to adulthood of non-college-graduates versus college-graduates and the growing social class inequalities in family patterns.
China: Students Use High Tech ‘James Bond’ Spy Devices to Cheat in College Exams
Nearly 10 million high school students sat China’s national college entrance exams last weekend. The ‘Gaokao‘ is a fiercely competitive, make-or-break test that determines the path of a student’s life. Some tried to improve their chances by using high-tech equipment straight out of a James Bond film.
Police have released photos of some of the devices they confiscated, such as a camera hidden in a pair of glasses and a tiny receiver that looks like a coin.
A hidden coil in a shirt, two batteries, a mobile phone and a receiver are displayed after being found on a student about to take an exam, in Chengdu, Sichuan province, China.Reuters
Google Sells Parent Status to Advertisers
If you’ve ever read “What to Expect When You’re Expecting”, you probably didn’t notice a chapter about Google tracking your parental status in AdWords. Well, this is exactly what Google is doing, as Parental Status is now a demographic subset that advertisers can explicitly target.
This feature went live within the past 12 hours or so, and Google has yet to make an official announcement. However, we’ve already seen it in action, as you can see in the following figure:
Note that many schools, including Madison, use google email and other services.
New, New Inner City Fatherhood
When 15-year old Andre Green found out that his ex-girlfriend, Sonya, was pregnant with his child, he was living with six members of his extended family in a small row house in Camden, New Jersey. His mother was a drug addict. His father, in Andre’s words, was a “dog” who had never even told Andre that he had several half-brothers kicking around the neighborhood. (The boy found out gradually, when he noticed similar-looking children in school and at the supermarket, and asked them who their father was.) Yet despite his poverty, lack of parental support, and the fact that his romantic relationship with Sonya had ended, Andre was excited—even thrilled—to become a father.
“I was like, “Yes! Thank you, Jesus!” he told sociologists Kathryn Edin and Timothy Nelson. Indeed, within several months of his daughter’s birth, Andre had dropped out of school to become Jalissa’s primary caregiver. He took great pride in keeping her well fed, nicely dressed, and even taking her to church. There, despite his youth and joblessness, Andre was celebrated as a devoted dad. “People say, ‘Oh Andre, you’re doing a beautiful job,’” he told the researchers. “They’re like, ‘Andre, I’m very proud of you.’”
Self-Delusion Spreads from Professional to Graduate Education; Consternation Curiously Absent
I want to be clear at the outset: I love literature. I was an English major, and I’ve never regretted it for a moment. I seriously considered pursuing a Ph.D. in English. I could not have a deeper faith in the liberal arts as a path to the betterment of all mankind.
So imagine my dismay at some recent reportage in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Graduate programs in languages and literature are suffering troubles all too familiar to the readers of these pages: In these straitened times, the tenure-track academic appointments for which a doctoral degree is the traditional and necessary preparation are available for only about 60% of the recipients of doctorates in language or literature (a number chillingly reminiscent of the 56%-57% of the last two law-school graduating classes who managed to find a full-time, long-term job requiring a law license within 9-10 months of graduation, though when you exclude school-funded and self-employed positions as well as a few other confounders and irrelevancies, that number is closer to 53%). The Modern Language Association (a trade group for college and graduate educators and scholars in language and literature analogous to AALS) recently released a report conceding “[w]e are faced with an unsustainable reality.”
Chess Site Now Accessible to Visually Impaired People
Thanks to recent improvements, it is really easy to start playing chess games through Lichess using screenreader. The first thing you need to do is to press “Enable blind mode” button, which should be one of first elements you encounter on the site. It is not really possible to play games without blind mode turned on.
If blind mode is on, you are offered textual description of moves and you are presented with labelled buttons. Now it is really easy – pick a player or just choose to play against computer and fun begins. During the game there is a heading called “Textual representation” and following this heading are following information:
Why Free Play Is the Best Summer School
Most schools across the nation have marked the end of another academic year, and it’s time for summer. Time for kids to bolt for the schoolhouse doors for two long months of play, to explore their neighborhoods and discover the mysteries, treasures, and dramas they have to offer. This childhood idyll will hold true for some children, but for many kids, the coming of summer signals little more than a seasonal shift from one set of scheduled, adult-supervised lessons and activities to another.
Unscheduled, unsupervised, playtime is one of the most valuable educational opportunities we give our children. It is fertile ground; the place where children strengthen social bonds, build emotional maturity, develop cognitive skills, and shore up their physical health. The value of free play, daydreaming, risk-taking, and independent discovery have been much in the news this year, and a new study by psychologists at the University of Colorado reveals just how important these activities are in the development of children’s executive functioning.
Executive function is a broad term for cognitive skills such as organization, long-term planning, self-regulation, task initiation, and the ability to switch between activities. It is a vital part of school preparedness and has long been accepted as a powerful predictor of academic performance and other positive life outcomes such as health and wealth. The focus of this study is “self-directed executive function,” or the ability to generate personal goals and determine how to achieve them on a practical level. The power of self-direction is an underrated and invaluable skill that allows students to act productively in order to achieve their own goals.
The First Two Years
The life-course perspective in particular is out of the public eye. Looking more deeply into research on the effects of early life, it is possible to estimate that roughly half of our health as adults is programmed from the time of conception to around two years of age. The importance of these “first thousand days” is the subject of increased interest and study, and explains a lot about the difficulties of focusing on short-term interventions to improve health. Countries with healthier populations structure this formative period by making it easier for parents to parent. In practical terms, this means that in modern societies where most people work outside the home, providing paid parental leave is the single most effective social intervention that can be undertaken for improving health. It can be thought of in the same light as public sanitation systems that make water safe to drink. We all benefit, rich and poor alike, from clean water, from sewage treatment, from immunizations, and other public health measures.
Everyone in a society gains when children grow up to be healthy adults. The rest of the world seems to understand this simple fact, and only three countries in the world don’t have a policy, at least on the books, for paid maternal leave—Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and the United States. What does that say about our understanding, or concern, about the health of our youth?
Kaleem Caire is working on an early childhood program in Madison.
Students with Special Needs Less Likely to Leave Charter Schools than Traditional Public Schools
Center for Reinventing Public Education, via a kind Deb Britt email:
CRPE commissioned Dr. Marcus Winters to analyze the factors driving the special education gap between Denver’s charter and traditional public elementary and middle schools.
Using student-level data, Winters shows that Denver’s special education enrollment gap starts at roughly 2 percentage points in kindergarten and is more than triple that in eighth grade. However, it doesn’t appear to be caused by charter schools pushing students out. Instead, the gap is mostly due to student preferences for different types of schools, how schools classify and declassify students, and the movement of students without disabilities across sectors.
Among the key findings:
Students with special needs are less likely to apply to charter schools in kindergarten and sixth grade: In the gateway grades, when students are most likely to choose schools, those with disabilities are significantly less likely to apply to charter schools than are students without disabilities. This difference explains the majority of the gap in middle school grades, particularly for certain categories of disability.The gap grows significantly between kindergarten and fifth grade: 46% of the growth occurs because charter schools are less likely to classify students as special education, and more likely to declassify them; 54% is due to the number of new general education students enrolling in charter schools, not from the number of students with special needs going down.
Students with special needs in charter schools change schools less often than those in traditional public schools: Five years after enrolling in kindergarten, about 65 percent of charter students with special needs are still in their original schools, while only 37 percent of traditional public school students with special needs are still in their original schools.
Why Boarding Schools Produce Bad Leaders
In Britain, the link between private boarding education and leadership is gold-plated. If their parents can afford it, children are sent away from home to walk a well-trodden path that leads straight from boarding school through Oxbridge to high office in institutions such as the judiciary, the army, the City and, especially, government. Our prime minister was only seven when he was sent away to board at Heatherdown preparatory school in Berkshire. Like so many of the men who hold leadership roles in Britain, he learned to adapt his young character to survive both the loss of his family and the demands of boarding school culture. The psychological impact of these formative experiences on Cameron and other boys who grow up to occupy positions of great power and responsibility cannot be overstated. It leaves them ill-prepared for relationships in the adult world and the nation with a cadre of leaders who perpetuate a culture of elitism, bullying and misogyny affecting the whole of society.
Nevertheless, this golden path is as sure today as it was 100 years ago, when men from such backgrounds led us into a disastrous war; it is familiar, sometimes mocked, but taken for granted. But it is less well known that costly, elite boarding consistently turns out people who appear much more competent than they actually are. They are particularly deficient in non-rational skills, such as those needed to sustain relationships, and are not, in fact, well-equipped to be leaders in today’s world
High-School Dropouts and College Grads Are Moving to Very Different Places
The ability to attract skilled workers is a key factor, if not the key factor, in the growth of cities and metro regions. Cities themselves are understandably keen to tout when their populations are growing, but just tracking overall population can mask the underlying trends that will truly shape the future of our metro areas.
A few weeks ago, I looked at the different places both recent immigrants and U.S.-born Americans are moving since the recession began. But, as I noted then, even these big-picture figures tell us little about the educational levels and skills of the people that are moving and staying. Writing in The Atlantic several years ago, I pointed out that the “means migration”—the movement of highly educated and highly skilled people—is a key factor that shapes which cities will thrive and which will struggle.
What the United States has been seeing is, so to speak, a big talent sort. There have been very different patterns of migration by education and skill, with the highly educated and highly skilled going some places and the less educated and less skilled going to others.
Greased palms and dried fruit
OBESITY, according to a government-sponsored report, could make the current generation of Americans the first in history to live shorter lives than the previous one. A major change in food habits is needed to reverse the trend of widening waistlines (a development which we recently illustrated on our blog Graphic detail). Recognising that people’s dietary preferences develop at an early age, John List of the University of Chicago and Anya Savikhin Samek of the University of Wisconsin-Madison examined in a recent study whether children can be “nudged” (or incentivised) to eat more fruits and less sweets. Their results suggest that the answer is yes.
In a field experiment carried out in Chicago over several weeks, Mr List and Ms Savikhin Samek tested the impact of giving kids an incentive to choose food they normally would not. During after-school programmes dubbed “Kids’ Cafes” in 24 different locations across the city, children aged 6-18 were offered a free snack and could select either a cup with dried fruit (dried banana with acai or dried mango) or a cookie (such as snickerdoodle or chocolate chip). A group of the Kids’ Cafes was randomly selected to offer the children at their particular site an incentive to pick the cup; each time an individual chose the dried fruit over the cookie and ate it in the cafeteria, he or she would receive a small prize worth 50 cents or less (for example a wristband, pen or keychain).
How one unvaccinated child sparked Minnesota measles outbreak
A measles outbreak in Minnesota offers a case study of how the disease is transmitted in the United States today: An unvaccinated person travels abroad, brings measles back and infects vulnerable people — including children who are unprotected because their parents chose not to vaccinate them.
That’s the conclusion of a report published online June 9 in Pediatrics that details the 2011 outbreak that sickened 19 children and two adults in the state.
It began when an unvaccinated 2-year-old was taken to Kenya, where he contracted the measles virus. After returning to the United States, the child developed a fever, cough and vomiting. However, before measles was diagnosed, he passed the virus on to three children in a drop-in child care center and another household member. Contacts then multiplied, with more than 3,000 people eventually exposed.
Don’t Go To College
Go to college if you’re fortunate enough to have the opportunity. I did, I learned a lot (both academically and socially), and I wouldn’t trade that experience for the world. Not everyone needs college, but you should go if you can.
My philosophy about being a C student and not needing to do 80% of the work should also be taken lightly. That strategy works well if you want to follow a path like mine after college: working for small companies that care less about your GPA, or that you can convince to hire you by other means (showing impressive personal projects, advanced skills, etc.). But my GPA was so bad that no big tech company — not Microsoft, not Apple, not Amazon, and definitely not Google — would even consider hiring me. (I tried.)
New York’s Single Test for High School Defined My Life
When I was eleven years old, didn’t speak English well, and worked in a sweatshop, I was accepted into one of New York City’s elite specialized high schools. Now, some want to alter the admissions system that helped change my life.
When I was eleven years old, I took the entrance exam for Hunter College High School, one of New York City’s elite schools and among the best in the country. It changed my life.
I came from a non-English-speaking immigrant family that had moved to New York from Hong Kong only six years earlier. My parents worked in a garment factory in Chinatown, where I helped them every day after school. My family knew absolutely nothing about navigating the New York City public school system, but I was lucky that my Brooklyn elementary school principal identified my academic potential, understood my family’s inexperience, and pointed me to the entry test. I remember stumbling out of the examination room, dazed by questions I had never imagined, many of which I could barely understand. But I was accepted, and the test became the defining event of my life.
It’s Urgent To Put The Liberal Arts Back At The Center Of Education
Here’s the thing. In the understanding of both the great Ancient philosophers and, taking after them, of the thinkers who gave us the Enlightenment and the intellectual scaffolding for our prosperous liberal-democratic society, including the Founding Fathers, democracy did not simply happen. Democracy depended on a robust citizenship, and this citizenship, in turn, was a struggle of all the men (and, now, women) of the polity; it conferred rights as well as responsibilities. In particular, two of the most fundamental requirements of citizenship were virtue and a liberal education.
The expression “liberal education” is quite important. Today, when we think “liberal education”, we think “Would you like fries with that?” But as the common root with the word liberty suggests, liberal education is an education that helps make us free. Only by first understanding not only the empirical scaffolding of our Universe–a.k.a. science–but also its conceptual scaffolding, a.k.a. the ideas, concepts and history which shape the world we live in, can we ever hope to be free, that is to say to be able to make informed, conscious decisions.
Similarly, the great men (and, sorry, they were mostly men) who bequeathed us this wonderful order understood that a regime of majority rule cannot long withstand the test of time without having a citizenship that takes seriously the notion of virtue. The virtues, to Aristotle and others, are not so much about being a goody-two-shoes, but rather about the lifelong effort to reach self-mastery through confronting our passions (today, perhaps, we would say: our addictions) and properly ordering our will towards that which is good. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll see how growth in virtue is itself a form of liberal education.
Without an awareness of these things, a bunch of very smart people who built our world and know the instruction manual have been warning us, we consign ourselves to doom.
Exorbitant Cost of Pseudo-Educating America: The Next Two-Trillion Dollar Bubble
At $1.2 trillion student debt, we may only be 60 percent along the way, but rest assured that it won’t take but 3 to 5 years before this spectacular bubble bursts… and it will do so on the economic backs of the poor, and the ghostly – ghastly might be more apropos – remnants of a fast disappearing middle class.
Two weeks ago, while doing a final screening of old papers kept for no-apparent good reason, I came across a few notes from a graduate business course which I taught over three decades ago. An underlined hyphenated-word stood in front of me teasing both my memory and reason for its use: Porno-Economics. Then, I quickly recalled that my reason for its use had absolutely nothing to do with the economics of porn; and how I explained to my class – mostly graduate engineers with families trying to attain an MBA attending evening classes to improve their chance for career advancement – with my intended meaning appearing in parenthesis in the notes: “worthless economic activity for no other reason than to stimulate and fulfill greed.” It would be more than a decade later that the true father of Porno-Economics, and Federal Reserve Board chairman, Alan Greenspan, would show up (December 1996) with his celebrated cute-ism of Irrational Exuberance… as prelude to the infamous Dot-com bubble burst (1999-2001).
High-School Students Smoking Less, but Texting While Driving More
Parents may no longer need to worry quite as much about their teens smoking and drinking, but texting and emailing while driving is rampant, according to a new government study of U.S. high-school students.
Some 41.4% of students said they had texted or emailed at least once while driving in the previous 30 days when asked last year, according to the broad-based study that tracks teenage behavior.
South Dakota topped the list with 61.3% of teens admitting they texted or emailed while driving. Massachusetts had the lowest rate, at 32.3%. This was the first time the question was asked in the National Risk Behavior Survey of more than 13,000 high schoolers, conducted every two years by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The 1 Thing That Will Improve Math Learning
How can we do a better job of teaching kids math? A different curriculum? New pedagogical strategies? Personalized instruction through technology? All these worthy ideas have their adherents, but another method — reducing math anxiety — may both improve performance and help kids enjoy math more. Sian Beilock and I recently reviewed the research literature on math anxiety with an eye towards remediation. Here are some of the highlights.
Math anxiety means, unsurprisingly, that one feels tension and apprehension in situations involving math. What is surprising is the frequency of the problem, and the young age at which it can start. Fully half of first and second graders feel moderate to severe math anxiety. And many children do not outgrow it; about 25 percent of students attending a four-year college suffer from math anxiety. Among community college students, the figure is 80 percent.
Here’s Why the Student Loan Market Is Completely Insane
President Obama made news this week by expanding a student loan program to broaden the eligibility of borrowers and proposing to limit monthly payments to 10 percent of a student borrower’s income. On the margin, such moves might help. But the administration’s efforts don’t address a more fundamental problem: These loans aren’t calibrated for risk. In other words, students from Harvard and less-prestigious regional colleges are thrown in the same bucket, despite quite different risk profiles.
Under Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) rules governing the insurance of banks, lenders can’t differentiate among schools in assessing credit risk as they do with home buyers and car owners. As a result, “the government has made it difficult for banks to price to default rates,” says Mike Cagney, founder of Social Finance, a socially based student lending operation known informally as SoFi. “By accepting FDIC insurance, banks lose pricing flexibility and can’t charge interest rates commensurate with the quality of schools—and default rates vary widely by schools.”
SoFi has funded more than $650 million in loans to 7,000 borrowers since its founding in 2011. Says Cagney: “The definition of a predatory lender is someone who pushes loans on an individual who can’t afford to pay them back. Under that definition, many of the educational loans made today could be considered predatory.”
On College Debt & lack of K-12 Math Teaching
And the contract terms on private college loans are rigid to the point of cruelty. Borrowers have almost no say and little ability to renegotiate the terms if financial trouble occurs – an inevitability. Many private lenders don’t allow students to pay down the principal of a loan, which means endless payments just to cover the high interest, without ever chipping away at the real amount. Payment options like forbearance are temporary and restricted; prepayment or consolidation are largely forbidden. The most dangerous part for such a significant debt is that there is no escape, no way to ease the burden.
Private or publicly guaranteed student loans are a sideshow. Our K-12 schools should be teaching basic math, skills that students can use to understand the implications of their choices.
The Latest Student-Loan Charade
You can tell an election is coming, because President Obama is promising more student-loan relief to young people who are growing less enthralled with his economic record. The latest exercise unveiled Monday is also supposed to make these young people forget the loan burden that earlier free lunches supposedly provided. The taxpayer losses will come on some other President’s watch.
Specifically, Mr. Obama announced an expansion of the burgeoning disaster known as his Pay As You Earn program. This gift from taxpayers caps monthly student-loan payments at 10% of a borrower’s discretionary income, regardless of how much the borrower owes. Even better, the borrowers have their debts entirely forgiven after 20 years—or merely 10 years if they work in government or nonprofits. Those who work outside the profit-making economy don’t even have to report the forgiven loans as income.
Explaining Asian Americans’ academic advantage over whites
We find that the Asian-American educational advantage over whites is attributable mainly to Asian students exerting greater academic effort and not to advantages in tested cognitive abilities or socio-demographics. We test explanations for the Asian–white gap in academic effort and find that the gap can be further attributed to (i) cultural differences in beliefs regarding the connection between effort and achievement and (ii) immigration status. Finally, we highlight the potential psychological and social costs associated with Asian-American achievement success.
Via Laura Waters.
Sports Should Be Child’s Play
The heightened pressure on child athletes to be, essentially, adult athletes has fostered an epidemic of hyperspecialization that is both dangerous and counterproductive.
One New York City soccer club proudly advertises its development pipeline for kids under age 6, known as U6. The coach-picked stars, “poised for elite level soccer,” graduate to the U7 “pre-travel” program. Parents, visions of scholarships dancing in their heads, enable this by paying for private coaching and year-round travel.
The Value of Autism
My name is Lisa Domican and I am the mother of 2 healthy, energetic, engaging and good-looking teenagers; who are both very autistic.
I co-created the Grace App along with my daughter Grace and a very clever young Games developer called Steve Troughton-Smith.
Grace App is a picture communications system for smart phones that has enabled 30,000 non-verbal people with autism or other communication disabilities to ask for what they want.
Unlike the multitude of picture speaking apps that followed, Grace app was created to be owned and controlled by the person who needs it. The goal is to give the user, the person with the disability, total control over what they want to communicate, and the means to do it independently.
A speech for high school graduates
Last weekend I gave a speech at this year’s graduation event for the Stanford Online High School (OHS) that one of my children has been attending. Here’s the transcript:
Thank you for inviting me to be part of this celebration today—and congratulations to this year’s OHS graduates.You know, as it happens, I myself never officially graduated from high school, and this is actually the first high school graduation I’ve ever been to.
It’s been fun over the past three years—from a suitable parental distance of course—to see my daughter’s experiences at OHS. One day I’m sure everyone will know about online high schools—but you’ll be able to say, “Yes, I was there when that way of doing such-and-such a thing was first invented—at OHS.”
Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and hypnotize the media Tuition is up 1,200 percent in 30 years. Here’s why you’re unemployed, crushed by debt — and no one is helping
The price of a year at college has increased by more than 1,200 percent over the last 30 years, far outpacing any other price the government tracks: food, housing, cars, gasoline, TVs, you name it. Tuition has increased at a rate double that of medical care, usually considered the most expensive of human necessities. It has outstripped any reasonable expectation people might have had for investments over the period. And, as we all know, it has crushed a generation of college grads with debt. Today, thanks to those enormous tuition prices, young Americans routinely start adult life with a burden unknown to any previous cohort and whose ruinous effects we can only guess at.
On the assumption that anyone in that generation still has a taste for irony, I offer the following quotation on the subject, drawn from one of the earliest news stories about the problem of soaring tuition. The newspaper was the Washington Post; the speaker was an assistant dean at a college that had just announced a tuition hike of 19 percent; and the question before him was how much farther tuition increases could go. “Maybe all of a sudden this bubble is going to burst,” he was quoted as saying. “How much will the public take?”
Information Processing: Rare mutations and severe intellectual disability
The paper below describes rare de novo mutations which cause severe intellectual disability. See also Structural genomic variants (CNVs) affect cognition.
By the principle of continuity, I suspect that rare variants of smaller negative effect on cognitive ability also exist. These alleles, although harder to detect, would account for part of the observed population variation in the normal range. As discussed in an earlier post (Common variants vs mutational load), these are likely responsible for additional heritability not included in the h2 ~ 0.5 due to common variants estimated from GCTA.
The Future Of College Financial Aid, According To The Man Who Influences Billions Of It
With college costs continuing to rise and the US economy still sputtering, financial aid for college is more important than ever to families trying to foot the bill. The big question then is what is the future of college financial aid? For that answer I turned to the man at the top, Justin Draeger, the President of the National Association of Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA). The nation’s college aid professionals make up NASFAA’s membership, allowing Draeger to keep his finger on the pulse of what is going on with billions in college aid. Ahead of NASFAA’s annual conference later this month in Nashville, Mr. Draeger took time for the Q&A below.
1. Admissions Deans offer admission to more students than they have room for because they know that not all of those students will enroll. For the same reason, financial aid officers award millions more in aid than is actually budgeted. How do admissions and financial aid professionals collaborate to fill a college’s seats without breaking the financial aid bank?
Generally, the planned collaboration between admission and financial aid offices occurs through an institution’s enrollment management plan and/or policies. This is typically derived from intricate statistical analyses that calculate the probability of students choosing to attend, the students’ expected financial need, and the institutional financial aid dollars available at the school.
Polarizing Plutocracy: Our Broken Higher Education System
The American political system is broken, and one unmistakable sign of it is our inability to bring down soaring levels of student debt or to regulate predatory for-profit colleges. The best solution the Obama administration has been able to propose in this area is a college ratings system that would evaluate colleges on the basis of factors like graduation rates and graduates’ earnings and debt loads.
Frankly, the idea that a ratings system will fix what ails American higher education is a little nuts. It views education as if it were a market like any other, and treats colleges like consumer products. “It’s like rating a blender,” burbled Education Department official Jamienne Studley last week to the New York Times. But while blenders can be tested in a lab, employment statistics can be all too easy to game, as anyone who’s followed recent reporting about bogus law school employment rates can attest.
By taking an approach to regulation that emphasizes “transparency” of information, the Obama administration also places the burden of evaluating schools on students and their families. Less affluent students, who often are poorly advised during the college application process in general, won’t fare particularly well under this system. A more aggressive approach is needed to protect them from the predatory for-profits. For many in this group, far more generous financial aid is needed to make going to college an economically rational decision in the first place.
The Key to Better US News College Rankings
What would it take for a well-regarded institution — such as the University of Rochester, and a few dozen more like it — to be among U.S. News & World Report’s top 20 national universities? Hundreds of millions of dollars and a prayer, according a new peer-reviewed paper co-written by a former Rochester provost and his staff.
The study, published by the journal Research in Higher Education, argues that small movements in the rankings are simply “noise” and that any kind of sustained upward movement is both immensely expensive and nearly impossible.
Ralph Kuncl, a former Rochester provost who is now president of University of Redlands, in California, co-wrote the paper, which was a decade in the making. He started thinking about changes in the rankings when he was vice provost at Johns Hopkins University.
He said “the trustees would go bananas” when Johns Hopkins dropped in the rankings. The administration would then have to explain what had happened.
Parents fight student data mining (do they use google & Facebook?)
Moms and dads from across the political spectrum have mobilized into an unexpected political force in recent months to fight the data mining of their children. In a frenzy of activity, they’ve catapulted student privacy — an issue that was barely on anyone’s radar last spring — to prominence in statehouses from New York to Florida to Wyoming.
A months-long review by POLITICO of student privacy issues, including dozens of interviews, found the parent privacy lobby gaining momentum — and catching big-data advocates off guard. Initially dismissed as a fringe campaign, the privacy movement has attracted powerful allies on both the left and right. The American Civil Liberties Union is pushing for more student privacy protection. So is the American Legislative Exchange Council, the organization of conservative legislators.
When No One Is Safe From Measles
Chalk up another demerit for the antivaccine movement: So far, 2014 is shaping up as the worst year for confirmed cases of the measles since it was declared eliminated as an endemic disease in 2000 in the U.S.
Most of the news and media coverage of the outbreak has focused on the fact that 69 percent of the 288 people sickened so far hadn’t been vaccinated against measles.
This, of course, shouldn’t be a surprise. People who don’t get immunized are prone to getting sick. What’s more noteworthy is that 10 percent of those who’ve fallen ill had been vaccinated and another 20 percent may have been but weren’t sure. Given that almost all the cases originated with unvaccinated individuals, this means vaccine rejecters are spreading a preventable disease not only to their own families but to the rest of the population as well.
A Decade of Degrees Universities are constantly changing and Northwestern is no exception. Its history—old and new—is written in the creation, destruction, and changing popularity of its majors.
Had your great-great-great-grandfather, or thereabouts, bought a $100 “perpetual scholarship” when the University first opened its doors on November 5, 1855, he would have had five departments and two degrees to pick from. Today, not only do you have the ability to attend NU and not be a Methodist man, but you also have 94 different majors to pick from, according to CAESAR.
The path from the University of 1855 to today is filled with antiquated majors and abandoned programs. For instance, in the years following World War I, the University introduced “Military Science” and “Physical Education and Hygiene” to broaden its course offerings, though both programs have since been abandoned. Those programs didn’t get very long in the spotlight: To be prepared for wartime jobs during World War II, more Northwestern students studied math, physics and chemistry.
The period after the war saw a huge change in Northwestern’s curriculum. New majors in “Naval Science” and “Home Economics” were created, presumably on the basis of the idea that sailing and sewing were vital anti-Soviet trades. In light of the struggle against communism, classes in “Western Civilization” to teach “democratic values” grew in popularity. This was accompanied by a renewed emphasis on the sciences to keep Moscow from beating us to the moon. The ’70s brought new technology and new fields of study: In 1971, the Department of Computer Science was created, closely followed in 1972, by the African-American Studies department.
Dads on patrol provide positive example in classrooms
Usually when we think about the parent heading to a PTO meeting, our minds go to moms, but a program in Sun Prarie schools is trying to change that.
They’re called WatchDOGS, DOGS standing for “Dads Of Great Students.”
Every morning at Horizon Elementary School, Principal Rainey Briggs introduces the men who came in for the day to look after the halls and participate in classrooms to the entire student body.
Briggs said the program has grown to be so popular that they had to add days when dads come in.
“It gives us another set of eyes in the building. It gives us another person in the classroom who really wants to be that positive role model for kids from a male’s perspective,” Briggs said.
Little brother, if I had to go to college again
My brother recently moved away from home to begin his first semester of college. I thought about my first semester of college and how much I changed during those four years. As I put myself in his shoes I thought to myself – what would I do differently if I had to go through college one more time? What would I do the same?
So a few weeks ago I sat down and wrote an email for him. I didn’t write it in an attempt to push him towards a different path. I wrote it because I think I would want him to do the same if he’d finished college before me. Here you go.
Start a business
Take something you’re good at, working out, and turn it into a business on the side. Be a physical trainer for people during your free time. Thanks to your classes, your days will be predictable and scheduling sessions will be easy. If there’s one thing [name redacted] and I both regret looking back, it’s not taking advantage of the freedom and free time you have in college.
Universities can’t fulfil the myth, but they can’t become a vocational school either
Is it time to rethink higher education? I’m someone who went through the system and I’m now, to a greater or lesser extent, contributing to its maintenance, so it seems strange that I should advocate its dismantling. Yet I’m beginning to think that I ought to.
Unlike most rants of this nature, I have no complaints about the modern standard of education. The myth of falling standards has been with us since the Roman republic decided that they wanted the south of France as their personal back garden. If they really were falling for that long, we would all be living in caves wondering how our fore bearers were able to create this thing called fire.
Indeed, I think that students today learn a hell of a lot more than I did in my day. Although I may mourn the fact that Lagrangian mechanics is now a footnote on the way to a physics degree, that is not a sign of falling standards, but rather tells us that it is more important to learn other things to obtain a relevant education.
No, my complaint is that universities do not fill the role that there were supposed to play, and they are very inefficient at fulfilling the role that they actually play.
