Is development aid effective? Do school uniforms improve discipline? Don’t guess – try it out
Doctors have been given the go-ahead to conduct a trial on victims of heart attacks. Some randomly assigned patients will get a shot of adrenaline, the treatment conventionally used in these situations. Others will get a shot of saltwater: in other words, a placebo. Doctors will then measure the outcomes to see which, if any, work better.
Germany’s ‘adopt a grandparent’ scheme
In Germany, a scheme that roughly translates as ‘adopt a grandparent’ has been running with great success.
It pairs older people with children who may not have or see grandparents of their own.
Apple’s iPhone Is at the Center of Another Major Revolution to address disabilities
Improving lives in unexpected ways
The most essential app Aimee Copeland has downloaded for her iPhone isn’t Facebook, Candy Crush Saga or Evernote. It’s “my i-limb,” an app that allows her to easily change the gestures her two prosthetic hands can make while on the go. Copeland, who lost her hands after a zipline accident in 2012, used to have to visit a registered prosthetist who had access to special software in order to adjust the grips on her hands for different physical activities. Now, with the i-limb bionic hand and its accompanying mobile app, such changes are as simple as booting up her phone or tablet.
Chicago Teacher Union President “1%” Commentary
DAN MIHALOPOULOS AND CHRIS FUSCO:
Karen Lewis, the Chicago Teachers Union president now considering whether to run for mayor, has frequently railed against the influence of the wealthy.
“Why do people of wealth and privilege try to convince the world they have neither?” she said on Twitter last year. “Be honest that you don’t have a clue about poverty.”
She has ripped Mayor Rahm Emanuel as a tool of corporate Chicago, labeled him “Mayor 1%” and described herself as “not egotistical or rich.”
Lewis isn’t as wealthy as Emanuel, a multimillionaire who made his fortune during a short stint as an investment banker. But she makes more than $200,000 a year and has an ownership interest in three homes, records show.
Head UK teachers’ unions and academies team up to establish new league table
After years of objecting to school league tables, headteachers’ unions are to establish a rival league table promising to offer more information for parents and downplay recent Department for Education rule changes.
The Association of School and College Leaders and the National Association of Head Teachers – which together represent the bulk of state school heads – are to join the United Learning academy chain and the PiXL network in promoting the league table
Do the maths on education choices
Jenkins uses the latest data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa) to argue that employment prospects for mathematicians are worse than those for, eg, historians. While it is true that 9% of mathematicians were unemployed six months after graduating compared with 7% of historians, the tables are turned in the longer term. The same annual Hesa reports used by Jenkins show that three years later in their careers:
(a) 2.3% of mathematicians were assumed unemployed compared to 3.8% of the historians;
(b) 75% of mathematicians thought their degree was good value for money, and 63% of historians thought theirs was;
(c) more than half the mathematicians in employment were earning more than £27,500, while this was true of only a quarter of the historians (92% of mathematicians were classified as being in “professional” employment compared with 77% of historians).
The Lower Ambitions of Higher Education
Are you a HYPSter? That’s William Deresiewicz’s term, in his new book, for Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, though it seems more idiomatic to apply that acronym to these schools’ graduates. With HYPSters, and with the recent graduates of the tier of elite American colleges a rung or two below them, he is unimpressed.
Far too many are going into the same professions, notably finance or consulting. He detects a lack of curiosity, of interesting rebellion, of moral courage, of passionate weirdness. We’ve spawned a generation of polite, striving, praise-addicted, grade-grubbing nonentities — a legion of, as his title puts it, “Excellent Sheep.”
Books like this one, volumes that probe the sick soul of American higher education, come and go, more than a few of them hitting the long tail of the best-seller lists. As a class of books, they’re almost permanently interesting, at least if you work in or around education, or if you, like me, have kids who are starting to freak out about their SATs.
College Selectivity and Degree Completion
Scott Heil, Liza Reisel & Paul Attewell:
How much of a difference does it make whether a student of a given academic ability enters a more or a less selective four-year college? Some studies claim that attending a more academically selective college markedly improves one’s graduation prospects. Others report the reverse: an advantage from attending an institution where one’s own skills exceed most other students. Using multi-level models and propensity score matching methods to reduce selection bias, we find that selectivity, measured by a college’s average SAT score, does not have an independent effect on graduation. Instead of a selectivity effect we find relatively small positive effects on graduation rates from attending a college with higher tuition costs. We also find no evidence that students who do not attend highly selective colleges suffer reduced chances of graduation as a result, all else being equal.
America’s Math Crisis
Americans could use a crash course in math.
According to a new study from the Brookings Institution, jobs in science, technology, engineering and math are vacant for more than twice as long as other positions — largely because employers can’t find people with the math and science skills to fill them.In fact, high school graduates with science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills are in greater demand than college grads without them.
Related: Math Forum Audio & Video and wisconsin2.org.
Let’s Stop Trying To Teach Students Critical Thinking
in knowledge passively? But there is a problem with the widespread treatment of critical thinking as a skill to be taught.
The truth is that you can’t teach people to be critical unless you are critical yourself. This involves more than asking young people to “look critically” at something, as if criticism was a mechanical task.
As a teacher, you have to have a critical spirit. This does not mean moaning endlessly about education policies you dislike or telling students what they should think. It means first and foremost that you are capable of engaging in deep conversation. This means debate and discussion based on considerable knowledge – something that is almost entirely absent in the educational world. It also has to take place in public, with parents and others who are not teachers, not just in the classroom or staffroom.
Rating US Colleges: in 1911
President Obama wants to rate colleges’ “value.” Higher ed leaders hate the idea, writes Libby Nelson on Vox. When the feds tried to rate colleges by quality — in 1911 — college leaders lobbied so vigorously they got the Babcock report quashed.
The U.S. Bureau of Education’s Kendric Babcock, a former college president, rated 600 colleges and universities by how well they prepared students for graduate work. Class 1 graduates would need only a year of graduate school to finish a degree, he estimated. In Class 2 and 3, students would need more time. Class 4 graduates would start out two years behind, he predicted.
via Joanne Jacobs.
What Are the Most Powerful Uses of Tech for Learning?
When we talk about the digital divide in education, the discussions revolve mainly around two factors: lack of access to the internet and lack of knowing how to use that access in powerful ways that can fuel learning beyond consuming content.
There are a lot of powerful tools for change available to educators and plenty of creative, inspired educators working hard to put available technology to work in classrooms. A lack of excellence is not the problem in education; access to technology and guidance for participating in the digital space in powerful ways are much bigger challenges.
That is the message Karen Cator, president and CEO of Digital Promise and former head of the Office of Technology at the US Department of Education, is spreading around the country. “When we think about students who do not have access to these kinds of powered-up learning environments, that’s a problem,” Cator said at a presentation sponsored by SVForum, a non-profit that organizes ed-tech events. From Cator’s perspective, the digital learning gap can be broken down into three parts: access, participation and powerful use.
Secrets of amazing teachers: What both sides of the education reform debate get wrong about autonomy and accountability
The common view of great teachers is that they are born that way. Like Michelle Pfeiffer’s ex-marine in “Dangerous Minds,” Edward James Olmos’s Jaime Escalante in “Stand and Deliver,” and Robin Williams’s “carpe diem”–intoning whistler in “Dead Poets Society,” legendary teachers transform thugs into scholars, illiterates into geniuses, and slackers into bards through brute charisma. Teaching is their calling—not a matter of craft and training, but alchemical inspiration.
Bad teachers, conversely, are portrayed as deliberately sadistic (as with the Sue Sylvester character on “Glee”), congenitally boring (Ben Stein’s nasal droner in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”), or ludicrously dim-witted (Mr. Garrison from “South Park”). These are the tropes of a common narrative, a story I’ve come to call the “Myth of the Natural-Born Teacher.”
Even in the rare cases where fictional teachers appear to improve—as happens in “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” the novel-turned-film, in which a bland schoolteacher named Mr. Chips comes to “sparkle”—the change is an ugly duckling–style unmasking of hidden pizzazz rather than the acquisition of new skill. Others think Mr. Chips has become a “new man,” but in fact, we are told, he has only peeled back a “creeping dry rot of pedagogy” to reveal the “sense of humor” that “he had always had.”
A New Ratio for the Japanese Cram School
Yuuki Takano, an athletic sixth grader, hopes to attend a private junior high school with a strong soccer team after he graduates from his Tokyo public elementary school next year.
To help him pass the junior high school’s notoriously difficult entrance exams this winter, Yuuki’s mother, Asuka Takano, decided to place him in a traditional Japanese preparatory school, made up of big classes with dozens of students. The schools are often called cram schools, or juku in Japanese.
Mrs. Takano assumed her son would do well there, as she had attended a big cram school herself when she was preparing to enter a private high school.
Princeton committee recommends end of grade deflation era
Following decades of rampant grade inflation, the average GPA and fraction of A-grades given dropped dramatically from 2003-05 — the years right before the current grading policy was implemented — according to a report released by the University on Tuesday morning.
The report, which was prepared at the request of University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 after only a few months in office, suggests that the controversial grade deflation policy has had little direct effect on grading. Implementation began in the fall of 2005 at a time when A-grades and GPA averages had decreased significantly already, only to increase unabated soon after the policy was put in practice, the report noted.
The grade deflation policy — which states that no department should give more than 35 percent A-grades overall — has been widely criticized since its inception. At the time it was approved, it was thought that the policy would curb grade inflation and other colleges would follow suit.
Study on Parental Longevity Is Short on Causation
A recent paper by two sociologists purports to show that sending your children to college is a great way to extend your life. Accessing the paper requires a subscription, but it is discussed in this news article and this post.
In the paper, the authors compare the life spans of people whose children did and did not go to college. They do some statistical adjustments in making this comparison, and to a rough approximation are comparing the longevity of parents who have similar finances and education but whose children have different levels of education. Their key finding: Parents with college-educated children live longer.
“Adult offspring’s educational attainments have independent effects on their parents’ mortality, even after controlling for parents’ own socioeconomic resources,” the authors say. They hypothesize that college-educated children encourage their parents to engage in healthier behaviors, and that’s why they live longer.
UK Free schools ‘popular with non-white families’
The government’s free schools programme has proved to be popular with non-white families, according to the first academic analysis of the policy, which also found free schools attracted brighter and slightly better-off primary-aged pupils compared with the national average.
“Free schools have emerged most strongly in neighbourhoods with high proportions of non-white children, compared with the national average, and that within those neighbourhoods they have admitted even higher proportions of non-whites,” the report’s authors, led by Prof Francis Green of the Institute for Education, said.
The research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, looked at the neighbourhoods and enrolments of 88 primary and 63 secondary mainstream free schools that opened between 2011 and September 2013.
In primary schools, researchers found that white children made up only a third of the free school population, which is less than half the national average in England and well below the proportion of the white ethnic population in the neighbourhoods where the schools were sited.
Explaining how pensions work might alarm rather than empower – strongly disagree….
What is the difference between per cent and percentage points? I was pulled up on this some years ago soon after joining the FT, and have since discovered many others, including prominent academics, who are not aware of the distinction.
Does it matter? For the sake of accuracy, yes it does. Given the general lack of numeracy and financial understanding though, it is a minor detail.
The financial industry has long maintained that financial education is the missing factor in making us all better customers for their wares. As financial decision-making is increasingly passed from institutions to individuals and becomes more and more complex, the apparent need for better education becomes more pressing.
Few would disagree that an appreciation of interest rates, compound interest, annual percentage rates and inflation should be taught as standard to all school children. It would not go amiss if they learned about the stock market either.
That alone, though, would not necessarily equip them to make decisions about how to invest for retirement, say. There is a distinct lack of agreement about how to do that among the professionals, for a start. There is also no agreement on the extent to which a better understanding of investment risk would lead to better decision-making.
A recent publication by Allianz, the insurer, reveals a belief on the part of some contributors that financial education would prevent the recurrence of a 2008-style crisis and contribute to lowering wealth inequality, while others maintain it is all too complex and we should leave decisions to the experts.
Commentary on College Remediation Rates
College remediation rates are used to justify the need for the Common Core. For diehard reformers, the lack of “rigorous standards” is res ipsa loquitur –the culpability is such that one can disregard the other possible contributing factors that result in student remediation.
The argument is both political and simplistic. It is political because time and again the facts about college remediation are distorted or framed to cause maximum alarm. It is simplistic because it fails to acknowledge the complexity of the problem, seeing college remediation solely as a function of inadequate high school preparation.
Let’s begin with how reformers distort the facts. Here is one example. According to Boston Globe columnist Scot Lehigh, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said the following in Massachusetts earlier this year:
Top UK universities urge scrapping of free-for-all student recruitment plan
Wendy Piatt, director-general of the Russell Group of universities – which represents research-intensive universities such as Oxford and Manchester – said the HEPI report on Australia’s experience raised “serious concerns” about the ending of firm controls on student numbers.
“Now that the government no longer intends to use the sale of the student loan book to fund the uncapping of student numbers in England, we would urge it to abandon the policy or at least consider much more robust ways of controlling costs and quality,” Piatt said.
“We would be extremely concerned if the substantial funds required to pay for additional students were taken from the already very stretched budget for research and higher education. It would be very worrying if this policy leads to less funding per student. Good teaching requires proper levels of investment.”
While Australia spent years preparing the groundwork for open enrolments in its universities, the English approach “was put together quickly and remains fuzzy,” according to Hillman, including the Treasury’s forecast of an additional 60,000 students a year.
Kardashian Index
I am concerned that phenomena similar to that of Kim Kardashian may also exist in the scientific community. I think it is possible that there are individuals who are famous for being famous. – Neil Hall
If you are scratching your head wondering who Kim Kardashian is, she is a reality TV star with millions of fans and online followers. When I first spotted tweets about the Kardashian factor, I rolled my eyes and ignored them. I inadvertently landed on an article about the Kardashian factor by following a tweet from Kirk Englehardt. Its interesting, sort of entertaining and irritating at the same time, but the article and the responses to it are raising some important issues.
The Kardashian Index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists
Big jump in number of millennials living with parents reported
More Americans than ever live in multigenerational households, and the number of millennials who live with their parents is rising sharply, according to a study released Thursday.
A record 57 million Americans, or 18.1% of the population, lived in multigenerational arrangements in 2012, according to the Pew Research Center. That’s more than double the 28 million people who lived in such households in 1980, the center said.
A multigenerational family is defined as one with two or more generations of adults living together.
Moving in with parents becomes more common for the middle-aged
Walter Hamilton
The sluggish job market and other factors have propelled the rise in millennials living in their childhood bedrooms.About 23.6% of people age 25 to 34 live with their parents, grandparents or both, according to Pew. That’s up from 18.7% in 2007, just prior to the global financial crisis, and from 11% in 1980.
” Children aren’t worth very much—that’s why we no longer make many”
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been characterized by a massive decline in fertility, beginning in rich western countries and spreading all over the world. It is a transformation that is still underway in poor countries today.
Technological advances have, over the same period, radically decreased child mortality and increased life span. Modern parents need not have many children to ensure that one or two survive; almost all children survive to reproductive age. But Darwinian genetic interests cannot explain the modern decline in fertility (if Darwinian interests dominated, fertility should increase with increased survival, as observed in many historical elites). Rather, the fertility decline to present levels is mostly an economic response to the changing value of children, and to the changing economic relationship of parents and children. The economic transformation is not spontaneous, but the product of cultural transformation through education.
The economic value of children has decreased, but this is not the most important cause of the fertility decline. The transformation of countries from predominantly agricultural to predominantly urban reduced the value of children, especially where the industrial employment of children was restricted. Each child’s labor contributed positive value to a family farm or cottage industry, but in an urban setting, children began to have negative economic value. Indeed, the fertility decline correlates somewhat—though not perfectly—with the transformation from agrarian to city life.
Children are an incredible blessing.
Licensed teachers overwhelm number of job openings
School officials who hire teachers who aren’t properly credentialed for their positions often cite a lack of suitable candidates, in part because of teacher shortages in certain areas. But the most current state data available show that most fields actually had a surplus of newly licensed candidates available for hire. A higher ratio means fewer newly qualified teachers were hired.
How the Government Exaggerates the Cost of College
But it turns out the government’s measure is deeply misleading.
For years, that measure was based on the list prices that colleges published in their brochures, rather than the actual amount students and their families paid. The government ignored financial-aid grants. Effectively, the measure tracked the price of college for rich families, many of whom were not eligible for scholarships, but exaggerated the price – and price increases – for everyone from the upper middle class to the poor.
New Rochelle Board of Education Declares War on Free Speech – Bans Criticism of Board Members, Grants “Right to Interrupt” to Board Members
NEW ROCHELLE, NY — Welcome to the administration of New Rochelle Board of Education President Lianne Merchant – where free speech goes to die and all dissent will be crushed. In her first act as the newly elected senior board President, Merchant waited until the last minute to unveil sweeping changes to board policy that eliminates any guarantees of public input into school board meetings as what can only be seen as a prelude to eliminating entirely any public involvement in school board meetings.
Beset by criticism over an unfolding story of corruption and incompetence on its watch, and infighting among its own members, the New Rochelle Board of Education last night proposed to “solve” that problem by severely curtailing public engagement during school board meetings.
THE NEWLY GUTTED POLICY: 9340 Public Participation in Meetings_REV_Track Changes
There are currently numerous criminal investigations going on concerning school district employees, the recent Board President was deposed after he was found to have misappropriated $13,000 to pay for his personal medical insurance, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the District asserting the District lied to investigators after wheel-chair bound students were left behind during a fire at the local high school, the District was issued fines and violation notices related to an asbestos exposure incident at an elementary school after an investigation by the New York State Department of Labor which also found the district never checked the license of its asbestos abatement contractor (the license was forged), the District’s business manager (since fired) paid out millions of dollars to contractors with no-bid contracts and invoices lacking required documentation, filed phony documents during a New York State Comptroller Audit, and in a report to the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, and lied repeatedly about a $3.5 million dollar environmental services contract that was never drafted or signed.
Eton headmaster: England’s exam system unimaginative and outdated
England’s “unimaginative” exam system is little changed from Victorian times and fails to prepare young people for modern working life, Eton’s headmaster has said.
Tony Little said there was a risk that “misleading” test scores may become more important than education itself, and warned against a narrow focus on topping rankings.
“There is a great deal more to an effective and good education than jostling for position in a league table,” Little wrote in a Viewpoint article for the Radio Times.
He said England’s attempts to copy the highly academic schooling offered in areas of the far east such as Shanghai was ironic, since schools there were now looking at the value of giving children a more rounded education.
“Here is the irony; we seem intent on creating the same straitjacket the Chinese are trying to wriggle out of,” he wrote. “We should be wary of emulating Shanghai just as they themselves see some value in the liberal values of an all-round education – something we have traditionally been good at.”
Shanghai is rated the top education system in the OECD’s Pisa tests (Programme for International Student Assessment), which compare the performance of children in 65 countries.
It’s harder to be a poor student in the U.S. than in Russia
It isn’t easy to be a disadvantaged high school student anywhere, but the U.S. education system appears to be particularly unkind to its less privileged youth.
Poor students have a tougher time overcoming their socioeconomic odds in the U.S. than in Canada, France, Russia, and 33 other countries, according to a new global report by the OECD. Only about 20 percent of disadvantaged students in the U.S.—those in the bottom 25th percentile of the PISA index of economic, social and cultural status— show academic performance that’s in the top 25th percentile internationally. In Russia and France, that percentage is only slightly higher; in Canada it’s nearer to 35 percent. In a handful of East Asian countries, including Singapore, Vietnam, and several provinces in China, well over 60 percent of disadvantaged students rank in the top quarter of international students. The average among all OECD member countries is roughly 25 percent.
Middle School Students Plan to Break Dress Code, Principal Screams Terrorism
A group of Georgia middle school students decided they had enough of the school dress code and would violate it together in an act of civil disobedience. The school, Cowan Road Middle, found out about the plan and suspended the students for…terrorism.
What?According to WSB-TV (emphasis added):
“To me it was just a bunch of 13-year-olds acting crazy,” said Christopher Cagle, the father of a suspended honor roll student.
Cagle said the principal called the students’ actions terroristic threats. He said the principal was too swift and severe with the punishment.”
Read more at http://pandaunite.org/ndaa-middle-school-students-plan-to-break-dress-code-principal-screams-terrorism/#FdIlDubvj0sOkdQZ.99
A Short List of Things that Do Not Explain Our Educational Mediocrity…
Everywhere I go, people bring me theories about why one country’s students seem smarter than another. Many of these theories make intuitive sense. Some make no sense at all. The good news is that the research helps us rule out a bunch of things based on what we do know about educational outcomes around the world:
A Short List of Things that Do NOT Explain Education Outcomes:
1. School Lunches
I hear this a lot, mostly because many people have heard that Finland–an educational utopia–gives free lunches to all students. While I think it’s a good idea to provide free lunch to all students, and I agree Finnish school lunches are quite delicious (as are Korean school lunches–see photo), free lunch does not seem to be a common theme among top performing countries.
For example, Canada, which has significant child poverty but very strong education outcomes, is rather stingy when it comes to lunch. Nine out of 10 students bring their own lunches in Canada, according to this 2008 report (which is fascinating, though a bit dated). In Poland, which also has better education outcomes than the U.S., the high school where I spent the most time did not even have a cafeteria, let alone free meals.
Ranking College Professors
Reed College rates No. 1 in the nation for professors who rate high in the eyes of their students, according to a survey of 130,000 college students released Monday by the Princeton Review.
The publisher of college guides asked students to complete a detailed survey covering all aspects of their college experience. Questions included a five-level rating of whether professors are accessible and “interesting and bring their material to life,” plus open-ended questions including “comment on your professors and your overall academic experience” and “what are the greatest strengths of your school?”
At no U.S. college were students more effusive about their professors than at Reed, the most selective college in Oregon, where super-smart students learn at an intellectually curious, lushly green campus in Southeast Portland.
Perhaps as a result, Reed students were No. 4 in the nation in the average amount of time they reported studying outside of class. (Harvard students were No. 11.) Reed students also enjoy the No. 3 best classroom experience, Review officials report.
Commentary on New Jersey’s School Equity Ruling’s 25th Anniversary
Therefore, relying on local property taxes to fund schools is unconstitutional and adequate funding, including compensatory services for disadvantaged students in New Jersey’s poorest 29 districts, “must be guaranteed and mandated by the State.” (Those 29 districts were called “Abbott districts” because the first name on the alphabetical list of plaintiffs was Raymond Abbott, a 12-year-old student from Camden. Two districts were added later.)
The court didn’t limit its pronouncement of inequity to funding formulas. The judges also pointed to the necessity of education reform in terms that today seem prescient.
In the second paragraph of the 69-page decision, Wilentz writes (emphasis my own): “We note the convincing proofs in this record that funding alone will not achieve the constitutional mandate of an equal education in these poorer urban districts; that without educational reform, the money may accomplish nothing; and that in these districts, substantial, far-reaching change in education is absolutely essential to success. The proofs compellingly demonstrate that the traditional and prevailing educational programs in these poorer urban schools were not designed to meet and are not sufficiently addressing the pervasive array of problems that inhibit the education of poorer urban children. Unless a new approach is taken, these schools — even if adequately funded –will not provide a thorough and efficient education.”
ELC’s litigation on behalf of New Jersey’s poorest students during Abbott II (it also filed a voluminous amicus brief for Robinson) has produced the most progressive and ethical schoolfunding mechanism in the country.
While we seem to rifle through funding formulas like teenagers through clothing fads — QEA, CEIFA, SFRA — Abbott districts are no longer dependent on local tax levies. In 2012, for example, the Camden public schools, which serve 15,000 students, had total revenues of $377 million, or about $27,000 per pupil. Local taxpayers were responsible for only 1.9 percent of that total.
Yum, McDonald’s bottom line shrinks as Americans eat healthier
Yum Brands Inc’s disappointing Pizza Hut and Taco Bell results, along with other data, suggested the U.S. fast-food business remained weak in the second quarter and that industry leader McDonald’s Corp continues to struggle.
The U.S. fast-food segment has lagged the broader restaurant sector, due to weak job growth and stagnant pay among the lower-wage diners who frequent such restaurants. The sector also is struggling to remain relevant as more consumers move away from decadent food like cheeseburgers and french fries to fresher, healthier fare.
“Equal Access to Good Teachers”
The Obama administration will announce plans on Monday to enforce a long-ignored federal mandate: a decade-old requirement that states give students of all ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds equal access to good teachers.
The new initiative, called “Excellent Educators for All,” aims to bring states into compliance with a teacher equity mandate in the No Child Left Behind Act, the George W. Bush-era law that requires states to reward and punish schools based on standardized test scores.
There are three parts to the effort: By April 2015, states must submit “comprehensive educator equity plans” that detail how they plan to put “effective educators” in front of poor and minority kids. To help states write the plans, the Education Department will create a $4.2 million “Education Equity Support Network.” And this fall, the Education Department will publish “Educator Equity profiles” that highlight which states and districts fare well or poorly on teacher equity.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will announce the changes Monday at a roundtable with teachers and President Barack Obama. The White House is framing the initiative as the latest of Obama’s executive actions to circumvent congressional gridlock.
It’s not yet clear, though, exactly how the department will hold states accountable for all this planning — and ultimately produce changes in classrooms. The department’s initial press release on the effort also did not specify how it will define “effective” teachers.
Art in the Future Will Be for Everyone
Before talking about the future of art, I’d like to draw your attention to the past, to another form of human expression: music.
Pre-20th century, the music world in the West resembled the art world today. If you listened to professional music, were informed about the genre and attended performances, you were part of an elite class.
Today, it’s hard to imagine a world where listening to music has anything to do with class. Not everyone can afford front-row seats to a Justin Timberlake concert, but everyone knows his music. You can ask anyone on the street about their favorite band and watch their eyes light up. In contrast, try asking someone on the street about their favorite artist and rarely will you find a similarly enthusiastic response. (If this thought experiment doesn’t make sense, you probably live in New York or London—two cities that together account for over 60% of the global art market.)
How Finland Keeps Kids Focused Through Free Play
Like a zombie, Sami—one of my fifth graders—lumbered over to me and hissed, “I think I’m going to explode! I’m not used to this schedule.” And I believed him. An angry red rash was starting to form on his forehead.
Yikes, I thought. What a way to begin my first year of teaching in Finland. It was only the third day of school and I was already pushing a student to the breaking point. When I took him aside, I quickly discovered why he was so upset.
Throughout this first week of school, I had gotten creative with my fifth grade timetable. Normally, students and teachers in Finland take a 15-minute break after every 45 minutes of instruction. During a typical break, students head outside to play and socialize with friends while teachers disappear to the lounge to chat over coffee.
I didn’t see the point of these frequent pit stops. As a teacher in the United States, I’d spent several consecutive hours with my students in the classroom. And I was trying to replicate this model in Finland. The Finnish way seemed soft and I was convinced that kids learned better with longer stretches of instructional time. So I decided to hold my students back from their regularly scheduled break and teach two 45-minute lessons in a row, followed by a double break of 30 minutes. Now I knew why the red dots had appeared on Sami’s forehead.
Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure if the American approach had ever worked very well. My students in the States had always seemed to drag their feet after about 45 minutes in the classroom. But they’d never thought of revolting like this shrimpy Finnish fifth grader, who was digging in his heels on the third day of school. At that moment, I decided to embrace the Finnish model of taking breaks.
How hard is it to be a teacher? Story from Japan.
About six weeks ago, Amanda Ripley published an article suggesting that it be made more difficult to become a teacher. I’ll add one story.
My colleague at the University of Virginia, Shige Oishi, is, without exaggeration, a brilliant and highly accomplished man. I recently learned that he briefly thought about a career in teaching in Japan. I asked why he didn’t pursue it.
He told me “I wasn’t sure I could do it. The entrance examination is very very difficult. I knew I would have to study at least a year, and then I wasn’t sure I could pass.”
A College Education Saddles Young Households with Debt, but Still Pays Off
Daniel Carroll and Amy Higgins:
Many parents believe their children must get a college degree—especially if they want to have at least as comfortable a lifestyle as their parents had; yet the price of a college degree has been rising rapidly over the past three decades. As costs have risen, more and more students and their families have turned to education loans for financing. This trend, combined with the strong propensity for households to form among individuals of similar education levels, has led to much larger student loan debt burdens for households headed by young adults who have attended college. In the 1989 Survey of Consumer Finances, real (inflation-adjusted) average student loan debt for young households (those headed by someone between 22 and 29 years of age) with a college degree was $3,420. In 2010, the same average was $16,714, nearly a 400 percent increase. For households with some college, but without a college degree, average student loan debt rose about 270 percent.
Another Challenge to Teacher Tenure Status Quo
David Boies, the star trial lawyer who helped lead the legal charge that overturned California’s same-sex marriage ban, is becoming chairman of the Partnership for Educational Justice, a group that former CNN anchor Campbell Brown founded in part to pursue lawsuits challenging teacher tenure.
Mr. Boies, the son of two public schoolteachers, is a lifelong liberal who represented Al Gore in Bush v. Gore and prosecuted Microsoft in the Clinton Administration’s antitrust suit. In aligning himself with a cause that is bitterly opposed by teachers’ unions, he is emblematic of an increasingly fractured relationship between the Democrats and the teachers’ unions.
As chairman of the new group, Mr. Boies, 73, will join Ms. Brown as the public face of a legal strategy in which the group organizes parents and students to bring lawsuits against states with strong tenure and seniority protections.
Commentary on Madison’s Long Term Achievement Gap Challenges; Single Year Data Points…
“It seems reasonable to attribute a good share of the improvements to the specific and focused strategies we have pursued this year,” Hughes writes. The process of improvement will become self-reinforcing, he predicts. “This bodes well for better results on the horizon.”
Not so fast, writes Madison attorney Jeff Spitzer-Resnick in his Systems Change Consulting blog, the results are not all they’re cracked up to be upon closer examination.
At Madison East High School, for example, the results reveal significant academic problems and huge racial disparities, but no information about school discipline issues, Spitzer-Resnick writes.
The number of East High 9th graders failing two or more courses dropped to 33 percent last school year from 38 percent the year before, the report says.
“This is still a very high rate of failure,” Spitzer-Resnick says and points out the significantly more troubling breakdown for African-American (49 percent) and special education (45 percent) 9th graders who failed two or more courses.
Spitzer-Resnick plots out other disparities in student achievement and argues that the lack of data on school discipline means there are no goals or accountability for the implementation of a new behavior plan the school district will launch next year.
Tim Slekar, education policy activist and dean of the School of Education at Edgewood College who blogs at The Chalk Face, says that the gains in the MMSD report “are so small that attributing a cause and effect relationship between the scores and the improvement plan is way too premature.”
Background links: Ed Hughes and Madison’s long term disastrous reading results.
Much more on Madison and nearby Districts use of the MAP assessment, including results from 2011-2012.
It would be useful to compare results over the past few years, rather than just the current school year.
Academics call for guidelines on use of online learners’ data
Guidelines to ensure the ethical use of data gathered from online learners need to be developed, to prevent the misuse of personal information, a group of academics has said.
Delegates at the Asilomar Convention for Learning Research in Higher Education, which took place in California earlier this month, have produced a framework to promote the appropriate use of both learners’ personal information, and any research based on their activity.
The document states that six principles should inform the collection, storage, distribution and analysis of information gathered from people who engage with online learning resources such as massive open online courses.
These include having respect for the rights and dignity of learners and ensuring that digital technologies never erode the relationships that make learning “a humane enterprise”.
“Virtually all modern societies have strong traditions for protecting individuals in their interactions with large organizations, especially for purposes of scientific research, yet digital media present problems for the inheritors of those traditions,” the document says.
Middle-class parents should give their children more freedom
IN 1693 the philosopher John Locke warned that children should not be given too much “unwholesome fruit” to eat. Three centuries later, misguided ideas about child-rearing are still rife. Many parents fret that their offspring will die unless ceaselessly watched. In America the law can be equally paranoid. In South Carolina this month Debra Harrell was jailed for letting her nine-year-old daughter play in a park unsupervised. The child, who had a mobile phone and had not been harmed in any way, was briefly taken into custody of the social services.
Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student
READING, STUDYING, THINKING,
STARTING OFF on the PhD,
DEEP in the MIDDLE of the PhD,
WRITING it all up.
YOUREADING:
Books are not scrolls.
Scrolls must be read like the Torah from one end to the other.
Books are random access — a great innovation over scrolls.
Make use of this innovation! Do NOT feel obliged to read a book from beginning to end.
Permit yourself to open a book and start reading from anywhere.
In the case of mathematics or physics or anything especially hard, try to find something anything that you can understand.
Read what you can.
Write in the margins. (You know how useful that can be.)
Next time you come back to that book, you’ll be able to read more.
You can gradually learn extraordinarily hard things this way.Consider writing what you read as you read it.
This is especially true if you’re intent on reading something hard.I remember a professor of Mathematics at MIT,
Families Borrow Less for College More Income, Savings Are Used to Cover Costs, Survey Finds
Cost-conscious families “are not going to write a blank check” for college, Ms. Ducich said. “They are making a lot of decisions to control the cost.”
For one thing, more students attended a two-year public college, and many such students live at home. The 34% of students using two-year public schools was the highest in the seven years the study has been conducted.
“You can save an enormous amount of money” at a two-year school, said Christopher Russo, 22, of Bridgewater, N.J., who received an associate degree in May from nearby Raritan Valley Community College.Because of medical and financial issues, his family was unable to contribute to college costs. Still, Mr. Russo is debt-free, with summer earnings combined with grants and scholarships having covered Raritan Valley’s full cost—$4,600 in 2013-14 for local-county residents taking 15 credits a semester.
Mr. Russo will incur a limited amount of debt when he continues his education this fall at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. While some of his friends attending private colleges will end up with huge debt burdens, he said, “I’ll be out of debt incredibly fast,” probably a few years after graduation, thanks to his in-state tuition at Rutgers and spending the first two years at a community college.
The Problem With College Rankings
As a Princeton professor, I really ought to love college rankings. The most famous of them, by U.S. News and World Report, currently places my employer first among national universities, nudging out Harvard and Yale. Forbes’s list of “America’s Top Colleges” has us at a respectable third. While Money’s brand-new “Best Colleges” ranking takes us down a notch to fourth, it still puts us ahead of the other Ivies. Go, Tigers!
In fact, as with most of my colleagues, what was once mild amusement at this Game of Lists is fast turning into serious annoyance. Far too many Boards of Trustees fixate on their school’s rankings, and a college president whose school drops sharply in the U.S. News list now has about as much job security as a Big Ten football coach after a third consecutive losing season. As a result, far too many schools design their policies explicitly with U.S. News in mind. Among the most nefarious consequences has been the shift of precious financial aid dollars away from students with real financial need, toward affluent ones who can boost a school’s average SAT and “yield” (the percentage of admitted students who actually matriculate). Stephen Burd filed an excellent report on this trend last year in The Washington Monthly, but it is all too obvious to anyone who, like me, has teenage children at an affluent high school (I know several families with “one-percent” level annual incomes whose offspring receive substantial merit scholarships).
Is the problem simply the way the rankings are designed? If this were so, in one respect the Money list might offer a welcome corrective. Unlike U.S. News, which gives the most weight to academic reputation and student retention rates, Money takes “affordability” as one of three equal factors, and within this category places significant emphasis on debt. Money will grade down colleges that offer merit scholarships to the affluent while skimping on aid to needy students, forcing them to take out higher loans.
Wall Street as cause and beneficiary of skyrocketing university tuition
A deep, carefully argued, carefully research report from Debt and Society makes a strong case that sky-high tuition (and brutal, lifelong student debt, up 1000% in 15 years) is not primarily caused by bloated administrations or high professors’ salaries. The explanation is a lot more banker-y.
Cuts to public spending drove universities to hike tuition, and the students made up the difference through loans, which benefit financial institutions. The university-as-business ethos that followed drove administrators to float lucrative (for the financial sector) bonds to create showy physical plant for their campuses, further driving up the cost of tuition and the finance-sector revenues from student debt. It’s even worse in the for-profit university sector, where all of these financial shenanigans and the attending lifetime of debt are accompanied by “dismal graduation rates.”
The spending on actual education — classrooms, faculty, etc — has held steady through this period, but ten percent of America’s $440B annual post-secondary education spend goes into investors’ pockets.
The Decline of Drudgery and the Paradox of Hard Work
Brendan Epstein Miles S. Kimball:
We develop a theory that focuses on the general equilibrium and long-run macro- economic consequences of trends in job utility. Given secular increases in job utility, work hours per capita can remain approximately constant over time even if the income e§ect of higher wages on labor supply exceeds the substitution e§ect. In addition, secular improvements in job utility can be substantial relative to welfare gains from ordinary technological progress. These two implications are connected by an equation áowing from optimal hours choices: improvements in job utility that have a significant e§ect on labor supply tend to have large welfare effects.
Keywords: Labor supply, work hours, drudgery, income e§ect, substitution e§ect, job utility.
A Brief History of the Humanities Postdoc
When Harriet A. Zuckerman joined the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 1991, postdoctoral fellowships in the humanities were rare. If, that is, they existed at all.
At the time, postdocs were unique to the sciences, where they’d already become a standard phase in the life cycles of young scholars. The positions had been created to give newly-minted Ph.D.’s in STEM fields a few additional years of training before they entered the job market by ushering them into laboratories to assist established scientists in their research. Science postdocs were far from perfect—they offered low pay and often-frustrating work conditions—but graduates flocked to the programs.
Fast forward about two decades, and graduates in the humanities are now doing roughly the same thing. Search Vitae’s job bank, or scan the Academic Jobs Wiki’s Humanities and Social Science Postdocs fork, and you’ll hit upon dozens of fellowship opportunities. Pursue a Ph.D. in the humanities, and you’re almost certain to hear plenty of opinions—whether from your own advisors or from other experts—on how postdocs should figure into your job search.
And now: The criminalization of parenthood
A couple of themes we explore here at The Watch are the increasing criminalization of just about everything and the use of the criminal justice system to address problems that were once (and better) handled by families, friends, communities and other institutions. A few examples from recent headlines show those themes intersecting with parenthood.
The first story comes from South Carolina, where a mother was jailed and charged with “unlawful conduct toward a child” for . . . leaving her 9-year-old daughter alone to play in a park. Lenore Skenazy of “Free Range Kids” comments:
Here are the facts: Debra Harrell works at McDonald’s in North Augusta, South Carolina. For most of the summer, her daughter had stayed there with her, playing on a laptop that Harrell had scrounged up the money to purchase. (McDonald’s has free WiFi.) Sadly, the Harrell home was robbed and the laptop stolen, so the girl asked her mother if she could be dropped off at the park to play instead.
Harrell said yes. She gave her daughter a cell phone. The girl went to the park—a place so popular that at any given time there are about 40 kids frolicking—two days in a row. There were swings, a “splash pad,” and shade. On her third day at the park, an adult asked the girl where her mother was. At work, the daughter replied.
Reality check: should private education be subsidised for UK poorer pupils?
Eye-catching research on private schools has come out strongly in favour of a scheme that would lead to the state funding places at top private schools for the children of less well-off parents. It would certainly be a scheme popular with the winners – if not those who miss out – but do the numbers in the report really bear out the case that the Social Market Foundation is making?
Can We Predict Which Teens Are Likely To Binge Drink? Maybe
More than half of 16-year-olds in the United States have tried alcohol. While many of them learn to drink responsibly, some go on to binge on alcohol, putting themselves at risk for trouble as adults. Researchers still aren’t sure why that is.
But it may be possible to predict with about 70 percent accuracy which teens will become binge drinkers, based on their genetics, brain function, personality traits and history, according to a study published Wednesday in Nature.
And as prediction tools get better, the researchers say, we’ll be better able to warn and help those who are most at risk.
“It’s sort of a deep mystery — why do some people become addicted and others don’t,” says Hugh Garavan, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont and the study’s senior author.
Wisconsin Court Upholds Law Curbing Unions’ Rights
Mark Peters & Caroline Porter:
Wisconsin’s highest court upheld a law ending most collective-bargaining rights for government employees in the state, a blow for public-sector unions that have been stymied in their efforts to reverse the controversial measure championed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker.
The law, passed in 2011, rocked the state, leading to mass protests and recall elections, while making Mr. Walker a favorite of conservatives across the country. The measure put Wisconsin at the center of a national debate over the role of public-employee unions, particularly in the wake of a recession that battered government finances.
Much more on Act 10, here.
Background links: Mary Spicuzza, Jason Stein & Monica Davey.
Job security for teachers helps everyone
A New York City parents group is joining a nationwide trend — recently filing a lawsuit that challenges teacher tenure laws.
Mona Davids of the New York City Parents Union sued in State Supreme Court in Staten Island on behalf of 11 plaintiffs who suffered in classrooms with bad teachers. A similar suit is pending in Albany by the Partnership for Educational Justice, led by former CNN anchor Campbell Brown, who has dedicated her post-TV career to crusading against teachers’ unions.
These actions are part of a national lawsuit wave to undermine tenure for public schoolteachers. In California, a group called Students Matter recently won a suit: The court found the state’s teacher tenure protections unconstitutional. Students Matter plans to sue in New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico and Oregon.
Groups claiming to represent kids and parents shouldn’t attack the profession. Teacher unions and tenure provisions don’t hurt students. If you don’t believe me, try sending one of your kids to public school in Massachusetts and another to public school in Mississippi, and see how each fares. (Student reading and math proficiency scores are above the national average in Massachusetts, where unions and job protections are more prevalent.
According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, reading and math proficiency lags below average in Mississippi, where teachers do not have tenure.)
Abnormal brain structure in youth who commit homicide.
Violence that leads to homicide results in an extreme financial and emotional burden on society. Juveniles who commit homicide are often tried in adult court and typically spend the majority of their lives in prison. Despite the enormous costs associated with homicidal behavior, there have been no serious neuroscientific studies examining youth who commit homicide.
METHODS:
Here we use neuroimaging and voxel-based morphometry to examine brain gray matter in incarcerated male adolescents who committed homicide (n = 20) compared with incarcerated offenders who did not commit homicide (n = 135). Two additional control groups were used to understand further the nature of gray matter differences: incarcerated offenders who did not commit homicide matched on important demographic and psychometric variables (n = 20) and healthy participants from the community (n = 21).
Secrets of Ivy League tour guides
In McCosh Courtyard on a sunny October afternoon, Princeton students mill about between classes while my friend Sybil, a junior, stands facing her Orange Key tour group. We smile and wave at each other over the heads of the thirty or so prospective students and their parents eagerly listening to Sybil. As I walk by, I catch a snippet of her presentation: “In general,” she says, “Princeton students aren’t really concerned with GPA.”
I laugh to myself at the absurdity of her comment. In a rigorous Ivy League atmosphere where students are divided into quintiles based on GPA cutoffs, how could this be true? I texted Sybil immediately after I heard her comment: “Stop lying to your tours!!” To which she responded: “They tell us to say that!”
Over lunch a few days later, Sybil—who, like all the other tour guides quoted in this article, agreed to be included on the condition that her real name not be used—lists several more pieces of exaggerated information she shares during her tours. She once begrudgingly told a tour group, “There’s no such thing as a typical or a bad dorm room” just one day after an incident that scarred her deeply. She had killed a large insect in her fourth-floor room, and when she returned to clean it up moments later, found a three-inch cockroach eating it. With a hint of bitterness, Sybil recalls a parent from another tour who asked her what the dating scene was like. “I said, ‘You can make it what you want it to be.’ Lie!” We both laugh. Some Princeton students do date, but Sybil is hinting at her frustration—shared by many of her peers—with ephemeral relationships that mostly blossom on “the Street,” the stretch of campus where most Princeton parties occur.
An Attack on the Ivy League Is an Attack on Meritocracy Itself
illiam Deresiewicz’s New Republic cover story, “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League,” has made a stir for his indictment of elite universities as bastions of inequality and intellectual indolence. Less discussed, however, is his claim that the Ivy League’s “narrow conception of what constitutes a valid life: affluence, credentials, prestige” has become a larger cultural problem, infecting American society in general. Generations of students, Deresiewicz argues, are having their souls sucked out of them as they strive to conform to these institutions’ narrow model of the good life. So he doesn’t just attack the conduct of Ivy League colleges; he assails the entire premise of an educational meritocracy. But in doing so, Deresiewicz ignores the values of that meritocracy and displays an unjustified optimism about what might take its place.
In Deresiewicz’s hands, the word “meritocracy” becomes a canard, as he condemns the Ivy League for creating a perverse incentive-structure and credential rat-race that prevents students from “building a soul.” According to Deresiewicz, the Ivy League’s cutthroat social competition and superficial standards for success drive students (and potential applicants) in artificial, anti-intellectual, and anti-contemplative directions. Because of the Ivy League, Deresiewicz explains, high school students spend their time in SAT prep instead of reading poetry, and rather than doing meaningful volunteer-work in their local soup kitchen, they run off to Africa for college essay–driven service trips. But Deresiewicz’s critique is half caricature and half wishful thinking. He ignores the ways in which these universities do promote precisely those values and behaviors that are critical to what Deresiewicz labels “the soul.”
Average European IQ by Country
Please note: Quality of education greatly influences IQ scores, i.e. a lower average IQ is more indicative of lower access to wide-scale quality education rather than innate intelligence (see my explanation of the issue). Also, testing conditions influence results; wealthier countries are more likely to be able to afford better testing conditions for participants.
The data may be outdated for some countries (not all up-to-date statistical data was available for all countries). Because of inevitable statistical errors, isolated figures must be taken with a grain of salt.
Before using strong words in the comments, please consider:
The Curse of Smart People
Anyway, this big company that now employs me is rumoured to hire the smartest people in the world.
Question number one: how true is that?
Answer: I think it’s really true. A suprisingly large fraction of the smartest programmers in the world *do* work here. In very large quantities. In fact, quantities so large that I wouldn’t have thought that so many really smart people existed or could be centralized in one place, but trust me, they do and they can. That’s pretty amazing.
Question number two: but I’m sure they hired some non-smart people too, right?
Answer: surprisingly infrequently. When I went for my job interview there, they set me up for a full day of interviewers (5 sessions plus lunch). I decided that I would ask a few questions of my own in these interviews, and try to guess how good the company is based on how many of the interviewers seemed clueless. My hypothesis was that there are always some bad apples in any medium to large company, so if the success rate was, say, 3 or 4 out of 5 interviewers being non-clueless, that’s pretty good.
Teacher tenure refugees flee public schools
When public school administrators and teachers in Washington, D.C., recently laced up their sensible shoes and launched an unprecedented canvassing campaign to goose slumped enrollment rates, the panicked affectation was unmistakable.
Short of horse-drawn carriage makers, few industries have suffered such a pronounced decline in market share than government-run schools in America’s urban centers. Consider the numbers: forty-four percent of the District’s public student population has abandoned conventional neighborhood schools for public charters.
But while the taxpayer-financed campaign was designed to signal fresh responsiveness to parents, the effort merely reinforced the perception that entrenched teachers and labor unions were braving the sweltering heat out of self-interest. No students means no jobs.
Here, where traditional public school enrollment has dipped by 30,000 students in just the last 18 years, administrators believe the key to stemming the exodus of public school refugees lies in diverting precious resources from improving instruction to marketing.
To augment the hard sell being made door-to-door by principals, the school system even retained the pricey data miners who twice won the White House for President Barack Obama.
Wanted: A Future for Philosophy
Adam Briggle & Robert Frodeman:
How goes it with the institution of philosophy? Consider the situation of “Jeremy,” a Ph.D. student in the graduate program at the University of North Texas. As a second-year student, he has a teaching fellowship. This means that in addition to taking nine credit hours of graduate coursework, he teaches two sections of “Contemporary Moral Issues” each semester. Each section has 45 students. Jeremy is responsible for the entirety of the class, just as any professor would be.
In 2014, for teaching four courses a year, Jeremy earns $14,199. That’s about $2,500 above the poverty level as established by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But Jeremy, like most graduate students at UNT, does not receive a tuition waiver. After he pays tuition and fees—some $8,000 a year—his annual salary comes to about $6,000 for nine months’ work.
Adjuncts Outsourced in Michigan
Colleges and universities have outsourced lots of services in the past several decades, from food preparation and delivery to bookstores to sanitation. But to many academics it is taboo to even consider outsourcing the faculty.
Not in Michigan. In recent years, a handful of community colleges in that state have outsourced the recruitment and hiring of adjunct instructors – who make up the overwhelming majority of the community college teaching force – to an educational staffing company. Just last week, the faculty union at a sixth institution, Jackson College, signed a collective bargaining agreement allowing EDUStaff to take over adjunct hiring and payroll duties.
Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/07/21/colleges-assign-adjunct-hiring-third-party#ixzz386Z0jm3Q
Inside Higher Ed
The End of Genius
WHERE does creativity come from? For centuries, we’ve had a clear answer: the lone genius. The idea of the solitary creator is such a common feature of our cultural landscape (as with Newton and the falling apple) that we easily forget it’s an idea in the first place.
But the lone genius is a myth that has outlived its usefulness. Fortunately, a more truthful model is emerging: the creative network, as with the crowd-sourced Wikipedia or the writer’s room at “The Daily Show” or — the real heart of creativity — the intimate exchange of the creative pair, such as John Lennon and Paul McCartney and myriad other examples with which we’ve yet to fully reckon.
Historically speaking, locating genius within individuals is a recent enterprise. Before the 16th century, one did not speak of people being geniuses but having geniuses. “Genius,” explains the Harvard scholar Marjorie Garber, meant “a tutelary god or spirit given to every person at birth.” Any value that emerged from within a person depended on a potent, unseen force coming from beyond that person.
Do standardized tests matter?
Schools wake up to benefits of teenage lie-in
TEENAGERS who struggle to get out of bed in the morning could soon have an excuse. The first experiment to test whether pupils perform better after a lie-in is expected to be approved this week.
The £1m project would involve more than 20 British schools and 30,000 pupils. Schools willing to allow pupils aged 11-16 to start class anytime from 10am onwards — and from 11am or 11.30am for sixth-formers — are being recruited by Professor Russell Foster, director of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at Oxford University. His team will learn tomorrow whether its application for funding from the Wellcome Trust has been successful.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Income Inequality Is Not Rising Globally. It’s Falling
Income inequality has surged as a political and economic issue, but the numbers don’t show that inequality is rising from a global perspective. Yes, the problem has become more acute within most individual nations, yet income inequality for the world as a whole has been falling for most of the last 20 years. It’s a fact that hasn’t been noted often enough.
The finding comes from a recent investigation by Christoph Lakner, a consultant at the World Bank, and Branko Milanovic, senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center. And while such a framing may sound startling at first, it should be intuitive upon reflection. The economic surges of China, India and some other nations have been among the most egalitarian developments in history.
The Plot Against Merit
In 2004, seven-year-old Ting Shi arrived in New York from China, speaking almost no English. For two years, he shared a bedroom in a Chinatown apartment with his grandparents—a cook and a factory worker—and a young cousin, while his parents put in 12-hour days at a small Laundromat they had purchased on the Upper East Side. Ting mastered English and eventually set his sights on getting into Stuyvesant High School, the crown jewel of New York City’s eight “specialized high schools.” When he was in sixth grade, he took the subway downtown from his parents’ small apartment to the bustling high school to pick up prep books for its eighth-grade entrance exam. He prepared for the test over the next two years, working through the prep books and taking classes at one of the city’s free tutoring programs. His acceptance into Stuyvesant prompted a day of celebration at the Laundromat—an immigrant family’s dream beginning to come true. Ting, now a 17-year-old senior starting at NYU in the fall, says of his parents, who never went to college: “They came here for the next generation.”
The Uses of Being Wrong
Confessions of wrongness in academic research should be unsurprising. (To be clear, being wrong in a prediction is different from making an error. Error, even if committed unknowingly, suggests sloppiness. That carries a more serious stigma than making a prediction that fails to come true.) Anyone who has a passing familiarity with the social sciences is aware that, by and large, we do not get an awful lot of things right. Unlike that of most physical and natural scientists, the ability of social scientists to conduct experiments or rely on high-quality data is often limited. In my field, international relations, even the most robust econometric analyses often explain a pathetically small amount of the data’s statistical variance. Indeed, from my first exposure to the philosopher of mathematics Imre Lakatos, I was taught that the goal of social science is falsification. By proving an existing theory wrong, we refine our understanding of what our models can and cannot explain.
And yet, the falsification enterprise is generally devoted to proving why other scholars are wrong. It’s rare for academics to publicly disavow their own theories and hypotheses. Indeed, a common lament in the social sciences is that negative findings—i.e., empirical tests that fail to support an author’s initial hypothesis—are never published.
Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League
In the spring of 2008, I did a daylong stint on the Yale admissions committee. We that is, three admissions staff, a member of the college dean’s office, and me, the faculty representative—were going through submissions from eastern Pennsylvania. The applicants had been assigned a score from one to four, calculated from a string of figures and codes—SATs, GPA, class rank, numerical scores to which the letters of recommendation had been converted, special notations for legacies and diversity cases. The ones had already been admitted, and the threes and fours could get in only under special conditions—if they were a nationally ranked athlete, for instance, or a “DevA,” (an applicant in the highest category of “development” cases, which means a child of very rich donors). Our task for the day was to adjudicate among the twos. Huge bowls of junk food were stationed at the side of the room to keep our energy up.
The junior officer in charge, a young man who looked to be about 30, presented each case, rat-a-tat-tat, in a blizzard of admissions jargon that I had to pick up on the fly. “Good rig”: the transcript exhibits a good degree of academic rigor. “Ed level 1”: parents have an educational level no higher than high school, indicating a genuine hardship case. “MUSD”: a musician in the highest category of promise. Kids who had five or six items on their list of extracurriculars—the “brag”—were already in trouble, because that wasn’t nearly enough. We listened, asked questions, dove into a letter or two, then voted up or down.
With so many accomplished applicants to choose from, we were looking for kids with something special, “PQs”—personal qualities—that were often revealed by the letters or essays. Kids who only had the numbers and the résumé were usually rejected: “no spark,” “not a team-builder,” “this is pretty much in the middle of the fairway for us.” One young person, who had piled up a truly insane quantity of extracurriculars and who submitted nine letters of recommendation, was felt to be “too intense.” On the other hand, the numbers and the résumé were clearly indispensable. I’d been told that successful applicants could either be “well-rounded” or “pointy”—outstanding in one particular way—but if they were pointy, they had to be really pointy: a musician whose audition tape had impressed the music department, a scientist who had won a national award.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The Latest Public-Sector Pension Scandal The state-pension-industrial complex corrupts politics on multiple levels
“By the end of approximately 2007, Villalobos had made, and I had accepted, bribes totaling approximately $200,000 in cash, all of which was delivered directly to me in the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Sacramento across from the Capitol. Villalobos delivered the first two payments of approximately $50,000 each in a paper bag, while the last installment of approximately $100,000 was delivered in a shoebox.”—Plea Agreement, United States of America v. Fred Buenrostro, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, filed July 11, 2014.
The government official who pleaded guilty here, Fred Buenrostro, wasn’t some city council member or state senator, but rather, from December 2002 to May 2008, the CEO of the California Public Employees Retirement System. Calpers, the largest public pension fund in the country, managed assets of as much as $250 billion during that period.
The bribing of Buenrostro was part of a successful effort by a New York money management firm (which claims it had no knowledge of the bribe and has not been charged with any wrongdoing) to win $3 billion in business managing pension money for California state employees and retirees.
Crooked government officials come along often enough that there’s a tendency to tune them out, but this case is worth pausing to analyze further for a number of reasons.
For one thing, there’s the hypocrisy angle. Calpers has been at the forefront of criticizing company boards for practices that are not shareholder friendly. Sometimes it’s right about that, but even when it is, it manages to come off as holier-than-thou. It doesn’t exactly add to Calpers credibility denouncing board-management coziness at big publicly traded companies when its own CEO is taking paper bags full of cash from a representative of a contractor.
Is the Tax Code the Proper Tool for Making Higher Education More Affordable?
Scott A. Hodge, Kyle Pomerleau :
Recently, college affordability has been on the minds of many. Over the past decade, the cost of college tuition has outstripped both inflation and income growth. On top of that, students are grappling with an ever-growing burden of debt.
Considering the financial benefits of getting a college degree, lawmakers have sought to help students afford the cost of higher education.
Traditionally, this was done through loan programs and direct subsidies such as Pell Grants. However, higher education policy has shifted in recent years away from traditional loan and direct subsidy programs toward the use of various tax credits.
The question now is whether the tax code is the proper tool to increase access to higher education and make college more affordable.
Generally speaking, the answer is no.First, these tax credits violate the principles of sound tax policy by greatly increasing the complexity and distortions in the tax code.
Second, if we are serious about reforming the tax code, there are four sound reasons to eliminate education tax credits within a comprehensive reform package:
College Graduates Don’t Always Out-Earn High School Grads
One of the biggest arguments in favor of a college education is that college grads make more money than do those with only a high-school diploma or a few years of college. The difference in earning power over a lifetime—the college wage premium—has been well-documented: One of the most popular recent sources, a paper by Christopher Avery and Sarah Turner, estimated the gap at more than $500,000, on average.
Those last two words are more important than anyone gives them credit for. Focusing on the average college wage premium puts the emphasis on the expected gains from education, which is not a bad thing if you’re trying to persuade lots of people to go to college. But it’s only part of the story. College tuition is expensive, and plenty of students take on tens of thousands of dollars of debt in pursuit of that wage premium—when what matters just as much is how risky it is relative to other ways they might spend their money or time.
When we look at distribution of the college wage premium—how much more the lowest-, middle-, and highest-earning quartiles make relative to high-school grads, the picture of risk becomes clearer. At every level short of graduate school, there’s a not-insignificant chance that a successful high-school graduate will out-earn you. The chances are greatest for college dropouts—the people who spend some time and money but don’t walk away with a degree.
Concerns rise about cheating by Chinese applicants to U.S. colleges
The application essay from a student in China sounded much like thousands of others sent each year to the University of Washington at Seattle.
“ ‘I did this,’ ” admissions officer Kim Lovaas remembers the essay saying, and, “ ‘I did that.’ ” Then she came to a phrase that stopped her short: “Insert girl’s name here.”
“I thought, ‘Did I just read that?’ ” said Lovaas, associate director for international student enrollment, admissions, and services. “To me, that was a really big red flag.”
The obvious clue in the essay was an indicator of a serious problem that’s not always so easy to detect: fraudulent applications from Chinese students seeking to get into U.S. colleges and universities.
In NSA-funded (taxpayer) initiative, Palo Alto students sharpen their Mandarin skills
As Americans debate revelations about sweeping data collection by the National Security Agency, the secretive federal department has funded a seemingly more benign agenda at Ohlone Elementary School in Palo Alto.
In a summer program known as STARTALK, 20 fifth- and sixth-graders are honing their Mandarin speaking, listening, reading and writing skills through in-depth study of the centuries-old Chinese folk tale “The Magic Paintbrush.”
Students have read the text in Mandarin, sung its stories, incorporated its lessons into their own 21st-century versions of the folk tale and created iMovies of the rewritten versions. On Thursday, July 3, they were to perform the original story in colorful, hand-made costumes for their parents.
The Ohlone program is one of more than 100 similar summer initiatives across the country aimed at boosting Americans’ abilities in Chinese languages and other “less commonly taught languages,” said Duarte Silva, the Stanford University-based executive director of the California World Language Project.
Those “strategic languages” include Arabic, Russian, Hindi and Farsi, with Korean soon to be added to the list.
Since the federal program began in 2006 Silva has been securing summer STARTALK grants, $90,000 of which this year is funding the four-week Ohlone program as well as a program for Sunnyvale middle school students that began this week. Later in the summer Silva and Stanford colleague Helene Chan will present their research about language training in a workshop for language teachers from across the nation.
The Parent Trap
WHEN I was about 9 years old, I graduated to a Little League whose diamonds were a few miles from our house, in a neighborhood that got rougher after dark. After one practice finished early, I ended up as the last kid left with the coach, waiting in the gloaming while he grumbled, looked at his watch and finally left me — to wait or walk home, I’m not sure which.
I started walking. Halfway there, along a busy road, my father picked me up. He called my coach, as furious as you would expect a protective parent to be; the coach, who probably grew up having fistfights in that neighborhood, gave as good as he got; I finished the season in a different league.
Wearable Technology in Education
Wearable technology in education can increase a child’s ability to more naturally interact with their environment, and to be be creative and innovative. Students can more easily access information without any obstructions. Examples of wearable technology in the classroom are: Autographer, Keyglove, Muse, VR, Smart Watches, GoPro, and Google Glass. Autographer allows students to capture students direct notes to ensure complete note taking. Keyglove are wireless gloves that are useful in gaming, design, art, music, data entry, device control, and 3D objects. Muse tracks students’ brain activity onto a smartphone or tablet so that it can detect what activities they might need to keep them focused on studying. Virtual Reality gives students hands-on experience that allows students to interact with the object in that particular environment. The iPod is also an effective learning tool that empowered students to creatively think about the subject as well as to allow greater collaboration. GoPro is a camera that can capture a student or teacher’s point of view of events, such as a lesson or student behavior. Finally, the Google Glass enables students and teachers to search, take a picture, record video, and answer and translate questions in a foreign language. One application would be for medical students to watch different medical procedures in real time.
School Climate: Socialism & Cheating
By running an experiment among Germans collecting their passports or ID cards in the citizen centers of Berlin, we find that individuals with an East German family background cheat significantly more on an abstract task than those with a West German family background. The longer individuals were exposed to socialism, the more likely they were to cheat on our task. While it was recently argued that markets decay morals (Falk and Szech, 2013), we provide evidence that other political and economic regimes such as socialism might have an even more detrimental effect on individuals’ behavior.
More, here.
More on American Colleges’ Standing in the World
Last week I wrote that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there is no reason to believe that American colleges are, on average, the best in the world. A number of people who responded, including several in letters to The Times, raised issues worth addressing more broadly.
Several of the questions concerned whether the American graduates in the study, known as Piaac, short for the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, are somehow different from those in other countries to whom they’re being compared.
Steve Hochstadt, professor of history at Illinois College, noted that a third of Americans have a bachelor’s degree, “compared with about 23 percent” in member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and asserted that this causes Americans, on average, to score lower on tests.
A chart with the article showed that Austrian graduates scored highest in a test of numeracy; Mr. Hochstadt noted that less than 15 percent of Austrians complete college, implying that those who do are likely to be higher achievers.
Raising the bar: New Mexico State Unversity to vote on minimum 2.75 GPA; UNM likes idea
At a time when the number of high school graduates and college enrollment rates are flat, New Mexico State University is poised to raise an important admission standard for incoming freshmen: the minimum grade point average.
The university’s Board of Regents will likely vote on a measure on July 23 that includes raising the GPA from 2.5 to 2.75, effective in the fall of 2016.
“I expect it to pass,” Provost Dan Howard said Friday, “but I don’t know that it will.”
A similar discussion is just getting started at the University of New Mexico, where the issue has caused heated controversy in the past.
Raising standards would almost certainly – at least at first – reduce the number of entering freshmen at the state’s two largest schools. And that would come at a time when the state
is projected to see only a small increase in its number of high school graduates over the next decade.
But officials say, in the long term, the move is expected to strengthen the NMSU brand, improve graduation rates and bolster the university’s image outside of New Mexico, all of which would make it easier to compete for out-of-state and foreign students.
The provost, however, said none of those benefits were behind the move to raise the admission standard.
The Prison Boom and the Lack of Black Progress after Smith and Welch
More than two decades ago, Smith and Welch (1989) used the 1940 through 1980 census files to document important relative black progress. However, recent data indicate that this progress did not continue, at least among men. The growth of incarceration rates among black men in recent decades combined with the sharp drop in black employment rates during the Great Recession have left most black men in a position relative to white men that is really no better than the position they occupied only a few years after the Civil Rights Act of 1965. A move toward more punitive treatment of arrested offenders drove prison growth in recent decades, and this trend is evident among arrested offenders in every major crime category. Changes in the severity of corrections policies have had a much larger impact on black communities than white communities because arrest rates have historically been much greater for blacks than whites.
5 Reasons Modern-Day Parenting Is in Crisis, According to a British Nanny
I generally am quite an optimistic person. I tend to believe that everything will work out for the best unless the evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary, and anyone who knows me will tell you that I am not prone to drama. That’s why when I say that modern parenting is in serious trouble — crisis, even — I hope you’ll listen, and listen carefully. I’ve worked with children and their parents across two continents and two decades, and what I’ve seen in recent years alarms me. Here are the greatest problems, as I see them:
1. A fear of our children.
School starts Monday for 2,800 Charlotte students
Summer break has come to an end for about 2,800 K-8 students in four Charlotte year-round schools.
Monday starts the 2014-15 school year at Bruns Academy, Walter G. Byers School, Druid Hills Academy and Thomasboro Academy. The schools are part of Project LIFT, a public-private partnership between Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and donors who pledged $55 million to improve academics and graduation rates at nine westside schools. The private money helps cover the cost of extra teacher time and busing.
Melinda Gates On Common Core Concerns
WBUR:
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is perhaps best known for funding global health programs, but in the U.S., it has focused largely on education.
The foundation has strongly backed the national education guidelines known as the Common Core. The standards in math and English that specify what skills a student should have for every grade.
“Where it got tricky was in the implementation.”
– Melinda Gates on
the Common Core
“We got so interested in Common Core because we saw such a huge number of students not being prepared to go on to college,” Melinda Gates told Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson.Gates attributes this to different education standards from state to state. She said it was time for something “different.” That different standard was the Common Core, which has now been adopted fully by 45 states.
“We saw the difference they could make in kids lives and we also saw that it brought flexibility to the way you were teaching and that teachers could start to collaborate with one another on lesson plans,” Gates said. “We can help come up with tools that help teachers teach the Common Core. If a teacher wants to teach ‘The Scarlet Letter’ or ‘Beloved’ or ‘The Secret Life of Bees,’ we can have tools there that then help them teach and then scaffold those lessons appropriately to meet the needs of their students.”
But Common Core has been criticized by teachers unions and parent groups, and at least three states have dropped the program this year.
To Fight Grade Inflation in the Humanities, Add Context
“You don’t understand,” the student said. “This is sociology. I took this class to increase my GPA. It wasn’t supposed to be hard!”
It was my first semester on the faculty, and the student had come to my office to complain about the grade she’d earned on the first paper for my sociology class: a B-minus. I had explained to her why the grade was appropriate, and one she could feel proud of. (UNC’s official grade system says the B range indicates “strong performance demonstrating a high level of attainment,” and that “the student has shown solid promise in the aspect of the discipline under study.”) But the student remained dissatisfied.
Alongside too many such conversations I’ve had, I’m happy to say that there have been at least as many with genuinely curious students who want to explore the material and see where it takes them. But the governing assumption—particularly in relatively humanistic fields like mine—that merely adequate performance deserves an A makes it difficult to document or reward the outstanding work of such curious young minds. That is why I became an advocate for curtailing grade inflation and grading inequality.
Citizen Oversight: Seattle Schools’ Pre-K “Mission Study”
This will be Part One of a thread about the Pre-K “mission trip” that several Seattle schools’ employees took as well as one Board director.
Part One will be the Narrative of what happened. Part Two will be the day-by-day planning for this trip.
Mirmac1 got e-mails via public disclosure and they paint a very damning picture. Because of my concerns over this troubling incident, I wrote a full report to the State Auditor. I can only say that I believe there may have been some illegalities in what happened but that’s not my call.
I DO think whether or not funds were misused, some of it feels unethical and it is clear there is a heavy push – from outside the district – on those inside the district for more and more pre-K in Seattle Schools.
There are a couple of SPS individuals who are either myopic or simply do not care about how their push for pre-K could affect/impact other programs and that money is scarce. There was very much of a “just find me the money for this trip” attitude.
Education Issues & The Wisconsin Governor’s Race
As governor, Burke said she would seek to improve the high school experience for students to decrease the number of students who drop out or leave without much direction.
“I see too much — we have either students who are not graduating or not engaged in their learning along with students who graduate but have no clear direction about their next step, and it doesn’t serve them well and it doesn’t serve the economy well,” she said.
Walker’s campaign said the governor’s approach to education is influenced by several of his closest friends who are teachers, and “each of them give the governor a unique perspective on education.”
The Republican Party of Wisconsin has highlighted Burke’s Madison School Board vote in June 2012 to increase property taxes by 4.95 percent. Later that year, after state aid came in higher than expected, she supported a 1.75 percent property tax increase, the maximum increase allowed under state law. She has not voted in favor of a school district budget since.
Related: The Common Core Commotion.
“Promoting diversity appears to be more important than teaching students”
This Framework for Diversity and Inclusive Excellence sailed through our Faculty Senate without the least bit of attention, much less the “sifting and winnowing” on which it prides itself.
Although much of the language is a thicket of clichés, no one dared challenge it. Moreover, there was no probing of the ramifications of the plan. Apparently, “diversity” has become such a sacred cow that even tenured professors are afraid to question it in any way.
To begin, the university’s justification for the new policy is difficult to understand: “Our commitment is to create an environment that engages the whole person in the service of learning, recognizing that individual differences should be considered foundational to our strength as a community.”
That language is mere education babble, but the Faculty Senate swallowed it whole. So did the academic staff and the students.
The plan¹s definition of diversity focuses on a wide array of differences that can be found in every enrolled student. Here’s what it includes:
See Inside The U.S. Neglects Its Best Science Students
Rena F. Subotnik, Paula Olszewski-Kubilius and Frank C. Worrell:
The U.S. education policy world—the entire country, for that matter—is on a quest to increase the ranks of future innovators in science and technology. Yet the programs that get funded in K–12 education do not support students who are already good at and in love with science. These students have potential for outstanding contributions, but without public investment they will not be prepared for the rigors of a scientific career. This is especially true for those without highly educated and resource-rich parents.
This lack of investment is not a matter of chance. It is the result of two related myths about who these students are and what they need from our education system. The first myth is that all talented students come from privileged backgrounds. A second is that students who are successful at a particular time in their school career can somehow thrive on their own, unassisted and unsupervised. We argue that all children deserve to be challenged cognitively, including the most able. Many students with low socioeconomic backgrounds never get the opportunity to develop their talents beyond the rudimentary school curriculum. Jonathan Plucker of the University of Connecticut has shown that high-achieving, low-income students fall further behind their higher-socioeconomic-status peers the closer they get to graduation. Moreover, international comparison studies show science scores improving for all students except those in the top 10 percent.
We know how to identify students who are talented in science and motivated to achieve. We find them thriving in enriched environments (think math and rocketry clubs) inside and outside of school. Standardized tests identify exceptional reasoning abilities in mathematics and spatial skills. Expressing and showing interest in science in elementary or middle school are good predictors of future pursuit of career interests in science, technology, engineering or mathematics.
The more people are exposed to socialism, the worse they behave
“UNDER capitalism”, ran the old Soviet-era joke, “man exploits man. Under communism it is just the opposite.” In fact new research suggests that the Soviet system inspired not just sarcasm but cheating too: in East Germany, at least, communism appears to have inculcated moral laxity.
Lars Hornuf of the University of Munich and Dan Ariely, Ximena García-Rada and Heather Mann of Duke University ran an experiment last year to test Germans’ willingness to lie for personal gain. Some 250 Berliners were randomly selected to take part in a game where they could win up to €6 ($8).
Millennials Favor Private Accounts for Social Security Even if Benefit Cuts to Current Seniors Required
Millennials aren’t optimistic about Social Security: 53% say Social Security is “unlikely” to exist when they are 67 years old, while 45 percent say it probably will remain.
But if it does exist at that time, even fewer millennials believe government will provide them with the same level of benefits that today’s seniors receive. Only 34 percent say they are confident that government will provide them with the same level of retirement benefits as it does for today’s retirees; 64 percent say they are not confident.
Education decreases the likelihood one believes Social Security will continue in the future. A majority (54%) of those with high school degrees or less expect Social Security to exist when they retire, compared to 36 percent of college graduates.
Leaked report reveals ‘aggressive Islamist agenda’ in Birmingham UK schools
A damning report into extremist infiltration of Birmingham schools has uncovered evidence of “coordinated, deliberate and sustained action to introduce an intolerant and aggressive Islamist ethos into some schools in the city”.
The conclusion emerges from a leaked draft of a report, commissioned by the former education secretary Michael Gove and written by Peter Clarke, the former head of the Metropolitan police’s counterterrorism command, which is due to be published in the next 24 hours.
Clarke said there was a “sustained and coordinated agenda to impose upon children in a number of Birmingham schools the segregationist attitudes and practices of a hardline and politicised strain of Sunni Islam”.
The draft, marked as sensitive, added that: “Left unchecked, it would confine schoolchildren within an intolerant, inward-looking monoculture that would severely inhibit their participation in the life of modern Britain”.
The uncompromising report may deepen community tensions in England’s second city and provoke a fierce debate on whether Britain has been sufficiently muscular in efforts to expose and uproot Islamism. It will also make uncomfortable reading for Birmingham city council as it accuses local politicians and officials of ignoring evidence of extremism for years, repeatedly failing to support bullied headteachers and putting the need to soothe community tensions ahead of all else.
Mommy Police With Real Handcuffs
You can argue that driving is necessary, but it seems to me that raising independent children is also necessary. Arresting parents who allow any child younger than a college freshman to spend time alone amounts to a legal mandate to keep kids timid and tethered. This should not be an object of public policy.
What is truly bizarre is that the cops cuffing these women were most likely raised with exactly the freedom they are now punishing. Do they think their parents should have been put in jail? Or have the intervening years rendered tweens unable to figure out how the car doors work?
I’m not saying that parents should take their toddlers into the wilderness and leave them there to hike their way out. What I can’t understand is how our society has lost the ability to distinguish between that and letting your pre-teen hang out in the car for a half-hour or spend some time in a nearby park. As Jessica Grose says, if this had been illegal in 1972, every single mother in America would have been in jail. Yet millions upon millions of us lived to tell the tale.
New Jersey’s Special Education Task Force
Regardless of how long it took to appoint a new state task force on special education, the 17 members will have less time to come up with recommendations.
Formally called the Task Force for Improving Special Education of Public School Students, the group appointed by Gov. Chris Christie met for the first time on July 1 to begin its work looking into the needs of students with disabilities — assessing everything from programs to costs.
But as complicated as that job may be, the law creating the task force — enacted in spring 2013 — calls for final recommendations by the end of this calendar year.
That’s a tall order. New Jersey’s schools face some vexing issues, such as how to best pay for services for special-needs students, how to implement and monitor those services, and how to balance the sometimes-conflicting needs and wants of families, districts, and the state.
Laura Waters has more.
Student Housing Gets Swanky and Investors Salivate
From the front lobby, it could easily be mistaken for a spa hotel—the blue wave lighting on the wall behind the concierge desk, the sleek sofas and flat screen monitors. But this is no hotel. It is student housing—millennial style—and it may be one of the best under-the-radar real estate plays of the decade.
“This is an industry that is ripe with opportunity,” said Bill Bayless, CEO of American Campus Communities, the largest student housing REIT (real estate investment trust) in the nation and developer of Drexel University’s Chestnut Square, a 361,000-square-foot luxury dormitory for 861 students on the Philadelphia campus. “If you look at the student housing sector, it was ignored by the mainstream real estate industry for more than 40 years.”
Impatient children are more likely to become lawbreakers
IN HIS “Odyssey”, Homer immortalised the idea of resisting temptation by having the protagonist tied to the mast of his ship, to hear yet not succumb to the beautiful, dangerous songs of the Sirens. Researchers have long been intrigued as to whether this ability to avoid, or defer, gratification is related to outcomes in life. The best-known test is the “marshmallow” experiment, in which children who could refrain from eating the confection for 15 minutes were given a second one. Children who could not wait tended to have lower incomes and poorer health as adults. New research suggests that kids who are unable to delay rewards are also more likely to become criminals later.
David Akerlund, Hans Gronqvist and Lena Lindahl of Stockholm University and Bart Golsteyn of Maastricht University used data from a Swedish survey in which more than 13,000 children aged 13 were asked whether they would prefer to receive $140 now or $1,400 in five years’ time. About four-fifths of them said they were prepared to wait.
Best state in America: Massachusetts, for its educational success
That’s according to the Education Week Research Center, a nonpartisan group that measured indicators such as preschool and kindergarten enrollment, high school graduation rates, and higher education attainment. The yearly study also considered family income and parental employment, which are linked to educational achievement.
In almost every category, the Bay State beats the national average: More than 60 percent of Massachusetts children have a parent with a post-secondary degree, 14 points higher than average, and nearly 60 percent of 3- and 4-year-olds are enrolled in preschool, more than 10 points above the national average.
No surprise, nearly half of Massachusetts fourth-graders are proficient on National Assessment of Educational Progress reading tests, and more than 54 percent of eighth-graders get proficient scores on NAEP math tests — both the highest rates in the country.
The underlying reason is a bipartisan commitment to education reform. Massachusetts passed a major school reform package in 1993, increasing spending, particularly in poorer districts; raising assessment standards; and making licensure exams for new teachers more difficult. Several other states improved their standards around the same time. But when partisan priorities shifted in other places, Massachusetts Republicans and Democrats alike continued investing heavily in education.
Improving scores, particularly among low-income and minority students, is still a challenge, and Massachusetts has done no better in closing the achievement gap than most other states.
Wisconsin took a very small step toward Massachusetts’ content knowledge requirements by adopting MTEL-90 for elementary English teachers.
Wisconsin results are available here.
Get a liberal arts B.A., not a business B.A., for the coming artisan economy
Editor’s Note: In Making Sen$e’s report on “the artisan economy” Tuesday evening on the NewsHour, Paul Solman speaks with two exterminators and a dementia coach. Not what you typically think of as “artisans”? Well, how about operators of a fresh fruit Popsicle company or a line of handmade dog leashes, both crafted in a repurposed Brooklyn factory? Any of those jobs can be artisan says Larry Katz, the Harvard professor who’s coined the term “artisan economy.” What makes them artisan is that they’re not standardized occupations; they involve what he calls “personal flair” in each stage of the job.
But this movement is about a lot more than hipsters bucking a traditional career path. Katz believes the artisan economy can help shore up the American middle class by creating new jobs to replace those mass production and middle management jobs lost to outsourcing or new technology. And he thinks that a firm grounding in the multidisciplinary liberal arts is the best preparation – better even than a business degree – to taking advantage of the artisan economy that he hopes will be a path to upward mobility for the average American. His extended interview with Paul Solman, edited and condensed for clarity, is below.
Commentary on School Choice in Sweden
very three years, Americans wring their hands over the state of our schools compared with those in other countries. The occasion is the triennial release of global scholastic achievement rankings based on exams administered by the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tests students in 65 countries in math, science, and languages. Across all subjects, America ranked squarely in the middle of the pack when the tests were first given in 2000, and its position hardly budged over the next dozen years.
The angst over U.S. student performance—and its implications for the American workforce of the near future—is inevitably accompanied by calls for education reform: greater accountability, more innovation. Just as inevitable are the suggestions for how more accountability and innovation could be realized: more charter schools, more choice, less bureaucratic oversight.
Advocates for choice-based solutions should take a look at what’s happened to schools in Sweden, where parents and educators would be thrilled to trade their country’s steep drop in PISA scores over the past 10 years for America’s middling but consistent results. What’s caused the recent crisis in Swedish education? Researchers and policy analysts are increasingly pointing the finger at many of the choice-oriented reforms that are being championed as the way forward for American schools. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that adding more accountability and discipline to American schools would be a bad thing, it does hint at the many headaches that can come from trying to do so by aggressively introducing marketlike competition to education.
Year after Rocketship’s scrutinized Milwaukee launch, signs point to progress; Status Quo in Madison
What were the highlights of Rocketship’s first year here?
Strong growth. Rocketship set a goal of having 65% of its Milwaukee students meet the national average for reading and math growth over the course of the year. In fact, 72% of the school’s students, almost all of whom are low-income and Hispanic or black, learned as much as a typical American student in English and language arts. In math, 87% of Rocketship students met or exceeded that average growth target.
New style. Rocketship introduced children to spending part of the day doing reading and math exercises on the computer, using software that adapts to each child’s skill level. Sessions are overseen by an aide rather than a teacher, which is one way Rocketship keeps costs down. Most teachers also specialize by subject matter.
Parent involvement. A Rocketship hallmark is involving parents in schools, not only to help their children with homework and goal-setting, but also to advocate in the community. Kinser said almost all teachers had 90% of their parents meet the 30-hour goal of interacting with the school.
Enrollment. This year’s enrollment goal is 487 children in kindergarten through fifth grade, and the school on its way to meeting it, Kinser said.
Rocketship’s challenges
The turbulent first year in Milwaukee also set Rocketship on its heels at times. Some challenges included:
Special education. About 17% of Milwaukee Rocketship children had special needs last year, which is close to the district average in Milwaukee Public Schools. Venskus said Rocketship went about $500,000 over budget to serve those students.
Teacher turnover. Rocketship, like other demanding urban charter schools with long hours and high expectations, was not a good fit for some teachers who left early in the school year. Rocketship did not renew some others. This fall there will be four new teachers at the school from Teach For America, the alternative teacher certification program from which Rocketship frequently recruits.
Political challenges. Rocketship leaders had to negotiate with lawmakers in Madison to try to clear a path for their staff with out-of-state teaching or administrator credentials to be recognized in Wisconsin.
Rocketship has a charter agreement with the Milwaukee Common Council to open up to eight schools serving 500 students each.
Links:
Madison’s disastrous long term reading results.
A majority if the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School.
Commentary on structural change.
Via Molly Beck.
Underwater Dreams
To understand why that’s more than a platitude, check out Underwater Dreams, a seemingly modest human interest film that may be the most politically significant documentary since Waiting for Superman. (It opened in Los Angeles and New York on July 11 and can be seen on cable later this month).
The film tells the story of four undocumented Mexican teenagers who are members of a robotics club at Carl Hayden High School in the barrio of Phoenix; their parents speak no English, and their own horizons are limited.
With the help of dedicated teachers, they build an underwater robot and enter a grueling collegiate competition held at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2004. The boys figure they might learn something from the older college-age engineers showing off their robots.
The Carl Hayden team— Christian Arcega, Lorenzo Santillan, Luis Aranda, and Oscar Vasquez—get off to a bad start when their robot, nicknamed “Stinky,” takes on water during a practice round on the first day. In one of the film’s many humorous moments, they buy a box of tampons that turn out to have the perfect absorbency for plugging Stinky’s leaks.
In an era of high-stakes testing, a struggling school made a shocking choice.
One afternoon in the spring of 2006, Damany Lewis, a math teacher at Parks Middle School, in Atlanta, unlocked the room where standardized tests were kept. It was the week before his students took the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, which determined whether schools in Georgia had met federal standards of achievement. The tests were wrapped in cellophane and stacked in cardboard boxes. Lewis, a slim twenty-nine-year-old with dreadlocks, contemplated opening the test with scissors, but he thought his cut marks would be too obvious. Instead, he left the school, walked to the corner store, and bought a razor blade. When he returned, he slit open the cellophane and gently pulled a test book from its wrapping. Then he used a lighter to warm the razor, which he wedged under the adhesive sealing the booklet, and peeled back the tab.
He photocopied the math, reading, and language-arts sections—the subjects that would determine, under the No Child Left Behind guidelines, whether Parks would be classified as a “school in need of improvement” for the sixth year in a row. Unless fifty-eight per cent of students passed the math portion of the test and sixty-seven per cent passed in language arts, the state could shut down the school. Lewis put on gloves, to prevent oil from his hands from leaving a residue on the plastic, and then used his lighter to melt the edges of the cellophane together, so that it appeared as if the package had never been opened. He gave the reading and language-arts sections to two teachers he trusted and took the math section home.
