A century ago, Henry Ford startled the world by doubling his workers’ wages, with some reaching the unheard-of level of $5 a day. Although accounts of Ford’s motivation differ, his decision fit into a larger context: A mass-production economy requires a mass-consumption society. In the absence of broad-based, steadily rising purchasing power, the engine of economic growth will sputter and die.
Fast-forward four decades to the day in the early 1950s that a Ford executive was showing United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther around a state-of-the-art automated assembly plant. The executive pointed to some gleaming new machines and asked Reuther, “How are you going to collect union dues from these guys?” Reuther replied, “How are you going to get them to buy Fords ?” News accounts record no answer to either question; nor do the ensuing 60 years.
This brings us to the present day—to a slow-motion recovery that thus far has left millions of Americans unemployed or underemployed and millions more outside the workforce. One key reason for this sluggish performance is a housing industry that is falling far short of a normal rebound from recessionary lows. Economists estimate that long-term demand for new housing units should average about 1.5 million a year. After overshooting badly between 2000 and 2006, the market collapsed to barely half a million by 2009. New housing starts have increased since then to an annual rate of just under one million, far below long-term trends. According to Neil Irwin of the New York Times, NYT -2.05% investment in new residential property today represents a smaller share of the U.S. economy than at any other time since World War II. If it returned merely to its postwar average share, growth would jump by 2%, adding 1.5 million jobs and knocking a full point off the unemployment rate.
Google ends “creepy” practice of scanning Gmail education apps
Technology giant Google has ended its practice of scanning its users’ Apps for Education accounts for advertising purposes after being sued by students and other Gmail users last year, the company announced Wednesday.
The Google Apps for Education tool suite is a service the company provides for free to more than 30 million students, teachers, and administrators globally. The service includes access to Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and cloud storage.
Users of the Apps for Education tools suite and other Gmail users have alleged that the company’s data scanning practices violated federal and state anti-wiretapping and privacy laws, according to the suit filed in a California federal court.
The plaintiffs have further claimed that the company crossed a “creepy line” by using scanned information to build “surreptitious” profiles of students, according to Education Week. The users who filed suit have sought money damages and an injunction preventing further scanning of accounts. The suit is ongoing, and, after a preliminary hearing in February, the court denied a motion for certification as a class action lawsuit in March.
“Trust but verify”.
When College Isn’t in the Cards
If college isn’t in a high school student’s plan for any reason, the sense of pressure and judgment that some families feel at this time of year can be overwhelming. Many seniors are deciding where they want to begin college in the fall, decisions that will be final on May 1. “I feel judgment like I haven’t felt since my kids were babies,” Adrienne Jones posted on Facebook (where many parents are proudly posting acceptances and decisions). Her son does not plan to enter college.
When a Motherlode reader asked for stories from other parents who have a child who is not interested in going to college, we asked her to tell us a little more. She described a child whose primary interests were in creative pursuits, and who is, at best, “ambivalent” about college. “He loves to learn but heavy-duty academics are not something he relishes, so on that front, I don’t want to push him into a four-year college where he would be miserable and we would spend what amounts to a fortune from our meager budget.” College of some kind may or may not lie in his future, and she is trying, amid some support from friends and some judgment, to feel sanguine. “It would really help to hear stories from other parents whose kids found a meaningful life with decent work, without college,” she wrote, as well as stories of what children who don’t choose college do after senior year.
So we asked, on Facebook, on the blog, and on Twitter, for parents to share their stories of “noncollege-bound kids” or of their noncollege-bound selves. We read about triumphs, we read about alternatives, and we read about regret. As promised, here are some of the stories.
“My partner and I are both college-educated and assumed that that was the route our intelligent child would take,” Weary1 of Seattle wrote. “But as middle and high school progressed it became clear that being intelligent is not the same thing as being scholastically inclined, and when you combine that with adolescent-onset anxiety disorder/clinical depression, well, college becomes less of an instant option. For this child, a gap year, the prospect of a two-year college in a nonliberal-arts field, working in the outdoors job that suits this child to a T … I am glad all these options exist and that we have come to accept that the four-year-college goal is not for everybody.”
Checking My Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege
There is a phrase that floats around college campuses, Princeton being no exception, that threatens to strike down opinions without regard for their merits, but rather solely on the basis of the person that voiced them. “Check your privilege,” the saying goes, and I have been reprimanded by it several times this year. The phrase, handed down by my moral superiors, descends recklessly, like an Obama-sanctioned drone, and aims laser-like at my pinkish-peach complexion, my maleness, and the nerve I displayed in offering an opinion rooted in a personal Weltanschauung. “Check your privilege,” they tell me in a command that teeters between an imposition to actually explore how I got where I am, and a reminder that I ought to feel personally apologetic because white males seem to pull most of the strings in the world.
I do not accuse those who “check” me and my perspective of overt racism, although the phrase, which assumes that simply because I belong to a certain ethnic group I should be judged collectively with it, toes that line. But I do condemn them for diminishing everything I have personally accomplished, all the hard work I have done in my life, and for ascribing all the fruit I reap not to the seeds I sow but to some invisible patron saint of white maleness who places it out for me before I even arrive. Furthermore, I condemn them for casting the equal protection clause, indeed the very idea of a meritocracy, as a myth, and for declaring that we are all governed by invisible forces (some would call them “stigmas” or “societal norms”), that our nation runs on racist and sexist conspiracies. Forget “you didn’t build that;” check your privilege and realize that nothing you have accomplished is real.
University of Michigan faculty question administrator pay in letter to Board of Regents
An open letter to University of Michigan’s Board of Regents from about a dozen of the school’s faculty criticizes the school’s administrative pay and bonus system.
“The University is in desperate and urgent need of fiscal reform,” the letter, dated April 20, states. Reform, it continues, should include: “arresting the steep increases in salaries to top administrators, reforming the secretive bonus culture of the Fleming administration building.”
In the 40-page letter, the authors ask regents to freeze the salaries of upper administrators, begin releasing the full salary information of employees, instead of just releasing the base salaries that are required by law, and review supplemental pay practices at the school.
The letter’s authors suggest that faculty pay has been increasing modestly in the last decade, while administrator pay at the school has increased substantially, both through hikes in base salaries and through supplemental pay.
Dario Gaggio, a history professor at U-M who authored the letter with about a dozen other faculty members, said he hopes the letter will help bring about change.
Big data and education
A FEW years ago a group of American educators got together to talk about a common problem. School systems were being swamped by data—like every other sector of the economy. And like other industries, they had no idea how to respond. But unlike businesses, most schools aren’t competitors. So they looked at how they could team up to solve their problems.
They created a computer system to store data in a secure, common format that gave the schools complete control over what data they collected, how it was used and with whom that data was shared. In a nod to transparency and civic responsibility, the software was open source. A non-profit organisation was formed to run it, backed with $100m from the Gates and Carnegie foundations. A blue-ribbon board of directors was formed, mainly educators but also Bob Wise, a former governor from West Virginia.
And so inBloom was born. But on April 21st, less than two years later, the group announced it is shutting down.
Why the flame out? After being warmly embraced by school districts in America, inBloom saw them pull out after parents and privacy advocates heard about the plans and feared for student privacy.
The Adjunct Revolt: How Poor Professors Are Fighting Back
Mary-Faith Cerasoli has been reduced to “sleeping in her car, showering at college athletic centers and applying for food stamps,” The New York Times recently reported. Is she unemployed? No, in fact, she is a college professor— but an adjunct one, meaning she is hired on a short-term contract with no possibility of tenure.
A spate of research about the contingent academic workforce indicates that Cerasoli’s circumstances are not exceptional. This month, a report by the American Association of University Professors showed that adjuncts now constitute 76.4 percent of U.S. faculty across all institutional types, from liberal-arts colleges to research universities to community colleges. A study released by the U.S. House of Representatives in January reveals that the majority of these adjuncts live below the poverty line.
Getting What Students Pay For In College
Our best public universities have spotty records in teaching such subjects as U.S.history, science and writing, and are having a persistent problem with grade inflation, according to a new report from the organization I work for, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). Our report, Getting What You Pay For?: A Look at America’s Top-Ranked Public Universities, looks at key areas of quality cost effectiveness at Berkeley, Penn State, the University of Virginia and other “Top 50” public flagship universities in the United States.
Seventeen of the 50 schools require two or fewer of seven key subjects and another 21 require only three. At many schools the grading standards have grown weak, too. Between 1960 and 2006, the University of Michigan saw its average GPA increase by 0.65, the University of Wisconsin at Madison by 0.7, and the University of California at Berkeley by 0.76–almost the whole way from a C+ to a B+ average. Across schools in the study, large increases are the rule, not the exception.
Use of Medication Prescribed for Emotional or Behavioral Difficulties Among Children Aged 6–17 Years in the United States, 2011–2012
Mental health problems are common chronic conditions in children. Medication is often prescribed to treat the symptoms of these conditions. Few population-based studies have examined the use of prescription medication to treat mental health problems among younger as well as older school-aged children.
A new NCHS report describes the sociodemographic characteristics of children aged 6–17 years prescribed medication or taking medication during the past 6 months for emotional or behavioral difficulties, and describes parental reports of the perceived benefit of this medication.
Seven and one-half percent of children aged 6–17 years used prescribed medication during the past 6 months for emotional or behavioral difficulties.
A higher percentage of children insured by Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program used prescribed medication for emotional or behavioral difficulties than children with private health insurance or no health insurance.A higher percentage of children in families having income below 100% of the poverty level used prescribed medication for emotional or behavioral difficulties than children in families at 100% to less than 200% of the poverty level.
More than one-half of children who used prescribed medication for emotional or behavioral difficulties had a parent report that this medication helped the child “a lot.”
Self-Regulation: American Schools Are Failing Nonconformist Kids
f the possible child heroes for our times, young people with epic levels of the traits we valorize, the strongest contender has got to be the kid in the marshmallow study. Social scientists are so sick of the story that some threaten suicide if forced to read about him one more time. But to review: The child—or really, nearly one-third of the more than 600 children tested in the late ’60s at Bing Nursery School on the Stanford University campus—sits in a room with a marshmallow. Having been told that if he abstains for 15 minutes he’ll get two marshmallows later, he doesn’t eat it. This kid is a paragon of self-restraint, a savant of delayed gratification. He’ll go on, or so the psychologists say, to show the straight-and-narrow qualities required to secure life’s sweeter and more elusive prizes: high SAT scores, money, health.
I began to think about the marshmallow kid and how much I wanted my own daughter to be like him one day last fall while I sat in a parent-teacher conference in her second-grade classroom and learned, as many parents do these days, that she needed to work on self-regulation. My daughter is nonconformist by nature, a miniature Sarah Silverman. She’s wildly, transgressively funny and insists on being original even when it causes her pain. The teacher at her private school, a man so hip and unthreatened that he used to keep a boa constrictor named Elvis in his classroom, had noticed she was not gently going along with the sit-still, raise-your-hand-to-speak-during-circle-time program. “So …” he said, in the most caring, best-practices way, “have you thought about occupational therapy?”
A High-School Freshman’s Investing Lesson: Time Horizons Matter
You don’t have to be old enough to drive to play master of the universe. I’m just 15 years old, but in a national stock-market game sponsored by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, I quickly grasped the way hedge fund managers must feel when they make decisions.
My friend Zachary Weiss and I had two months to beat 1,235 other groups of New Jersey high schoolers. There wasn’t any real money at stake, so we were playing for glory and, in the case of Northern Valley Demarest Regional High School, where we’re freshmen, a tour of the New York Stock Exchange.
Unfortunately, we won’t be visiting the Big Board. We didn’t even finish in the top half. But we learned some valuable lessons. First, that you shouldn’t have a two-month time frame in mind when investing. And second, that people do funny things when their own money isn’t at stake.
As the game was getting underway, my dad, who writes The Wall Street Journal’s Ahead of the Tape column, showed me some of the most volatile securities out there, which my partner and I thought of as essential for victory in a short-term game where anything can happen.
Deciding the market probably would rise, we sold short securities that produced double the daily return of VIX futures. My dad explained that, on average, they should lose over 90% of their value each year. We also bought securities that did the opposite. We used the proceeds from our shorts and bought on margin, increasing our risk and potential return. Then Vladimir Putin came into our lives and we found ourselves in 1,016th place.
Are US universities choosing rich Chinese students over Asian Americans?
An editorial in the Chinese financial magazine Caixin points out another potential obstacle for Asian Americans trying to get into college: hundreds of thousands of wealthy Chinese students that are flocking to US schools every year.
American universities, especially elite schools, have been suspected of admitting a disproportionately low number of Asian American students given their high test scores and academic performance. Over the past five to six years, these schools—faced with less private and public funding—have also started depending on international students who pay full tuition to pick up the bill. “Asian Americans now face a double barrier to entry at US universities,” writes the Caixin author Wu Yuci.
Grace app for autism
The Grace App for Autism helps autistic and other special needs children to communicate effectively, by building semantic sequences from relevant images to form sentences. The app can be easily customized by using picture and photo vocabulary of your choice.
Rural states such as Iowa, Vermont and Nebraska are among the best at keeping kids in school until graduation — but other top performers include Texas, Tennessee and Missouri
“This is really, really good news,” said John Gomperts, the president of America’s Promise Alliance, a coalition of nonprofits, businesses and educators focused on raising the graduation rate. “For a country that can feel like it’s struggling to make progress, this is a pretty big story of positive change.”
Education Secretary Arne Duncan will discuss the data Monday morning at a “Building a Grad Nation” summit hosted by America’s Promise. The group released a report Monday detailing state-by-state performance, based on 2012 data.
But the strong national gains mask sharp disparities between states — and between groups of students.
In Nevada, fewer than one in four students with disabilities earns a high school diploma. In Montana, 81 percent do.In Minnesota, just 59 percent of low-income students graduate, compared with 87 percent of their wealthier peers. The disparity between income groups is almost as big in Colorado, Connecticut, South Dakota and Wyoming.
Connecticut Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor noted that the state has made some progress: Graduation rates jumped more than 6 percent for low-income students in 2012. But that only brought them up to a 70 percent graduation rate — compared to a 94 percent rate for their more affluent peers. “There remains much more work to do,” Pryor said. To make up ground, the state is focusing on chronically absent students. It’s also pushing to expand choice by introducing more magnet and charter schools in a bid to keep more teenagers engaged.
Elite journals are losing their position of privilege
The digital age has brought forth many changes to scholarly publishing. For instance, we now read papers, not journals. We used to read papers physically bound with other papers in an issue within a journal, but now we just read papers, downloaded individually, and independently of the journal. In addition, journals have become easier to produce. A physical medium is no longer necessary, so the production, transportation, dissemination and availability of papers have drastically increased. The former weakened the connection between papers and their respective journals; papers now are more likely to stand on their own. The latter allowed the creation of a vast number of new journals that, in principle, could easily compete at par with long-established journals.
In a previous blog, and paper, we documented that the most widely used index of journal quality, the impact factor, is becoming a poorer predictor of the quality of the papers therein. The IF already had many well documented and openly acknowledged problems, so that analysis just added another problem to its continued. The data set used for that analysis was as comprehensive as possible, and included thousand of journals. During subsequent discussions, the issue came up of whether the patterns we documented at a large scale also applied to the handful of elite journals that have traditionally deemed to be the best.
Hence, in a follow-up paper we examined Nature, Science Cell, Lancet, NEJM, JAMA and PNAS (just in case, the last 3 are New Engl. J. Med., J. Am. Med. Ass., and Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.). We identified the 1% and 5% most cited papers in every year in the past 40 years, and determined the percentage of these papers being published by each of these elite journals. In all cases, except for JAMA and the Lancet, the proportion of top papers published by elite journals has been declining since the late-eighties.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: How to Get Rich Just by Moving
What if you could get a 20 percent discount on everything from beer to real estate? You can. You just have to move to Danville, Illinois.
And that’s assuming you live in a town with average prices. Residents of Honolulu and New York, the two most expensive cities in the U.S., would see a 35 percent drop in their cost of living in Danville, according to new data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Feel like moving to Pittsburgh? Now there’s a city in a sweet spot, with cheap prices and, according to new BEA data that adjust average incomes for local inflation, relatively high incomes. Pittsburgh is 6.6 percent cheaper than the national average, and residents are the 36th best-paid in the U.S., bringing home almost $48,000 annually per person.
Locally, Middleton’s property taxes are 16% less than Madison’s for a similar home.
ASA Statement on Using Value-Added Models for Educational Assessment
American Statistical Association:
Many states and school districts have adopted Value-Added Models (VAMs) as part of educational accountability systems. The goal of these models, which are also referred to as Value-Added Assessment (VAA) Models, is to estimate effects of individual teachers or schools on student achievement while accounting for differences in student background. VAMs are increasingly promoted or mandated as a component in high-stakes decisions such as determining compensation, evaluating and ranking teachers, hiring or dismissing teachers, awarding tenure, and closing schools.
The American Statistical Association (ASA) makes the following recommendations regarding the use of VAMs:
The ASA endorses wise use of data, statistical models, and designed experiments for improving the quality of education.
VAMs are complex statistical models, and high-level statistical expertise is needed to develop the models and interpret their results.
Estimates from VAMs should always be accompanied by measures of precision and a discussion of the assumptions and possible limitations of the model. These limitations are particularly relevant if VAMs are used for high-stakes purposes.
VAMs are generally based on standardized test scores, and do not directly measure potential teacher contributions toward other student outcomes.
VAMs typically measure correlation, not causation: Effects – positive or negative – attributed to a teacher may actually be caused by other factors that are not captured in the model.
Under some conditions, VAM scores and rankings can change substantially when a different model or test is used, and a thorough analysis should be undertaken to evaluate the sensitivity of estimates to different models.
Much more on value added assessment, here.
A year into his School in the Cloud documentary, Jerry Rothwell shares the highs and lows of watching students teach themselves
British director Jerry Rothwell, the winner of the first annual Sundance Institute | TED Prize Filmmaker Award, has spent the past year trailing TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra as he sets up the first locations of the School in the Cloud. Traveling between a remote village in India and a forward-thinking elementary school in the U.K., Rothwell has watched Mitra, a Newcastle University professor, plant the seeds of his global education experiment that lets children learn on their own, and from each other, by tapping into online resources and their inner sense of wonder.
The subject matter of School in the Cloud is definitely different from Rothwell’s previous films, which include Donor Unknown, about a sperm donor and his many offspring; Town of Runners, about an Ethiopian village famed for its athletes; and Heavy Load, about a group of people with learning disabilities who form a punk band. But Rothwell says he has long been interested in education and technology, so was up for this challenge.
School in the Cloud is slated for release in April 2015. Now that Rothwell is halfway through the project, we thought we’d check in with him to see how it’s going …
When use of pseudo-maths adds up to fraud
An academic journal called the Notices of the American Mathematical Society may seem an unlikely periodical to have exposed fraud on a massive scale. The investigation, published in the current edition, is certainly not going to sit among the nominees for next year’s Pulitzer prizes. But a quartet of mathematicians have just published a piercing article in the public interest and in the nick of time.
In their paper, entitled Pseudo-Mathematics and Financial Charlatanism, they make the case that the vast majority of claims being made for quantitative investment strategies are false.*
By calling it fraud, the academics command attention, and investors would be wise to beware. With interest rates about to turn, and a stock market bull run ageing fast, there have never been such temptations to eschew traditional bond and equity investing and to follow the siren sales patter of those who claim to see patterns in the historical data.
The (unnamed) targets of the mathematicians’ ire range from individual technical analysts who identify buy and sell signals in a stock chart, all the way up to managed futures funds holding billions of dollars of clients assets.
There will be many offenders, too, among investment managers pushing “smart beta” strategies, which aim to construct a portfolio based on signals from history.
Commentary on School Choice vs Status Quo Models
Several letters to the NY Times:
A prevailing belief in the United States is that education is the great opportunity equalizer — a silver bullet that can lift kids out of poverty and transform them into productive citizens. Yet the reality of our “make or break” education system is that race and social class largely determine the quality of one’s educational life, from pre-K to graduate school.
“Global cities” like New York, Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles boast diverse populations and cultural depth, but their public school systems remain highly segregated. Much of this has to do with housing and rapid rates of gentrification. But it also has to do with the slow repeal of public policy focused on school integration in favor of privatization, accountability schemes and school choice. A recent University of California, Los Angeles study, for example, argues that in New York City, private and charter schools are exacerbating the problem of “apartheid” schooling.
Getting into the Ivies
ASK just about any high school senior or junior — or their parents — and they’ll tell you that getting into a selective college is harder than it used to be. They’re right about that. But the reasons for the newfound difficulty are not well understood.
Population growth plays a role, but the number of teenagers is not too much higher than it was 30 years ago, when the youngest baby boomers were still applying to college. And while many more Americans attend college than in the past, most of the growth has occurred at colleges with relatively few resources and high dropout rates, which bear little resemblance to the elites.
So what else is going on? One overlooked factor is that top colleges are admitting fewer American students than they did a generation ago. Colleges have globalized over that time, deliberately increasing the share of their student bodies that come from overseas and leaving fewer slots for applicants from the United States.
Related: “Financial Aid Leveraging”.
The lowest score – 6% – was in the US
BBC:
William Shakespeare is the UK’s greatest cultural icon, according to the results of an international survey released to mark the 450th anniversary of his birth.
Five thousand young adults in India, Brazil, Germany, China and the USA were asked to name a person they associated with contemporary UK arts and culture.
Shakespeare was the most popular response, with an overall score of 14%.
The result emerged from a wider piece of research for the British Council.
The Queen and David Beckham came second and third respectively. Other popular responses included JK Rowling, Adele, The Beatles, Paul McCartney and Elton John.
Related: wisconsin2.org.
Travel Agents, Technology, and Higher Ed
I am a higher ed technology optimist.
I think that technology will improve higher education.
I believe that we will leverage technology to tackle challenges around costs, access,and quality.
But what if I’m wrong?
What if technology ends up pushing us backwards in higher ed?
One reason why I worry about technology and higher ed is because I like to go on vacation with my family.
To plan our vacations we use technology. Websites to search out destinations. Kayak to find flight. Airbnb to find someplace to stay.
And each year we struggle to find family vacations that will work for everyone. How to satisfy the needs to two teenagers and their parents? What happens when you throw in grandparents? Or younger cousins?
Parent to Obama: Let me tell you about the Common Core test Malia and Sasha don’t have to take but Eva does
We have something very important in common: daughters in the seventh grade. Since your family walked onto the national stage in 2007, I’ve had a feeling that our younger daughters have a lot in common, too. Like my daughter Eva, Sasha appears to be a funny, smart, loving girl, who has no problem speaking her mind, showing her feelings, or tormenting her older sister.
There is, however, one important difference between them: Sasha attends private school, while Eva goes to public school. Don’t get me wrong, I fully support your decision to send Malia and Sasha to private school, where it is easier to keep them safe and sheltered. I would have done the same. But because she is in private school, Sasha does not have to take Washington’s standardized test, the D.C. CAS, which means you don’t get a parent’s-eye view of the annual high-stakes tests taken by most of America’s children.
I have been watching Eva take the Massachusetts MCAS since third grade. To tell you the truth, it hasn’t been a big deal. Eva is an excellent student and an avid reader. She goes to school in a suburban district with a strong curriculum and great teachers. She doesn’t worry about the tests, and she generally scores at the highest level.
Much more on the Common Core, here.
Trying to Improve Status Quo Education Models; Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
DC Prep operates four charter schools here with 1,200 students in preschool through eighth grade. The schools, whose students are mostly poor and black, are among the highest performing in Washington. Last year, DC Prep’s flagship middle school earned the best test scores among local charter schools, far outperforming the average of the city’s traditional neighborhood schools as well.
Another, less trumpeted, distinction for DC Prep is the extent to which it — as well as many other charter schools in the city — relies on the Walton Family Foundation, a philanthropic group governed by the family that founded Walmart
Since 2002, the charter network has received close to $1.2 million from Walton in direct grants. A Walton-funded nonprofit helped DC Prep find building space when it moved its first two schools from a chapel basement into former warehouses that now have large classrooms and wide, art-filled hallways.
One-third of DC Prep’s teachers are alumni of Teach for America, whose largest private donor is Walton. A Walton-funded advocacy group fights for more public funding and autonomy for charter schools in the city. Even the local board that regulates charter schools receives funding
Related: Madison’s long term disastrous reading results, at $15k/student annual spending.
Colleges Want Students with Character, But Can’t Measure It
Jon Boeckenstedt devours data. As DePaul University’s associate vice president for enrollment management, he studies how the institution’s 16,000 undergraduates are doing, trying to forecast their performance. Many in his position would turn to standardized tests like the SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test) and the ACT (American College Testing). But Boeckenstedt believes the tests carry too much weight in college admissions. “We know there are students for whom the tests don’t represent their true ability,” he says. Today more than 800 four-year colleges and universities in the United States no longer require standardized tests as part of their admissions process—that’s about 20 percent of the total. In 2011, DePaul became the largest private nonprofit among these.
The flaws in standardized testing are well-documented at this point. They punish disadvantaged students and minorities, entrench class lines, and their predictive powers only forecast a student’s progress as far as the first semester of their freshman year. The University of California, Berkeley1 economist Jesse M. Rothstein has found that the combination of a student’s high school grades and demographic information predicted first-year grades in college about as well as her high school grades and SAT scores do. Based on his experience evaluating undergraduate performance, Boeckenstedt agrees. “It’s double counting,” he says.
Powerful Force Teaching Students the Very Essence of Being Americans
During the continuously explosive debates about education reform and teacher evaluation, no mention has been made by the media in all its forms of a persistently effective national teaching force in enabling college students to know how to become self-governing Americans for the rest of their lives.
Nor have I previously identified the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education as not only a foremost civil rights and civil liberties leader, but also as an educational leader in truly Americanizing American colleges — an education American students almost never get in their classes.
I have, of course, often cited another such tirelessly liberating educational force, John Whitehead’s Rutherford Institute. However, I focus now on the future impact of FIRE being primarily responsible for the first ever U.S. state, Virginia, to bring full college students’ First Amendment rights to all outdoor areas of university campuses there instead of tiny “free speech zones.”
To Take the Helm, State Ed Agencies Need a Navigator
Today the Fordham Institute added to a growing stack of reports about what states can do to support dramatic improvements in K-12 education. It’s important to think hard about states, which have constitutional authority over K-12 and provide most of the money, but historically have done little to drive reform efforts.
Enter our friend and colleague Andy Smarick, whose latest report with Juliet Squires suggests state education agencies can play an effective leadership role if they become smaller, and get most of their work done via contracts and partnerships with independent organizations. These ideas, adapted from the pioneering work of Osborne and Gaebler on reinventing government, suggest SEAs need to develop the capacity to steer rather than row.
While Andy and Juliet’s take on the state role is clarifying, it leaves three nagging questions: First, how will states find the independent providers they need to perform key functions, including providing technical assistance to low-performing schools? Second, how will the SEA attract high-level staff capable of overseeing key contractors? Finally, how will the SEA get the political backup to act decisively?
Why (And How) Students Are Learning To Code
Coding is more important now than ever before. With computer related jobs growing at a rate estimated to be 2x faster than other types of jobs, coding is becoming an important literacy for students to have and a more integral part of education and curricula. The handy infographic below takes a look at some of the interesting statistics about coding and computer science jobs. So if you aren’t yet sure why learning to code is important, you’ll find out below. Keep reading to learn more!
What Will Become of the Library?
Around the turn of the 20th century—a golden age for libraries in America—the Snead Bookshelf Company of Louisville, Ky., developed a new system for large-stack library shelving. Snead’s multifloor stack systems can still be seen in many important libraries built in that era, for instance at Harvard, Columbia, the Vatican, and at Bryant Park in New York City. Besides storing old bundles of bound paper, Snead’s stacks provided load-bearing structural support to these venerable buildings. To remove the books would literally invite collapse.
A recent attempt by the New York Public Library to do away with the stacks at its main branch and move its research collection to New Jersey invited just this concern. Engineers described the idea of removing the shelves that support the Rose Reading Room as “cutting the legs off the table while dinner is being served.” The plan was to transform the interior of the iconic 42nd Street building from its original purpose—a massive storage space for books with a few reading rooms attached—to a more open, services-oriented space with many fewer books on-site. An outcry from scholars and preservationists may yet halt the NYPL’s renovation, with a final verdict on the way this year.
The Student Becomes the Teacher
Over the past year, a boy genius from Mongolia has been schooling MIT on how to improve the elite institution’s free online courses.
When he was just 15, the Mongolian wunderkind Battushig Myanganbayar earned a perfect score in MIT’s first massive open online course, or MOOC. Designers of the course touted him as a poster boy for the power of free courses to spread high-quality education to the farthest reaches of the globe, and the New York Times hailed his story. But leaders of edX, the consortium started by MIT and Harvard University to develop free online courses, also did something else: They offered the star student a job, hoping he could make their MOOCs work better for other high schoolers.
As it turns out, edX needed the help. Despite the hope that courses from name-brand universities would draw students from high schools and less-selective colleges, some 70 percent of people taking edX courses already hold a college degree. MOOCs today are primarily serving the education haves, not disadvantaged learners.
“That certainly surprised me,” said Anant Agarwal, the CEO of edX and the instructor of the course Myanganbayar aced. “I expected more people who were in college [and high school],” he added. “We’re looking to change a few things to increase that number.” (Other MOOC providers have seen similar demographic trends, he notes.)
Amid Affirmative Action Ruling, Some Data on Race and College Enrollment
Data from the National Center for Education Statistics suggest that there has been a convergence among races going to college in recent years. But though there has been progress in equal representation in college for high-school graduates of different races, affirmative action can only help with one barrier to higher education. The high-school graduation rates for black and Hispanic students remain low and there are growing disparities by income.
College-enrollment rates by race: Among all high-school graduates, about 67% went to either a two- or four-year college, according to the most recent Digest of Educational Statistics prepared by the Education Department. That number is a three-year moving average for 2012 that aims to smooth out annual volatility.
Breaking it down by race, 69% of Hispanic high-school graduates, 67% of white graduates and 62% of black graduates went on to college in 2012. More than 80% of Asian graduates enrolled in a higher-education program.
Student-Debt Forgiveness Plans Skyrocket, Raising Fears Over Costs, Higher Tuition
Government officials are trying to rein in increasingly popular federal programs that forgive some student debt, amid rising concerns over the plans’ costs and the possibility they could encourage colleges to push tuition even higher.
Enrollment in the plans—which allow students to rack up big debts and then forgive the unpaid balance after a set period—has surged nearly 40% in just six months, to include at least 1.3 million Americans owing around $72 billion, U.S. Education Department records show.
The popularity of the programs comes as top law schools are now advertising their own plans that offer to cover a graduate’s federal loan repayments until outstanding debt is forgiven. The school aid opens the way for free or greatly subsidized degrees at taxpayer expense.
At issue are two federal loan repayment plans created by Congress, originally to help students with big debt loads and to promote work in lower-paying jobs outside the private sector.
A Lack of Affirmative Action Isn’t Why Minority Students Are Suffering
To this end, the Supreme Court’s decision Tuesday in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action upholding the ban on affirmative action in public-university admissions takes America one step closer to President Kennedy’s dream. In a 6-2 decision, the Court held that a ballot initiative by Michigan residents to bar the use of race preferences as a factor of admission was constitutional.
On a Court that has consistently issued closely contested opinions—often in 5-4 decisions—the overwhelming majority of the Justices recognized the importance and the legality of people in several states like Michigan to prohibit the use of race as a factor in admissions. Despite the commentary to the contrary which is likely to follow in the coming days, the Court did not address whether colleges or universities could use race as a factor of admission—they wisely left the decision to the voters in individual states to make such a decision.
Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy opined:
Here, the principle that the consideration of race in admissions is permissible when certain conditions are met is not being questioned…. The decision by Michigan voters reflects the ongoing national dialogue about such practices.
Reinventing School Lunches
IDEO recently took on a particularly picky client: Kids. More specifically, kids who should be eating school lunches on the regular, but weren’t.
The San Francisco Unified School District hired the design firm (through a donation from the Sarah & Evan Williams Foundation) last spring to answer a nagging, persistent question: How do you get kids to eat lunch at school, and get them to do so consistently?
This was a big problem. The district has more than 55,000 students attending 114 schools. Nearly 60 percent of them qualify for free or reduced lunch, but only 60 percent qualifying students were taking advantage of it. Only around 40 percent of all students were eating the lunches on a regular basis. It was a wasted opportunity, and an expensive one at that. “The school district was running a huge operation at what ended up being a deficit because kids weren’t really participating,” says Sandy Speicher, an associate partner at IDEO.
Wisconsin Sen. Olsen unbowed by pressure from Common Core opponents
Olsen said he sees the Common Core standards as an improvement over Wisconsin’s old standards and points to support from the conservative Fordham Foundation and business leaders like Bill Gates, who argue the standards are needed to remain competitive in a global economy. He wants to avoid a situation similar to Indiana, which dropped Common Core only to end up adopting something similar anyway.
While he thinks that some groups are using the issue to “gin up” membership and hopes it will fade away after the 2014 elections, he also says the issue’s staying power will likely depend on how Gov. Scott Walker handles it.
“The governor put the money in the budget for the [Smarter Balanced] test, and I was asking him and his staff all along, ‘Is he going to stand strong on his position supporting this?'” Olsen said. “And all of a sudden, one day, he turned 180 degrees. ‘Well, we can do better.’ Well, I’ve been waiting to find out what ‘better’ is. I’ve been waiting to find out what ‘more rigorous’ is. I’ve been waiting to find out what’s the problem is. It’s easy to say this stuff, but there’s nothing behind it. And when you say things like this, people believe it.”
Links: Luther Olsen.
Those Master’s-Degree Programs at Elite U
igher education has a long and fraught relationship with the labor market. From colonial colleges training clergymen to the Morrill Act, normal schools, and the great 20th-century expansion of mass higher education, colleges have always been in the business of training people for careers. The oldest university in the Western world, in Bologna, started as a law school. Ask students today why they’re going to college and the most common answer is, by far, “to get a job.”
But most colleges don’t like to see themselves that way. In educators’ own minds, they are communities of scholars above all else. Colleges tend to locate their educational missions among the lofty ideals of the humanities and liberal arts, not the pedestrian tasks of imparting marketable skills.
In part, this reflects the legitimate complexity of some institutional missions. But the fact remains that most professors were hired primarily to teach, most institutions are not research universities, most students are enrolled in preprofessional programs, and, it seems, few colleges have undergraduate curricula that match their supposed commitment to the liberal-arts ideal.
10 Rules for Students and Teachers Popularized by John Cage
One of those whom he inspired was Sister Corita Kent. An unlikely fixture in the Los Angeles art scene, the nun was an instructor at Immaculate Heart College and a celebrated artist who considered Saul Bass, Buckminster Fuller and Cage to be personal friends.
In 1968, she crafted the lovely, touching Ten Rules for Students and Teachers for a class project. While Cage was quoted directly in Rule 10, he didn’t come up with the list, as many website sites claim. By all accounts, though, he was delighted with it and did everything he could to popularize the list. Cage’s lover and life partner Merce Cunningham reportedly kept a copy of it posted in his studio until his dying days. You can check the list out below:
RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.
RULE TWO: General duties of a student: Pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.
RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher: Pull everything out of your students.
RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.
RULE FIVE: Be self-disciplined: this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
Highly Profitable Nonprofit Universities
Nonprofit universities make money, but they expense those profits away in various ways that don’t help students or taxpayers.
One in five UK teachers abused online by parents and pupils, survey says
One in five teachers have received abuse aimed at them on social media and online forums from parents and pupils – some as young as seven – a survey by the NASUWT union has found.
One teacher about to go on maternity leave was told online by a parent: “My son will fail now because of you.”Another discovered a Facebook page set up by a pupil claiming the teacher wanted to kill him. One pupil told a teacher via Twitter: “You are a paedo and your daughter is a whore.”
About 7,500 teachers responded to a survey on the use of technology conducted by the NASUWT, which is holding its annual conference in Birmingham.
The Economics of Prestige or stuntcasting for cash
Whether or not Krugman’s scholarship and teaching ability warrant such a superior salary is certainly worthy of debate, but the real issue for most commentators is not how much CUNY will pay Krugman, but how little they are asking him to do. CUNY is essentially offering him what used to be called a sinecure. Like ecclesiastical appointments “without the care of souls,” the terms of Krugman’s contract require him to do almost nothing his first year and then teach just one graduate seminar each year for as long as he would like to stay at CUNY. This required teaching in the second year is less than half of the usual course load for most distinguished professors at the Graduate Center, some of whom teach three classes per year and advise several dissertations at a time. Whether Krugman will advise or sit on any dissertation committees remains to be seen.
It is clear from his acceptance email however, that he is interested in doing as little work as possible: “My biggest concern is time, not money — and your description of the time commitment, one seminar per year plus public events and commitments to LIS [Luxembourg Inequality Study] (which I would want to do in any case) sounds as if it’s within the parameters I had in mind.”
So, in essence, for the first two years CUNY is paying Krugman $450,000 (plus $10,000 in travel and research costs each year, and a one-time relocations cost of $10,000) to teach one seminar and to participate in public events.
On the surface this seems like an outrageous expenditure, but there is an obvious market logic at work here. It is clear that CUNY and the Graduate Center are banking on the brand recognition that a figure like Krugman bestows upon a university. As a Facebook friend of mine succinctly put it, Krugman is essentially “stuntcasting for cash,” and one has to wonder how long before his name is plastered on subway ads promoting CUNY’s “best and brightest.”
Family Structure and Inequality
What are the determinants of inequality? The first step in answering this question is defining exactly what we mean by inequality. A working paper by Chetty, Hendren, Kline, and Saez takes an interesting approach: it measures inequality based on the likelihood that a child born into a poor family will rise in the overall income distribution.
They call this measure “absolute upward mobility.” If absolute upward mobility is high, it means a child born into a poor family has a good chance of rising in the overall income distribution. If it is low, that means the poor child will likely be poor when she grows up.
The authors construct upward mobility for different cities. A city with a high score is considered more equal; a child born to a relatively poor family in the city has a good chance of rising in the income distribution. A city with a low score is more unequal, as a poor child is likely to remain poor as an adult.
The part of the study that interests us most is the correlation between their measure of inequality and other variables at the city level. In other words, what characterizes the most “unequal” cities?
Denied University of Michigan hopeful learns tough lesson
First, we should remember that Brooke Kimbrough is still in high school. She is, as the Beatles once sang, just 17.
So even if she ruffled feathers this past week claiming she should have been admitted to the University of Michigan — despite lower grades and test scores — because she is African American and the school needs diversity, the best thing is not to insult her or dismiss her.
The best thing is to talk to her.
So I did. We spoke for a good 45 minutes Friday. I found her passionate, affable, intelligent and, like many teens her age, adamant to make a point but, when flustered, quick to say, “I don’t have all the answers.”
The problem is, she went public as if she did. She was the focus of a U-M rally organized by the advocacy group BAMN (By Any Means Necessary). A clip of her went viral, yelling as if her rights had been denied:
Why 14 Wisconsin high schools take international standardized test
Patricia Deklotz, superintendent of the Kettle Moraine School District, said her district, west of Milwaukee, is generally high performing. But, Deklotz asked, if they talk a lot about getting students ready for the global economy, are they really doing it? PISA is a way to find out.
“It raises the bar from comparing ourselves to schools in Wisconsin,” she said. “This is something that can benchmark us against the world.” Deklotz said she wants the school staff to be able to use the results to analyze how improve their overall practices.
One appeal for taking part in the PISA experiment: The 14 Wisconsin schools didn’t have to pay out of their own pockets.
The Kern Family Foundation, based in Waukesha County, is one of the leading supporters of efforts aimed at improving the global competitiveness of American schoolchildren. Kern convened the invitation-only conference in Milwaukee. And as part of its support of the effort, it is picking up the tab — $8,000 per school — for the 14 schools.
“The Kern Family Foundation’s role is to support and convene organizations focused on improving the rising generation’s skills in math, science, engineering and technology to prepare them to compete in the global marketplace,” Ryan Olson, education team leader at the foundation, said in a statement.
A second somewhat-local connection to the PISA initiative: Shorewood native Jonathan Schnur has been involved in several big ideas in education. Some credit him with sparking the Race to the Top multibillion-dollar competitive education grant program of the Obama Administration. Schnur now leads an organization called America Achieves, which is spearheading the PISA effort.
Until now, Schnur said in an interview, there hasn’t been a way for schools to compare themselves to the rest of the world. Participating in PISA is a way to benefit from what’s being done in the best schools in the world.
Each participating school will get a 150-page report slicing and dicing its PISA results. That includes analysis of not only skills but also what students said in answering questions about how their schools work. Do kids listen to teachers? Do classes get down to business promptly at the start of a period? Do students have good relationships with teachers?
Schleicher told the Milwaukee meeting that PISA asked students why they think some kids don’t do well in math. American students were likely to point to lack of talent as the answer. In higher-scoring countries, students were more likely to say the student hadn’t worked hard enough. “That tells you a lot about the underlying education,” he said.
Related wisconsin2.org. Much more on PISA and Wisconsin’s oft criticized WKCE, here
Elections, Propaganda and Education
The Left parties always told their members that election campaigns were to be used as opportunities for the ideological education of the masses. Losing or winning was not as important for them. But lately, we see them hobnobbing with ‘bourgeois parties’, striking tactical alliances and seldom talking directly with the people. They seem to have totally withdrawn themselves from this educational role.
We see our leaders keeping away from ‘sensitive issues’. Bad enough. Worse is that they are advised to do so even by our political analysts and academics. Why blame the politicians from shunning the role of educators? Look at the silence in the departments of Political Science in our universities in these noisy times. It was painful to see the campus, students and teachers not participating in this great exercise of democracy. We did see them campaigning in constituencies as representatives of different political parties but the fact that the campus restrained itself from discussing this election academically should worry us. Imagine lakhs of young men and women, first time voters, spending their best hours on the campus, trying to extract meaning from the cacophony of the propaganda war unleashed through electronic channels and other media, left on their own. My daughter wants to know as to what would change fundamentally in our lives after the chosen saviour is elected. Why have her textbooks or her school failed to anticipate this young anxiety and devise academic or educational means to address it? To leave the youth at the mercy and vagaries of their instincts and intuition and not create opportunities to examine their common sense is worse than not finishing the syllabus on time.
Artists ‘have structurally different brains’
Artists have structurally different brains compared with non-artists, a study has found.
Participants’ brain scans revealed that artists had increased neural matter in areas relating to fine motor movements and visual imagery.
The research, published in NeuroImage, suggests that an artist’s talent could be innate.
But training and environmental upbringing also play crucial roles in their ability, the authors report.
As in many areas of science, the exact interplay of nature and nurture remains unclear.
Taking the erudition out of SAT
The College Board this morning disclosed more detail about its revamped SAT. The good news for anxious teens: It’s a lot easier in some respects than its previous versions.
The obscure vocabulary words, meant to bedevil, have been banished. So there’s no need to churn obsessively through flash cards memorizing the definitions of “pellucid” and “crepuscular” and “euphony.” The number of math topics has been winnowed considerably; the exam now focuses intently on algebra, though there are still some questions from other disciplines. The essay is now optional. The College Board will no longer deduct points for incorrect answers.
King: Paul ‘feeding into paranoia’
And guessing just got substantially easier: There are now four choices for each multiple choice question, not five.
Buried Treasure: Unique Schools Serving Unique Students
As the charter movement grew, so did concern that charter schools would become boutique schools for affluent families. By 2010, that concern had been dispelled—half of the 1.8 million students in charter schools came from low-income families. But it was increasingly clear that many charter schools were exclusive in another way: they were not enrolling as many special education students as the district-run schools nearby.
Sometimes, this gap happens because charter schools find other, effective ways to serve students who might have been assigned to special education in their traditional schools. But in other cases it’s a genuine disparity of service. That’s especially concerning in the several states where charter schools hold the status of an independent district (called “LEA status”) and are thus legally obligated to serve all students regardless of their learning needs.
It’s not just a matter of numbers but of purpose. As I’ve learned in helping my family find good educational and life opportunities for my severely disabled aunt, the best environments for people with special needs are often small, flexible, and dedicated to a specialized mission—characteristics that charter schools tend to share.
In 2010, Robin Lake edited Unique Schools Serving Unique Students: Charter Schools and Children with Special Needs, a much-needed book that turned attention to special education in charter schools. Unlike much of the coverage of the issue, Unique Schools wasn’t dedicated to calling out where charters fell short. Rather, the book stands out because the contributors showed where real solutions existed for families, and how those opportunities could be leveraged even more widely.
UK’s National Union of Teachers conference votes on new strikes for June
The National Union of Teachers is to consider a call for a further national day of strikes in the week beginning 23 June, potentially closing schools in England and Wales.
The union, which will vote on the proposal at its annual conference in Brighton on Saturday, says it is prepared to go it alone in taking industrial action, without the other main teachers’ union, the NASUWT.
According to a priority motion to be presented to the conference that starts on Friday, the NUT will consider progress in talks with the Department for Education over pay and conditions before finally deciding on strike action.
Although the NUT and NASUWT have taken combined action in the past, the NASUWT declined to take part in the NUT’s most recent national strike on 26 March this year.
The motion says: “In the event that significant progress is not being made, seek to co-ordinate national strike action in the week beginning Monday 23 June”.
Child bullying victims still suffering at 50 – study
BBC:
Children who are bullied can still experience negative effects on their physical and mental health more than 40 years later, say researchers from King’s College London.
Their study tracked 7,771 children born in 1958 from the age of seven until 50.
Those bullied frequently as children were at an increased risk of depression and anxiety, and more likely to report a lower quality of life at 50.
Anti-bullying groups said people needed long-term support after being bullied.
A previous study, from Warwick University, tracked more than 1,400 people between the ages of nine and 26 and found that bullying had long-term negative consequences for health, job prospects and relationships.
The Confidence Gap Evidence shows that women are less self-assured than men—and that to succeed, confidence matters as much as competence. Here’s why, and what to do about it.
For years, we women have kept our heads down and played by the rules. We’ve been certain that with enough hard work, our natural talents would be recognized and rewarded.
We’ve made undeniable progress. In the United States, women now earn more college and graduate degrees than men do. We make up half the workforce, and we are closing the gap in middle management. Half a dozen global studies, conducted by the likes of Goldman Sachs and Columbia University, have found that companies employing women in large numbers outperform their competitors on every measure of profitability. Our competence has never been more obvious. Those who closely follow society’s shifting values see the world moving in a female direction.
Learning to Code: The New (Hong Kong) After-School Activity
With the advent of smartphones and handy mobile applications that help you hail a cab or find a gas station, the use of software has become more tightly intertwined with our daily lives. The success stories of some app developers have encouraged students and professionals to learn coding, the language of the future.
Coding class at First Code Academy. First Code Academy
Michelle Sun, a former Goldman Sachs technology analyst decided to take a three-month programming bootcamp at the Hackbright Academy in Silicon Valley after her first mobile application venture failed due to her lack of technical knowledge. Since then she worked as a programmer at Bump, a local-file-sharing app startup later acquired by Google and taught coding in high schools in the Bay Area.
Inspired by her previous employer Joel Gasoigne–the founder of Silicon Valley-based social media management tool Buffer who made the app as a weekend project to meet his own needs to space out his tweets– the Hong Kong native founded a code learning workshop called First Code Academy in Hong Kong last year to pass on lessons she has learned.
Sun spoke about coding in her daily life and the goals of her Hong Kong-based startup First Code Academy. Below are edited excerpts.
There’s more to a good life than college
A smooth hand-off of his department to new owners in St. Louis took eight months. So it was a long goodbye to work he enjoyed and 17 years of friendships.
The transition was doubly difficult because of how he views work. Commit long-term to your employer, he says. Give your absolute best. This is how you live out your calling and live into what comes next.
But where’s next? And what next?
These are my husband’s questions. They are also our son’s questions.
Silas graduates high school next spring and is knee-deep in campus visits and SAT test prep. As he talks aloud about his future, we hear his inner conflict: Do I pursue what I love? I’m not even sure what that is yet. Maybe I should just pick a career that will make me a lot of money.
“When you could pay your way through college by waiting tables, the idea that you should ‘study what interests you’ was more viable than it is today when the cost of a four-year degree often runs to six figures,” wrote Glenn Harlan Reynolds, in an essay for The Wall Street Journal.
Our son worries about choosing the wrong path. No more are the 20s the years of do-overs.
The Sad Demise of Collegiate Fun
A few years ago, the psychologist Peter Gray released a fascinating—and sobering—study: Lack of free play in millennials’ overscheduled lives is giving kids anxiety and depression in record numbers. Why? They’re missing what Gray’s generation (and mine) had: “Time to explore in all sorts of ways, and also time to become bored and figure out how to overcome boredom, time to get into trouble and find our way out of it.”
What happens when a bunch of anxious kids who don’t know how to get into trouble go to college? A recent trip back to my beloved alma mater, Vassar—combined with my interactions with students where I teach and some disappointing sleuthing—has made it apparent that much of the unstructured free play at college seems to have disappeared in favor of pre-professional anxiety, coupled with the nihilistic, homogeneous partying that exists as its natural counterbalance. The helicopter generation has gone to college, and the results might be tragic for us all.
I certainly noticed a toned-down version of this trend at Vassar, which in my day was where you went to get seriously weird (all right, not Bennington-weird or Hampshire-weird, but weird). A lot about the place was the same—interesting, inquisitive students; dedicated faculty; caring administrators—but it was also dead all weekend! The closest I saw to free play time was, I kid you not, a Quidditch game.
The College Contraction Has Begun
An entire generation of Americans has been sold the idea of higher education as a panacea for all ills. That generation of Americans is now shackled…
Last year, US college enrollment registered a notable decline for the first time in decades. The college boom had peaked. Now, the contraction begins.
It starts around the margins—community colleges and shitty “for profit” colleges losing students who recognize that they are not necessarily a good investment. A year ago, experts said that “signs point to 2013-14 being the year when traditional four-year, nonprofit colleges begin a contraction that will last for several years.” That prediction appears to be coming true.
Bloomberg today surveys the doom that is now creeping into the smaller, weaker, less popular, less financially stable class of private four year colleges. As their own enrollment declines—and without the huge endowments necessary to fill the holes—they risk falling into “death spirals” of continuing cuts and falling popularity, until nothing is left. After the shock of the recession, the weak of higher education are beginning to fall by the wayside:
Via Marc Eisen.
Diversity and Dishonesty
EARLIER this year, a column by a Harvard undergraduate named Sandra Y. L. Korn briefly achieved escape velocity from the Ivy League bubble, thanks to its daring view of how universities should approach academic freedom.
Korn proposed that such freedom was dated and destructive, and that a doctrine of “academic justice” should prevail instead. No more, she wrote, should Harvard permit its faculty to engage in “research promoting or justifying oppression” or produce work tainted by “racism, sexism, and heterosexism.” Instead, academic culture should conform to left-wing ideas of the good, beautiful and true, and decline as a matter of principle “to put up with research that counters our goals.”
No higher-up at Harvard endorsed her argument, of course. But its honesty of purpose made an instructive contrast to the institutional statements put out in the immediate aftermath of two recent controversies — the resignation of the Mozilla Foundation’s C.E.O., Brendan Eich, and the withdrawal, by Brandeis University, of the honorary degree it had promised to the human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Is college worth it? Too many degrees are a waste of money. The return on higher education would be much better if college were cheaper
WHEN LaTisha Styles graduated from Kennesaw State University in Georgia in 2006 she had $35,000 of student debt. This obligation would have been easy to discharge if her Spanish degree had helped her land a well-paid job. But there is no shortage of Spanish-speakers in a nation that borders Latin America. So Ms Styles found herself working in a clothes shop and a fast-food restaurant for no more than $11 an hour.
Frustrated, she took the gutsy decision to go back to the same college and study something more pragmatic. She majored in finance, and now has a good job at an investment consulting firm. Her debt has swollen to $65,000, but she will have little trouble paying it off.
Many American universities offer lousy value for money. The government can help change that
YOU cannot place a value on education. Knowledge is the food of the soul, Plato supposedly remarked. Great literature “irrigates the deserts” of our lives, as C.S. Lewis put it. But a college education comes with a price tag—up to $60,000 a year for a four-year residential degree at an American university.
A report by PayScale, a research firm, tries to measure the returns on higher education in America (see article). They vary enormously. A graduate in computer science from Stanford can expect to make $1.7m more over 20 years than someone who never went to college, after the cost of that education is taken into account. A degree in humanities and English at Florida International University leaves you $132,000 worse off. Arts degrees (broadly defined) at 12% of the colleges in the study offered negative returns; 30% offered worse financial rewards than putting the cash in 20-year Treasury bills.
None of this matters if you are rich and studying fine art to enhance your appreciation of the family Rembrandts. But most 18-year-olds in America go to college to get a good job. That is why the country’s students have racked up $1.1 trillion of debt—more than America’s credit-card debts. For most students college is still a wise investment, but for many it is not. Some 15% of student debtors default within three years; a startling 115,000 graduates work as caretakers.
‘Selfie’ body image warning issued
Spending lots of time on Facebook looking at pictures of friends could make women insecure about their body image, research suggests.
The more women are exposed to “selfies” and other photos on social media, the more they compare themselves negatively, according to a study.
Friends’ photos may be more influential than celebrity shots as they are of known contacts, say UK and US experts.
The study is the first to link time on social media to poor body image.
The mass media are known to influence how people feel about their appearance.
But little is known about how social media impact on self-image.
These charts explain what’s behind America’s soaring college costs
The growing $1.1 trillion student debt burden in the US has been well documented, yet concerns are subdued. That’s because the burden, unlike the housing crisis, won’t cause a sudden economic crash. Instead, it will prompt a slow strangulation of spending spread over many years. Congress has made some minor efforts to reduce interest rates on debt, but the necessity for such large loans must be scrutinized. And that means confronting the indulgences of colleges.
Tuition costs have soared in recent decades. In 1973, the average cost for tuition and fees at a private nonprofit college was $10,783, adjusted for 2013 dollars. Costs tripled over the ensuing 40 years, with the average jumping to $30,094 last year. Even in the last decade the increase was a staggering 25%.
The ability of colleges to raise costs has been facilitated by a sharp increase in federal student aid. Lenders freely dispense credit to students, safe in the knowledge that all loans are guaranteed by the government. Between 1973 and 2012, federal aid (inflation-adjusted) increased more than 500%. Looking at a shorter period, between 2002 and 2012, total federal aid to students ballooned an inflation-adjusted 106% to $170 billion.
Coursera Creates Bricks & Mortar Learning Hubs
Online university providers, which offered people the chance to study from home, are turning full circle by creating a network of learning centres where students can meet and study together.
Instead of demolishing the dusty old classrooms, the online university revolution is responsible for opening some new ones.
Coursera, a major California-based provider of online courses, is creating an international network of “learning hubs”, where students can follow these virtual courses in real-life, bricks and mortar settings.
And there are thousands of meet-ups in cafes and libraries where students get together to talk about their online courses.
Humans Steal Jobs From Robots
Craig Trudell, Yuki Hagiwara and Ma Jie:
Inside Toyota Motor Corp.’s oldest plant, there’s a corner where humans have taken over from robots in thwacking glowing lumps of metal into crankshafts. This is Mitsuru Kawai’s vision of the future.
“We need to become more solid and get back to basics, to sharpen our manual skills and further develop them,” said Kawai, a half century-long company veteran tapped by President Akio Toyoda to promote craftsmanship at Toyota’s plants. “When I was a novice, experienced masters used to be called gods, and they could make anything.”
These gods, or Kami-sama in Japanese, are making a comeback at Toyota, the company that long set the pace for manufacturing prowess in the auto industry and beyond. Toyota’s next step forward is counter-intuitive in an age of automation: Humans are taking the place of machines in plants across Japan so workers can develop new skills and figure out ways to improve production lines and the car-building process.
Meanwhile: Europe’s manufacturers experiment with the ‘smart factory’.
How Higher Ed Contributes to Inequality
In 2011, Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler highlighted poll results showing a striking phenomenon: About half of the Americans receiving federal assistance in paying college tuition or medical bills believe they have never benefited from a government social program. The results are evidence of what Mettler has termed “the submerged state”—a series of policies, like tuition tax credits or federally-guaranteed student loans, that are practically invisible to citizens. That invisibility, she argues, erodes public support for the very idea of government playing an active role in people’s lives.
Now in a new book, Degrees of Inequality, Mettler reveals how, over the past 60 years, American higher-education policy has gone from being visible and effective (the GI Bill and the Pell grant program) to being invisible and inefficient ($32 billion in federal funding for for-profit colleges with abysmal graduation rates). Congressional polarization along party lines, it turns out, played a major role, as did plummeting federal and state support for four-year public universities.
Rise in number of unqualified teachers at state-funded schools in England
Unions reacted angrily on Thursday after official figures showed a sharp rise in the number of unqualified teachers employed by state-funded schools in England.
The growth follows education secretary Michael Gove’s 2012 decision to give academies and free schools the freedom to hire staff without standard qualifications such as a postgraduate certificate in education.
The Department for Education figures reveal that, after years of decline in the number of unqualified teachers in classrooms, there was a sharp jump from 14,800 in 2012 to 17,100 in November last year, when the national survey was carried out.
With Free Tuition, Mich. Students Hear ‘You Are Going To College’
This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I’m Michel Martin. This spring, we’re joining our colleagues at Morning Edition to take a closer look at paying for college. So far in this series, we’ve talked about navigating the mountains of paperwork, whether working during school is a good idea, and if so, how much is too much. And we’ve also talked about the huge debt that many students face after graduation. But imagine if all those worries went away.
What if the city you lived in footed the bill for college? Kalamazoo, Michigan is doing that. In 2005, a group of anonymous donors pledged enough money to pay the tuition at any of Michigan’s public universities and community colleges for every student who graduated from the district’s public high schools.
Campus Stung by Controversial Video Moves to Ban Recordings in Class
The Faculty Senate of the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater has responded to a controversy over a surreptitiously obtained classroom video of a guest lecturer lambasting Republicans by moving to bar students from recording and disseminating such … – See more at: http://m.chronicle.com/article/Campus-Stung-by-Controversial/145595/#sthash.6FchW4pm.dpuf
“The Theft of the Century”: Education in Mexico
The Mexican government wisely decided that before the educational system in Mexico could be fixed, they first needed to figure out what they were dealing with. For that reason, EPN ordered the first ever Census of Schools, Teachers and Students of Basic and Special Education (basic meaning primary and middle schools).
The results show the magnitude of the problem. Here are some key findings:
1. “39,222 people supposedly assigned to a school in which no one actually knows them (“aviators”)
2. 30,695 people who claim to be teachers, but who in reality work for the SNTE [National Union of Education Workers] or the CNTE [National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers—a dissident teachers group];
3. 113,259 people who claim to be in a school, but who are located “in another place of work” (fugitives)
4. 114,998 people who receive pay as active teachers, but who do it in the name of people who have already retired or passed away.”
And this is a gross underestimate, since the states with “the with the most corrupt and backwards systems (Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Guerrero), refused to participate and were not included in the census.” Yikes.
What’s Behind America’s Soaring College Costs?
The growing $1.1 trillion student debt burden in the US has been well documented, yet concerns are subdued. That’s because the burden, unlike the housing crisis, won’t cause a sudden economic crash. Instead, it will prompt a slow strangulation of spending spread over many years. Congress has made some minor efforts to reduce interest rates on debt, but the necessity for such large loans must be scrutinized. And that means confronting the indulgences of colleges.
Tuition costs have soared in recent decades. In 1973, the average cost for tuition and fees at a private nonprofit college was $10,783, adjusted for 2013 dollars. Costs tripled over the ensuing 40 years, with the average jumping to $30,094 last year. Even in the last decade the increase was a staggering 25 percent.
Are university rankings the tip of the iceberg?
After a decade, it’s clear that rankings have, controversially, fired a shot across the bow of higher education and their host governments. They may have started out being about informing student choice but, in today’s highly globalised and competitive world, they have become much more about geo-political factors for nations and higher education institutions.
In the process, they have become a profitable industry – replete with perceptions of conflict of interest and self-interest, along with self-appointed auditors – all of which, in this post-global financial crisis age, would almost certainly provoke concern in other sectors.
By monetising educational data in different ways, these initiatives are tantamount to new product development or revitalising products in response to new market opportunities or consumer demand.
Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say
Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. Like a lot of Web surfers, she clicks on links posted on social networks, reads a few sentences, looks for exciting words, and then grows restless, scampering off to the next page she probably won’t commit to.
“I give it a few seconds — not even minutes — and then I’m moving again,” says Handscombe, a 35-year-old graduate student in creative writing at American University.
But it’s not just online anymore. She finds herself behaving the same way with a novel.
“It’s like your eyes are passing over the words but you’re not taking in what they say,” she confessed. “When I realize what’s happening, I have to go back and read again and again.”
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The Financial Vulnerability of Americans
Excessive household debt was crucial in explaining the severity of the Great Recession. So where are we now? Have households strengthened their financial position since 2009? Are household balance sheets strong enough to prevent another massive pull back in spending if there are significant job losses?
To answer to these questions, we look at evidence from the 2012 National Financial Capability Study by FINRA. (We are grateful to Annamaria Lusardi, an expert on financial literacy, for pointing us to the data used in this post.) This survey is a representative sample of 25,000 individuals who were asked mostly qualitative questions about their finances. The survey was put into the field three years after the worst of the Great Recession.
The survey responses are shocking, and should put fear into all of us about the financial vulnerability of U.S. households.
Related: MADISON SCHOOLS’ REFERENDUM & POSSIBLE BOUNDARY CHANGE COMMENTARY
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Wesleyan bucks trend, lets students graduate in 3 years
They’ve given up on studying abroad, taking a summer vacation, or getting a full night’s sleep. Cookies or a granola bar on the run often constitute meals. Friends give them guilt trips for skipping out on the senior year bonding experience.
But for a few students at Wesleyan University seeking to earn a degree in three years, there will be a big payoff: saving tens of thousands of dollars in tuition.
Wesleyan, a liberal arts college sometimes called a “little Ivy,” appears to be the most elite school yet to embrace the idea of helping students cut down on the exorbitant cost of a college education by speeding up their journey to graduation.
The sheer enormity of tuition prices has helped the concept of a three-year bachelor’s degree gain a foothold in recent years at a few dozen schools around the country, including the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Lesley University.
The number of students choosing to participate remains tiny at most of the colleges, because of the difficulty of doing so and the enduring allure of four years in the ivory tower. And some educators worry that three years isn’t enough time for young people to find themselves intellectually or emotionally. But the endorsement from Wesleyan (sticker price $61,000 a year) may yet help popularize the idea.
Oppressed by the Ivy League What Dartmouth’s president should have told bullying students.
Academia has been obsessed over identity politics for two generations, so there’s some justice in the newest addition to the matrix of oppression: an Ivy League education, according to the Dartmouth College students who this week took over the president’s office.
On Tuesday Dartmouth’s finest seized the main administration building and disrupted college business. The squatters were allowed to remain until Thursday night, when the dean of the college negotiated and signed an exit settlement assuring them the non-dialogue would continue.
The demonstrators had a 72-point manifesto instructing the college to establish pre-set racial admission quotas and a mandatory ethnic studies curriculum for all students. Their other inspirations are for more “womyn or people of color” faculty; covering sex change operations on the college health plan (“we demand body and gender self-determination”); censoring the library catalog for offensive terms; and installing “gender-neutral bathrooms” in every campus facility, specifically including sports locker rooms.
As Parents Struggle to Repay College Loans for Their Children, Taxpayers Also Stand to Lose
Parents are increasingly struggling to repay federal loans they’ve taken out to help cover their children’s college costs, according to newly released federal data.
The Parent Plus program allows parents to take out essentially uncapped amounts to cover college costs, regardless of the borrower’s income or ability to repay the loan. As the cost of college has risen, the program has become an increasingly critical workaround for families that max out on federal student loans and can’t pay the rest out of pocket.
Education Department officials have long said that they simply don’t have figures on how many of the loans were in default. But the agency has finally run some numbers. The data shows that default rates, while still modest, have nearly tripled over the last four years. About five percent of loans originated in fiscal year 2010 were in default three years later. The default rate at for-profit colleges is much higher, at 13 percent.
Overall, there is about $62 billion in outstanding debt from Parent Plus, according to the new data. The average Parent Plus loan borrower owes about $20,300. The Education Department compiled the numbers at the request of a government committee that is working on new rules for the program.
Illustration by Stanley Mouse Field Trippin’ One high school teacher’s account of a trip he didn’t mean to take
We were barely past MacArthur when I felt it beginning to take hold. It was a big Friday for me, taking 40 students on a walking field trip to our local bookstore, then a tour of the Community Center and, if there was enough time, a little sit-under-a-tree-and-read time for the students in the Plaza.
I was in my 10th year of teaching in the only alternative high school in the town of Sonoma. Fall semester I was teaching English, algebra, science and art to students who usually hate each of those subjects. My primary task was engagement: get the kids understanding why knowledge is power and why they should give a shit, and then fill in the blanks as they appear.
It was the beginning of the year, and my office manager had informed the staff two weeks ago that we suddenly had $4,000 to spend. “But spend it fast,” she warned, “because you never know.” Budget distribution in the district frequently means no money for long periods of time, then a big wad to be spent within two weeks before it disappears into another pot. I quickly scheduled a Friday walking field trip to Readers’ Books, telling each student they had $15 to spend on a book of their choice. The only catch was that they would have to complete a book report. It’s an excellent way to spend $600, as most of my students have never been in a bookstore, much less bought or read a book of their own.
Public Schools Can’t Help but Curb Freedom of Expression
It was trending on Twitter all day on Tuesday: #ReligiousFreedomForAll. The impetus was the Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby case being argued before the Supreme Court, and disgust over government forcing people to pay for medical treatments they find immoral. But if people cared about public schooling as much as they do Obamacare, hashtags defending all kinds of freedom would be the daily norm on Twitter.
Just like Obamacare, public schools — government institutions for which all people must pay — regularly violate basic rights. They have to: Among many curbs on freedom, to avoid chaos schools have to have rules about what students and teachers can say, and decisions must be made about what is — and is not — taught.
Consider the nationally covered Easton Area School District v. B.H. case (colloquially known as “I (Heart) Boobies”), which the Supreme Court refused to hear a few weeks ago. It involved two students in Easton, PA, who were suspended for wearing pink, breast-cancer-awareness bracelets that carried the “boobies” message. The district argued that the bracelets, with their intentionally attention-grabbing message, threatened school“decorum” and “the civility of discussion in the classroom.”
Too many degrees are a waste of money. The return on higher education would be much better if college were cheaper
WHEN LaTisha Styles graduated from Kennesaw State University in Georgia in 2006 she had $35,000 of student debt. This obligation would have been easy to discharge if her Spanish degree had helped her land a well-paid job. But there is no shortage of Spanish-speakers in a nation that borders Latin America. So Ms Styles found herself working in a clothes shop and a fast-food restaurant for no more than $11 an hour.
Frustrated, she took the gutsy decision to go back to the same college and study something more pragmatic. She majored in finance, and now has a good job at an investment consulting firm. Her debt has swollen to $65,000, but she will have little trouble paying it off.
As Ms Styles’s story shows, there is no simple answer to the question “Is college worth it?” Some degrees pay for themselves; others don’t. American schoolkids pondering whether to take on huge student loans are constantly told that college is the gateway to the middle class. The truth is more nuanced, as Barack Obama hinted when he said in January that “folks can make a lot more” by learning a trade “than they might with an art history degree”. An angry art history professor forced him to apologise, but he was right.
College graduates aged 25 to 32 who are working full time earn about $17,500 more annually than their peers who have only a high school diploma, according to the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank. But not all degrees are equally useful. And given how much they cost—a residential four-year degree can set you back as much as $60,000 a year—many students end up worse off than if they had started working at 18.
How to get British kids reading
Pavan’s favourite activity is playing football outdoors. His second favourite is playing football indoors, and in third place is practising football skills against the sofa. Reading – the pursuit that Francis Bacon claimed “maketh a full man” – comes further down the eight-year-old’s list, behind school, going to discos, buying stuff, chatting to people, watching TV and playing on his Xbox games console.
Would he ever pick up a book for pleasure? “No,” Pavan shoots back jovially. “If I’m bored, I will ask my mum if I can play on her phone.” By this point, I am relieved that Michael Gove is not part of our conversation at a homework club in Harlesden Library, north London.
The UK education secretary has long feared that British children are “just not reading enough”. The same concern has been raised by publishers and literacy charities, which worry that new distractions – computer games, online videos, social networking – are pushing books off the shelf. More than 60 per cent of 18-to-30-year-olds now prefer watching television or DVDs to reading, according to a survey for the charity Booktrust. A similar proportion of young people think the internet and computers will replace books in the next 20 years.
The literacy debate received fresh impetus last October when a study from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development suggested that vast numbers of young people were leaving school without the ability to read well. Of the 24 industrialised countries covered by the research, England was the only one that went backwards, with literacy and numeracy skills lower among the young – those aged 16 to 24 – than the old. (The results were little better in Northern Ireland; Scotland and Wales were not included in the study.)
Dance of the lemons Reformers want to make it easier to sack bad teachers
JOSH, a young social-studies teacher working in a tough part of Los Angeles, had been on the job for less than a year when word came that it might not last much longer. Its public finances in ruins, California was slashing budgets and laying off thousands of teachers. Josh’s headmaster fought to keep him, but his hands were tied; under the state’s strict “last in, first out” seniority rules, enshrined in statute, the most recent recruits had to be fired first, regardless of ability.
Luckily Josh found a job at a charter school (funded by the state but run independently). Three years later, he says he can understand why experienced teachers deserve protection; as a newbie, the help he received from veterans at his first school was invaluable. Yet others seemed to be serving time; it was hard to see them “chuckle on” in the cafeteria when he was being told to leave.
More Financial Aid + Less Need to Work = More STEM Graduates?
Students who major in the sciences often spend more time in out-of-class work—in labs or field research—than other students do. That means less time to earn money while in college, and sometimes it’s the reason financially needy students switch out of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics, the STEM fields.
Would an extra $1,000 a year in financial aid help some of those STEM-inclined students stick with it?
That’s the essence of a new study getting under way next fall at 11 Wisconsin colleges. With $4-million from the Great Lakes Higher Education Guaranty Corporation, which will make possible the extra $1,000 a year, and a $1.5-million grant from the National Science Foundation, Sara Goldrick-Rab will study the effects of the extra aid by comparing the academic paths of 1,000 students who will get the money with 1,000 others who won’t.
The grants won’t displace other financial aid that the students are otherwise due to receive, and when students are told they are getting the money, “it’s not going to say, ‘You’ve got to do STEM,’” says Ms. Goldrick-Rab, an associate professor of educational-policy studies and sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The idea behind the project is simply to see if giving students fewer reasons to work, and no other requirements, makes a difference in helping more lower-income students pursue STEM majors.
An Update on Credit for Non Madison School District Courses; Instructional Policy Changes
The Madison School District (PDF):
Effective July 1, 2016, increase math and science graduation requirements by 1 credit each and eliminate specific math course requirements
Remove references to the High School Graduation Test (HGST)
Add language permitting course equivalencies
Related: notes and links on Credit for non-Madison School District courses.
Appealing to a College for more Financial Aid
The era of the financial aid appeal has arrived in full, and April is the month when much of the action happens.
For decades, in-the-know families have gone back to college financial aid officers to ask for a bit more grant money after the first offer arrived. But word has spread, and the combination of the economic collapse in 2008-9 and the ever-rising list price for tuition and expenses has led to a torrent of requests for reconsideration each spring.
Do not call it bargaining. Or negotiation. That makes financial aid officers mad, as they don’t like to think of themselves as presiding over an open-air bazaar. But that’s not to say that you shouldn’t ask. At many of the private colleges and universities that students insist on shooting for, half or more of families who appeal get more money. And this year, for the first time, the average household income of financial aid applicants will top $100,000 at the 163 private colleges and universities that the consulting firm Noel-Levitz tracks.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Cities See a ‘Bright Flight’ Highly Educated Americans Increasingly Move to More Affordable Metro Areas in South, West
Highly educated Americans are choosing cheaper metropolitan centers in the West and South over more dominant—and expensive—population centers on the coasts and former industrial hubs.
After flocking to areas with ample employment opportunities such as New York City and Los Angeles for years, the nation’s most educated are fanning out in search of better jobs, lower housing costs and improved quality of life.
The 25 U.S. counties with the largest net inflow of people older than 25 with graduate or professional degrees arriving from out of state are nearly all linked to more affordable cities like Raleigh, N.C., and San Antonio, according to an analysis of census data by The Wall Street Journal.
Demographers cite several causes for the shift, including soaring property prices in coastal areas, stagnant paychecks and heightened wariness about the increase in debt that is often the price of admission in bigger cities. The proliferation of regional technology hubs in places such as Raleigh also plays a role, while taxes are often lower in parts of the South.
“It’s a kind of middle-class flight—a bright flight,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington, D.C. “People are moving to where the cost of living is reasonable.”
Madison is considering a further property tax increase via referendum this fall.
Commentary on the Growth in Federal K-12 Redistributed Tax Dollar Spending
Rather than shift the tax burden from households with children to relatively high-earning households without children, Felix Salmon of Reuters proposes increasing federal education funding. This strikes me as ill-conceived for a number of reasons. If anything, I would suggest that we move in the opposite direction. Though federal spending represents a relatively small share of K-12 spending at present (13 percent of the total as of 2010), this understates the extent of federal influence, as federal mandates shape how much of the remaining spending is disbursed. And so the U.S. has a far more centralized, far more tightly-regulated K-12 system than is commonly understood. The chief virtues of a decentralized system — the potential for innovation as different jurisdictions and educational providers embrace new approaches to instruction, management, compensation, recruitment, and scaling successful approaches, among other things — are greatly undermined by the prescriptiveness of federal education policy, which has grown worse under the Obama administration thanks to its use of policy waivers to impose its vision of education reform on local districts. We thus have the worst of both worlds: we have a theoretically decentralized system plagued by a lack of creativity and experimentation outside of charter schools, which serve fewer than 4 percent of K-12 public school students; and we have a federal government that imposes enormous compliance costs on K-12 schools without actually providing much in the way of resources. Salmon’s strategy is to double down on centralization; let’s keep imposing compliance costs, yet let’s at least do more to finance schools as well. Another approach would be to foster creativity and experimentation by having the federal government take on the tasks to which it is best suited.
As Rick Hess and Andrew Kelly of the American Enterprise Institute have argued, the federal government could play to its strengths by abandoning its efforts to tightly regulate local schools and instead (a) promote basic research in cognitive science and human learning; (b) serve as a “scorekeeper” that measures educational outcomes and, just as importantly, spending levels across districts and student populations so that the public will have more reliable data on the return on investment; (c) encourage competition and innovation not by prescribing that local communities embrace charter schools or vouchers (though both ideas could do a great deal of good, and state and local electorates ought to embrace these ideas of their own volition) but by addressing the compliance costs created by federal mandates, encouraging alternative paths to teacher certification to expand the teacher talent pool and get around onerous licensing requirement; and (d) develop a bankruptcy-like mechanism that would allow dysfunctional school districts to restructure their obligations without first having to appeal to state education authorities. One of the more attractive aspects of this agenda, incidentally, is that it largely allows contentious questions about the best approach to educating children to state and local officials while providing parents and policymakers with meaningful yardsticks to evaluate the success or failure of different approaches.
Where Federal Education Funds Should Really Be Going
The Fix Is it scandalous to claim that not everyone needs a university degree? When we look at some of the major trends swamping the American economy, like unemployment and student debt, the real scandal is how we neglect vocational education, even though it is a solution to both of these crises. Skilled labor could fill a bulk of vacant jobs, and a cohort of learners could be saved from the quicksand of student debt, if only we placed more importance, and more resources, on vocational training. But alas, vocational education programs don’t seem to get the respect (read: funding) that they deserve.
Vocational training programs do not preclude a college education. In fact, professional licenses and certifications were found to lead to higher earnings both in combination with, and in the absence of, post-secondary degrees. Having an alternative credential, like LEED accreditation, is associated with an earnings premium for every level of educational achievement, with the exception of master’s degree holders, according to a report by the US Census Bureau. So while my standpoint may sound averse to university degrees, it’s not; it’s simply asking for us to dedicate more public resources and respect for educational programs that better suit the needs of many students, and better suit the needs of the skilled economy.
The college degree dream is an unsuitable paradigm for the future of the American labor force. President Obama’s plan to boost domestic innovation and reduce dependence on foreign production will only come about if we focus further resources on training Americans for the careers that need them. With apprenticeships, workforce training and professional certification courses that teach workers the skills they need now, we can reach a more appropriate proportion between middle skills education and the university degree system. The prevailing pursuit of the American dream has placed college degrees on a precarious pedestal. But as middle-skills become synonymous with the middle class, why shouldn’t the American Dream include blue-collar work?
First Test For College Hopefuls? Decoding Financial Aid Letters
Around the country, millions of parents of prospective college freshmen are puzzling over one big question: How will we pay for college?
The first step for many families is reviewing the financial aid award letters they receive from each school. But often those letters can be confusing. Some are filled with acronyms and abbreviations, others lump scholarships and loans together. And because they’re often very different, they’re also difficult to compare.
Chris Reeves, a guidance counselor at Beechwood High School in Fort Mitchell, Ky., tells NPR’s David Greene that he fields lots of questions from families trying to decipher their award letters. “They don’t always understand that part of the financial aid package includes loans,” he says.
But loans “don’t really reduce your costs,” explains Mark Kantrowitz, founder of the financial aid website FinAid.org and publisher of Edvisors Network. “They simply spread them out over time. … A loan is a loan. It has to be repaid, usually with interest — which increases your costs.”
Stanford edges out Harvard on admissions
Stanford University edged out its rival Harvard University for the second year in a row to be the most selective academic institution in America, despite cooling application trends.
The latest admissions figures showed applications overall remained near the levels of the previous year as the pace of the rise in those seeking out places in elite universities abates. According to figures analysed by the Financial Times, applications filed to 40 selective US institutions were stagnant at levels of the previous year.
Nonetheless, finding a spot at most of these universities remains a challenge.
Stanford was joined by Harvard, Brown, Columbia, Yale, and Princeton universities, as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in accepting fewer than 10 per cent of applicants.
Spokane Administrative plan for math is to fix the math program later
According to The Spokesman-Review, Spokane Public Schools Superintendent Shelley Redinger said in October 2013 that math outcomes in Spokane are “average” and that’s why the school district is focusing on repairing its English/language arts program.
The impression given in the article was that math instruction in Spokane is in an OK place, not great but not terrible, and that attention needs to be paid first to ELA.
Such an impression, however, isn’t what college remedial rates indicate to be true. It isn’t reflected in most high school graduates, nor in most students in any grade prior. It isn’t what I have told the superintendent; it isn’t what she has repeatedly acknowledged to me. It isn’t what she told me that the rest of the Spokane community has said to her. Even board directors appear to have gotten a clue: On Dec. 4, 2013, director Rocky Treppiedi called the district’s math program “a disgrace.” And it is.
I asked Dr. Redinger about her choice of the word “average” to describe math outcomes in Spokane, and she wrote that she chose the word because district scores are “at the state average in mathematics.”
If I didn’t know better, I might accept that. However, I do know better.
The Madison Teachers, Inc. Budget Process
Madison Teachers, Inc. Newsletter via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):
Each year about this time MTI engages in the process of developing its Budgets for the ensuing fiscal year, in this case July 1, 2014 through June 30, 2015. MTI has two (2) budgets, one for MTI (the Union) and one for the MTI Building Corporation, the owner of MTI’s headquarter’s building.
MTI’s Budget is the operating Budget under which the Union provides services to the members of its five (5) bargaining units; i.e. the Teacher/professional unit (MTI); the Educational Assistants bargaining unit (EA-MTI); the Clerical/Technical bargaining unit (SEE-MTI); the Substitute Teacher bargaining unit (USO-MTI); and the Security Assistants bargaining unit (SSA-MTI).
The Union’s Budget provides funds for bargaining, member representation, member and Union legal services, legislative action, public relations, and labor solidarity with other unions experiencing crisis. The Union Budget also provides funds for rent paid to the MTI Building Corporation for office and meeting space, staffing, equipment lease/purchase, telephone, printing and the like, to enable the Union to perform the services required to fulfill its obligation to the members of the various bargaining units.
The Union’s Budget, in addition to dues, also includes
funds for political action, paid by those who are willing to advance the cause of education and those who are represented by MTI.The MTI Solidarity Fund is included in the Budget, but is not funded by dues. Rather, these funds assist members in need and come from voluntary contributions by MTI members and others.
Battle lines forming in LA Unified for ‘Local Control’ spending
The battle over the new money coming into LA Unified from the state’s new Local Control Funding Formula starts in earnest tomorrow when Superintendent John Deasy lays out his plan for the 2014-15 budget.
Deasy is meeting with reporters to unveil his spending priorities plan for an estimated $390 million the district will receive in extra resources, before he presents it to the school board on Tuesday.It’ll be the first glimpse of how well (or how poorly) competing interests have lobbied for a piece of the pie, and it’s likely to kick off of an intense debate over dollars as the district — like all school districts in California — formulates its Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP) over the next couple of months.
A preview of the pressures came into view today when Communities for Los Angeles Student Success (CLASS) and various constituencies outlined their wish-list for some of the districts’ neediest schools.
Under the new plan, districts will receive a base grant per student. Beyond that, students who are either low-income, foster youth or English learners earn supplemental money. Additionally, schools with more than 55 percent of low-income students get concentration grants.
Report looks at earning potential of RI graduates
A new report from the Rhode Island Campaign for Achievement Now looks at the state’s education system.
Christine Lopes of RI-CAN said Thursday that the group looks at statewide date to measure trends and outcomes.
This is the fourth report generated in four years, and this year a focus is on earning power for students who graduate from a high school in Rhode Island.
“We found that a high school graduate in Rhode Island can earn about $25,000 a year. What’s even more startling is there’s a $40,000 a year gap between a student who graduates high school and a student that has a bachelor’s or higher,” Lopes said.
State Education Commission Deborah Gist said she wasn’t completely surprised by that.
Almost a quarter of postgrad students at English universities are Chinese
There are now almost as many Chinese students on full-time postgraduate courses at English universities as there are British students, according to figures published on Wednesday.
But the rising numbers of Chinese students masks a drop in the overall number of foreign students studying in England for the first time in almost three decades.
According to figures from the Higher Education Funding Council of England (Hefce), 23% of students studying for masters-level degree courses are from China while 26% of students are from the UK – a sign that English universities are increasingly replying on China to fill its courses.
“The degree of reliance on students from China at full-time masters level varies across the subject group,” Hefce said. The highest concentration is in maths, where Chinese students make up 58% of all international entrants, followed by 56% in media studies, 47% in business and management studies and 39% in engineering.
Prediction: No commencement speaker will mention this – the huge gender degree gap for the Class of 2014 favoring women
Now that we’re about a month away from college graduation season, I thought it would be a good time to show the updated chart above of the huge college degree gap by gender for the upcoming College Class of 2014 (data here). Based on Department of Education estimates, women will earn a disproportionate share of college degrees at every level of higher education in 2014 for the ninth straight year. Overall, women in the Class of 2014 will earn 140 college degrees at all levels for every 100 men, and there will be a 638,200 college degree gap in favor of women for this year’s class (2.21 million total degrees for women vs. 1.57 million total degrees for men). By level of degree, women will earn: a) 160 associate’s degrees for every 100 men, b) 130 bachelor’s degrees for every 100 men, 149 master’s degrees for every 100 men and 106 doctoral degrees for every 100 men.
Over the next decade, the gender disparity for college degrees is expected to increase according to Department of Education forecasts, so that by 2022, women will earn 148 college degrees for every 100 degrees earned by men, with especially huge gender imbalances in favor of women for associate’s degrees (162 women for every 100 men) and master’s degrees (162 women for every 100 men).
Benchmarking UK students vs Chinese: Light Years From Wisconsin
England’s GCSE pupils will be benchmarked against their Chinese counterparts from 2017, in a response from exam regulators to ministers’ calls to toughen up a marking system they say has been discredited by years of grade inflation.
At the urging of the education secretary, Michael Gove, Ofqual has unveiled a plan to link GCSE grades to levels achieved by pupils in China, Singapore and other countries deemed to be high-performing.
Glenys Stacey, Ofqual chief regulator, conceded that the watchdog was responding to a written request from Gove that exams should be more demanding because international tables suggest the UK has fallen behind even as results appear to have improved.
But the idea of an international educational currency prompted concern from teaching unions, who said some countries excluded certain types of children to boost their scores in international tests.
Light years away from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s lost decades with the oft-criticized WKCE.
Why Computer Science Should Be a High School Graduation Requirement
Jeff:
The facts about computer and smartphone ownership make it extremely apparent that smart technology and the internet has become a human necessity. This technology has become almost as essential as access to transportation or grocery stores. People simply cannot survive in this modern era without access to computers and the World Wide Web.
Clearly, students should begin to grow up with a deeper understanding of the technology that defines their lives. They are required to have a fundamental understanding of natural sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology, as well as mathematics, like geometry, trigonometry, and algebra. Presumably, these requirements were put into place so that students would graduate from high school with at least a basic understanding of how the world around them works, but if these students don’t understand computers, they won’t even come close to understanding the world around them.
What good is math and why do we teach it?
This month’s column comes in lecture format. It’s a narrated videostream of the presentation file that accompanied the featured address I made recently at the MidSchoolMath National Conference, held in Santa Fe, NM, on March 27-29. It lasts just under 30 minutes, including two embedded videos.
In the talk, I step back from the (now largely metaphorical) blackboard and take a broader look at why we and our students are there is the first place.
What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends?
I understand the reasons Asian parents have raised a generation of children this way. Doctor, lawyer, accountant, engineer: These are good jobs open to whoever works hard enough. What could be wrong with that pursuit? Asians graduate from college at a rate higher than any other ethnic group in America, including whites. They earn a higher median family income than any other ethnic group in America, including whites. This is a stage in a triumphal narrative, and it is a narrative that is much shorter than many remember. Two thirds of the roughly 14 million Asian-Americans are foreign-born. There were less than 39,000 people of Korean descent living in America in 1970, when my elder brother was born. There are around 1 million today.
Asian-American success is typically taken to ratify the American Dream and to prove that minorities can make it in this country without handouts. Still, an undercurrent of racial panic always accompanies the consideration of Asians, and all the more so as China becomes the destination for our industrial base and the banker controlling our burgeoning debt. But if the armies of Chinese factory workers who make our fast fashion and iPads terrify us, and if the collective mass of high-achieving Asian-American students arouse an anxiety about the laxity of American parenting, what of the Asian-American who obeyed everything his parents told him? Does this person really scare anyone?
Earlier this year, the publication of Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother incited a collective airing out of many varieties of race-based hysteria. But absent from the millions of words written in response to the book was any serious consideration of whether Asian-Americans were in fact taking over this country. If it is true that they are collectively dominating in elite high schools and universities, is it also true that Asian-Americans are dominating in the real world? My strong suspicion was that this was not so, and that the reasons would not be hard to find. If we are a collective juggernaut that inspires such awe and fear, why does it seem that so many Asians are so readily perceived to be, as I myself have felt most of my life, the products of a timid culture, easily pushed around by more assertive people, and thus basically invisible?
Stopping a Shortcut to In-State Tuition
In a tit-for-tat with two companies that helped out-of-state students pay much lower in-state rates, the University of Colorado system changed its tuition policy.
The change, made last fall, has put one of the two companies out of business and may be forcing a change in tactics by the second. Both companies, Tuition Specialists and In-State Angels, promised to help parents and students save thousands of dollars by getting in-state tuition for nonresident students.
Both companies are based in Boulder and share the unusual business model. It’s so unusual that Tuition Specialists, founded in 2007, sued In-State Angels, founded in 2011, for stealing its idea.
The idea? “At Tuition Specialists we pave your road to in-state tuition,” claims the older of the two companies.
Wal-Mart has a lower acceptance rate than Harvard
This year’s Ivy League admissions totals are in. The 8.9 percent acceptance rate is impressively exclusive, but compared to landing a job at Wal-Mart, getting into the Ivy Leagues is a cakewalk.
Last year when Wal-Mart came to D.C. there were over 23,000 applications for 600 jobs. That’s an acceptance rate of 2.6%, twice as selective as Harvard’s and over five times as choosy as Cornell.
The Northwestern University Football Union and the NCAA’s Death Spiral
“Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered,” – Mark Cuban
The experts said that the efforts of the Northwestern University football team to form a union would crash and burn. The experts scoffed that these naïve jocks would lose their case before the National Labor Relations Board. The experts all believed that this is what they call “settled law.” After all, since the 1950s, when the widow of a football player who died on the field of play failed in her efforts to sue the NCAA for worker’s compensation, it was clear to the courts that these were not workers but “student-athletes.” The experts were proven wrong on Wednesday and the established order in the sports world has been shaken to its foundations.
The NLRB has ruled that& the Northwestern Wildcats are in fact workers. They ruled that since players do not get class credit for playing football and that they are given value for their time playing football, namely an annual scholarship that is worth over $60,000, then yes, they can organize themselves into a union.
