Last month a small national group of graduate career counselors met on the University of California at San Diego’s campus in La Jolla to discuss one of the academic world’s hottest and most vexing topics: how to help Ph.D.’s and postdoctoral scholars get jobs.
The three-day conference, which was organized by the Graduate Career Consortium, was the group’s 26th annual meeting, and its largest ever: Around 100 advisors and counselors from 80 institutions attended. One-third of this year’s attendees were new registrants, an indication that campus administrators are responding to growing calls from around the country to reform graduate education.
When the GCC formed, back in 1987, only a handful of counselors showed up to these annual gatherings. As recently as a decade ago, relatively few colleges offered career-counseling services to graduate students beyond managing their dossiers. Victoria Blodgett, the GCC’s president, attributed the uptick in attendance to this year’s conference to a confluence of factors: the recent expansion of career services for Ph.D.’s, the creation of postdoctoral-affairs offices on more campuses, the growing demand for better counseling about alternative and nonacademic careers, and the need for more transparent data on job placement for advanced degree-holders.
Shortchanged: The Hidden Costs of Lockstep Teacher Pay
TNTP:
Nobody goes into teaching to get rich, but that’s no excuse not to pay teachers as professionals.
Compensation is one of the most important factors in determining who enters the teaching profession and how long they stay—yet 90 percent of all U.S. school districts pay teachers without any regard for their actual performance with students, shortchanging our best educators. If we seriously believe in the value of great teaching, we have to not only pay teachers more but also pay them differently.
Shortchanged examines why lockstep pay undermines the value of great teaching and hurts students and teachers, making it difficult to recruit and keep top talent, and discouraging high performers from teaching where they’re needed most. It’s time to build smarter compensation systems that actually pay for what really matters: how hard teachers’ jobs are and how well they’re doing them. Schools and districts can—and should—free up existing funds and pay teachers according to three principles:
Diane Ravitch: Campbell Brown Shouldn’t Worry Her Pretty Little Head About Education Policy
“I have trouble with this issue because it’s so totally illogical,” says Diane Ravitch, an education historian. “It’s hard to understand why anyone thinks taking away teachers’ due-process rights will lead to great teachers in every classroom.”
As for Brown, Ravitch is dismissive: “She is a good media figure because of her looks, but she doesn’t seem to know or understand anything about teaching and why tenure matters … I know it sounds sexist to say that she is pretty, but that makes her telegenic, even if what she has to say is total nonsense.”
Why, yes, that does sound rather sexist. Now, Ravitch suggests here that Brown’s analysis is so transparently illogical that perhaps only her looks can account for her views. Why, Ravitch wonders, would the elimination of a job protection help attract better teachers? Let me reveal, via the power of logic, how this can work.
The basic problem is that some proportion of American teachers is terrible at their job and immune to improvement, yet removing them is a practical impossibility. (A good overview of the research on chronically ineffective teachers can be found here. Standard caveat: The author is my wife.) Under some conditions, loosening tenure laws can lead directly to more effective teachers in the classroom. For instance, when the Great Recession drove states to lay off teachers in order to balance their budgets, last-in, first-out hiring rules led them to fire teachers regardless of quality, thus removing highly effective (yet unprotected) teachers from classrooms.
Our Frederick Taylor style monolithic education model has obviously run its course.
2008 was a terrible year to graduate college
College graduates in the class of 2008 had it rough. They started college when the economy was thriving and took on more student loan debt than anyone before them.
Then, they graduated just as the Great Recession rushed in. The Class of 2008 was blindsided by an economic reality that they hadn’t planned on and weren’t prepared to handle.
Turning College Into a No-Thought Zone
Last September, Vincenzo Sinapi-Riddle, a student at Citrus Community College near Los Angeles, was collecting signatures on a petition asking the student government to condemn spying by the National Security Agency. He left the school’s designated “free speech area” to go to the student center. On his way there, he saw a likely prospect to join his cause: a student wearing a “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirt. He stopped the student and they began talking about the petition. Then an administrator came out of a nearby building, informed them their discussion was forbidden outside the speech zone, and warned Sinapi-Riddle he could be ejected from campus for violating the speech-zone rule.
Sinapi-Riddle has now sued Citrus College, a state institution, for violating his First Amendment rights by, among other things, demanding that “expressive activities” be confined to the 1.34 percent of campus designated as a “free speech area.” Perhaps the most outrageous part of his experience is how common it is. The vague bans on “offensive” language and other “politically correct” measures that most people think of when they imagine college speech codes are increasingly being joined by quarantine policies that restrict all student speech, regardless of its content.
Students paying extra for business skills they say they haven’t learned on campu
Ben Wei was already paying hefty tuition to earn a sociology degree from Bowdoin College, which charged nearly $57,000 at the time, but worried his classes weren’t teaching him skills he needed in the workplace.
So he gave up his winter break just a semester before graduating and paid another $3,000 to take a three-week business boot camp designed to teach him how to work a full-time job.
The course, offered by a company called Fullbridge, covered problem-solving, collaboration and communication—the kinds of skills employers say they want but aren’t getting from college grads.
“You can sit in a room and learn economic theory from a professor or a textbook, but at the end of the day, it’s still just theory,”said Wei, who now works as a data analyst. “They don’t really teach you how to apply that theory.”
All Children Should Be Delinquents
IN the late 1970s, in the Mississippi River town of Dubuque, Iowa, the threat of summer boredom was real. The nearest theme parks were hours away, and the best video games (Space Invaders, Asteroids) were coin guzzlers, fueled by hard-earned lawn-mowing or paper-route funds. While we had the requisite tennis courts and public swimming pools, which we used to exhaustion, our best resources were our rawest ones — hilly streets, undeveloped woods, local streams and hours of unstructured, unsupervised playtime.
As a 6- to 8-year-old, when I wasn’t searching for sticks to whittle with my collection of X-acto knives (or giving myself the scars to remember them by), I was getting lost in ragtag gatherings of kids. We played afternoon-long basketball games and twilight sessions of kick the can that could span three streets and involve 30 or more screaming kids.
France to teach programming languages beginning with 10 year olds
« Cette initiation devrait être inscrite dans les programmes du second degré », selon le ministre, qui considère que « certains professeurs pourraient, plus naturellement que d’autres, être des pédagogues du code : les professeurs de technologie et de mathématiques ».
« Nous lançons par ailleurs, avec Arnaud Montebourg, un grand programme en faveur de la filière industrielle française du numérique éducatif », ajoute Benoît Hamon, précisant que 70 % des élèves du primaire et de collège et 100 % des enseignants seront équipés à l’horizon 2020 en ordinateurs et tablettes dotés de ressources pédagogiques numériques.
Commentary on Student Loan Debt Practices
Last week, after years of being on the financial precipice and facing accusations of improper recruiting practices by authorities in several states, Corinthian Colleges, a for-profit education company with 74,000 students in more than 100 locations around the country, began to wind down its operations. In an agreement with the federal Department of Education, Corinthian said it would halt admissions and try to sell 85 of its campuses.
At another 12 Corinthian campuses, students can continue their studies until they graduate. Certain students who choose to stop attending classes will receive refunds, the company said.
Even as the company’s fortunes faded in recent years, Corinthian’s five top executives piled up real money: Over the last three years, they’ve shared $12.5 million in salaries and cash bonuses.
But taxpayers and Corinthian students — a vast majority of whom have borrowed to finance their educations — will be the biggest losers. When Corinthian eventually vanishes, its graduates will be left holding degrees from a defunct institution. This will make it even tougher for them to get jobs, resulting in higher default rates on their federal student loans.
Related: NYU’s student debt stories.
Why Middle School Should Be Abolished
America should do away with middle schools, which are educational wastelands. We need to cut the middle out of middle schools, either by combining them with the guidance and nurturing that children find in elementary school, or with the focus on adult success that we expect from our high schools.
For much as half of middle schools across the country, national statistics show substantial performance gaps, especially in math and reading achievement, between middle school and high school. It’s time to admit that middle school models do not work—instead, they are places where academics stall and languish.
via Marc Eisen.
Mr Eisen wrote “My Life & Times with the Madison Public Schools” in 2007. Well worth reading.
Study: Half of black males, 40 percent of white males arrested by age 23
Nearly half of black males and almost 40 percent of white males in the U.S. are arrested by age 23, which can hurt their ability to find work, go to school and participate fully in their communities.
A new study released Monday (Jan. 6) in the journal Crime & Delinquency provides the first contemporary findings on how the risk of arrest varies across race and gender, says Robert Brame, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina and lead author of the study.
The study is an analysis of national survey data from 1997 to 2008 of teenagers and young adults, ages 18
TV Watching and Computer Use in U.S. Youth Aged 12–15, 2012
Were there differences by sex in the percentage of youth who watched TV or used a computer for 2 hours or less daily?
Were there differences by race and Hispanic origin in the percentage of youth who watched TV or used a computer for 2 hours or less daily?
Were there differences by weight status in the percentage of youth who watched TV or used a computer for 2 hours or less daily?Nearly all (98.5%) youth aged 12–15 reported watching TV daily.
More than 9 in 10 (91.1%) youth aged 12–15 reported using the computer daily outside of school.In 2012, 27.0% of youth aged 12–15 had 2 hours or less of TV plus computer use daily.
Among youth aged 12–15, girls (80.4%) were more likely to use the computer 2 hours or less daily when compared with boys (69.4%).
Fewer non-Hispanic black youth aged 12–15 (53.4%) reported watching 2 hours or less of TV daily than non-Hispanic white (65.8%) and Hispanic (68.7%) youth.Excessive screen-time behaviors, such as using a computer and watching TV, for more than 2 hours daily have been linked with elevated blood pressure, elevated serum cholesterol, and being overweight or obese among youth (1–3). Additionally, screen-time behavior established in adolescence has been shown to track into adulthood (4). The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute-supported Expert Panel and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommend that children limit leisure screen time to 2 hours or less daily (5,6). This report presents national estimates of TV watching and computer use outside of the school day.
Embattled teacher unions to go after ‘toxic testing’
National Education Association (NEA) President Lily Eskelsen García on the use of student test scores to evaluate teacher effectiveness:
They’re “the mark of the devil.” “For us, one thing is clear. Before anything is going to get better: It’s the Testing, Stupid. Better yet, it’s the stupid testing.”
New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) Vice President Marie Blistan on the use of student test scores to evaluate teacher effectiveness:
“We need to safeguard against a test-taking tsunami that enriches private corporations’ wallets but impoverishes our students.”
Denver, the site of the NEA’s annual meeting last week, is a long way from Trenton but you’d never know it from the sound bites.
During this past year the rhetoric from both the national teacher union leadership and N.J.’s state chapter have grown progressively more rancorous. The bicoastal target of ire is, ostensibly, the practice of linking student test scores to teacher evaluations.
American Teens Achieve Mediocrity In Financial Literacy, Local math & reading background
When it comes to financial literacy around the world, American teens are middling.
The United States may fuel the world’s largest economy and operate its most robust financial system. But compared to the financial prowess of teenagers in 17 other countries, U.S. teens come off downright mediocre.
That’s according to a new study published Wednesday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development as part of its Program for International Student Assessment, conducted once every three years.
The OECD, a 34-nation organization based in Paris, surveyed 15-year-old students in 13 member nations and five other nations throughout 2012 to ascertain their level of familiarity with the financial system as they neared adulthood.
“Finance is part of everyday life for many 15-year-olds, who are already consumers of financial services, such as bank accounts,” the report said. “As they near the end of compulsory education, students will face complex and challenging financial choices, including whether to join the labor market or continue with formal education and, if so, how to finance such study.”
Unfortunately, this is unsurprising. Read two useful articles on local math difficulties and long term disastrous reading results.
The OECD report.
Building a Community for High Schoolers Who Code
Last September, the day before PennApps 2013f, a 48-hour, 1,000+ student hackathon at the University of Pennsylvania, I created a Facebook Group called “PennApps HS Hackers” for the dozen or so high school students who were also attending the event.
If the words “hacker” and “hackathon” evoke mental images of scary-looking criminals breaking into computers, I can assure you we’re nothing like that. Hackers, in the original spirit of the term, are programmers and designers who use technology to build things — not destroy things. Hackathons are events where hackers of all kinds come together to collaborate on new projects and compete for prizes, often on college campuses.
Turns out I picked an incredible time to start a community — the hackathon scene exploded in rhythm with my Facebook Group. In the course of a school year, the group would grow to include high schoolers from all 50 states and more than a dozen countries, organizers from nearly every major U.S. college hackathon, founders of high school hackathons and hacker meetups, and even the president of the well-known startup incubator, Y Combinator.
For years we’ve been telling kids to sit still and pay attention. That’s all wrong.
Today’s educational technology often presents itself as a radical departure from the tired practices of traditional instruction. But in one way, at least, it faithfully follows the conventions of the chalk-and-blackboard era: EdTech addresses only the student’s head, leaving the rest of the body out.
Treating mind and body as separate is an old and powerful idea in Western culture. But this venerable trope is facing down a challenge from a generation of researchers—in cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, even philosophy—who claim that we think with and through our bodies. Even the most abstract mathematical or literary concepts, these researchers maintain, are understood in terms of the experience of our senses and of moving ourselves through space.
This perspective, known as “embodied cognition,” is now becoming a lens through which to look at educational technology. Work in the field shows promising signs that incorporating bodily movements—even subtle ones—can improve the learning that’s done on computers.
Teacher pension rescue to cost LAUSD $1.1 billion
LA Unified must come up with $16 million this year to pay an unexpected bill as a result of legislation signed by Governor Jerry Brown aimed at rescuing the state’s teachers retirement pension system known as CalSTRS, but the district’s total increase is much higher, estimated to reach an extra $1.1 billion over the next seven years.
While teachers and school districts across the state will see their contribution rates increase, LAUSD, the largest school district in the state, will pay the lions-share.
The rescue, which will help address a $74 billion shortfall in the teachers pension fund, requires school districts to radically raise their contributions to the fund from the current rate of 8.25 percent, to a rate of 19.1 percent by 2020. Teachers will see a more modest step up, from 8.15 percent to an eventual 10.25 percent of their salary, over the same seven year period. The state’s contribution will rise from 3 percent to 6.3 percent.
But In real dollar terms, the pension contribution price tag for LAUSD is steep: it will eventually more than double by the end of the phase-in period, from its current payment of $213 million per year, to $493 million per year by 2020.
“Value-added measures are the Mark of the Devil”
Eskelsen García already has fiery words for the feds, who she holds responsible for the growing use of “value-added measures,” or VAMs, an algorithm that aims to assess teacher effectiveness by student growth on standardized tests. The idea has gained traction under the Obama administration through waivers from No Child Left Behind and the administration’s signature Race to the Top program. But studies, including some funded by the Education Department, have cast doubt on the validity of the measures.
VAMs “are the mark of the devil,” Eskelsen García said.
The algorithms do aim to account for variables such as student poverty levels. But Eskelsen García said they can’t capture the complete picture.
The year she taught 22 students in one class and the year she taught 39 students in one class — “Is that factored into a value-added model? No,” she said. “Did they factor in the year that we didn’t have enough textbooks so all four fifth-grade teachers had to share them on a cart and I couldn’t send any books home to do homework with my kids?”
“It’s beyond absurd,” she added. “And anyone who thinks they can defend that is trying to sell you something.”
Locally, Madison schools have been spending money and time on value-added assessment for years.
Self-Delusion Spreads from Professional to Graduate Education; Consternation Curiously Absent
I want to be clear at the outset: I love literature. I was an English major, and I’ve never regretted it for a moment. I seriously considered pursuing a Ph.D. in English. I could not have a deeper faith in the liberal arts as a path to the betterment of all mankind.
So imagine my dismay at some recent reportage in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Graduate programs in languages and literature are suffering troubles all too familiar to the readers of these pages: In these straitened times, the tenure-track academic appointments for which a doctoral degree is the traditional and necessary preparation are available for only about 60% of the recipients of doctorates in language or literature (a number chillingly reminiscent of the 56%-57% of the last two law-school graduating classes who managed to find a full-time, long-term job requiring a law license within 9-10 months of graduation, though when you exclude school-funded and self-employed positions as well as a few other confounders and irrelevancies, that number is closer to 53%). The Modern Language Association (a trade group for college and graduate educators and scholars in language and literature analogous to AALS) recently released a report conceding “[w]e are faced with an unsustainable reality.”
The solution? Simple—dismiss the “reality” as “wrong”:
At Sea in a Deluge of Data
Alison J. Head and John Wihbey:
This spring, more college students than ever received baccalaureate degrees, and their career prospects are brighter than they were for last year’s graduates.
Employers responding to this year’s National Association of Colleges and Employers’ “Job Outlook 2014 Survey” said they planned to increase entry-level hiring by almost 8 percent. But what they may not realize is that these seemingly techno-savvy new hires could be missing some basic yet vital research skills.
It’s a problem that we found after interviewing 23 people in charge of hiring at leading employers like Microsoft, KPMG, Nationwide Insurance, the Smithsonian, and the FBI. This research was part of a federally funded study for Project Information Literacy, a national study about how today’s college students find and use information.
Nearly all of the employers said they expected candidates, whatever their field, to be able to search online, a given for a generation born into the Internet world. But they also expected job candidates to be patient and persistent researchers and to be able to retrieve information in a variety of formats, identify patterns within an array of sources, and dive deeply into source material.
Charters Catch On Fast in Newark Parents Increasingly Look Outside District Schools
In the debut of a system that lets families apply to charter schools and district schools at the same time, Newark got an eye-opening lesson: More than half of the applicants for kindergarten through eighth grade ranked charters as their first choice.
The application numbers, supplied by the state-operated district, show the popularity of charters at a time when Superintendent Cami Anderson’s One Newark reorganization plan faces heated opposition from some residents.
One part of the complex plan aims to make it easier for children to sign up for schools outside their neighborhoods. Ms. Anderson said the application data show many families want greater choice.
“Universal enrollment is giving us a real sense of demand and allowing families of all learners, including those who struggle, more options,” she said. Some critics, meanwhile, say the superintendent’s push to consolidate, overhaul and restaff many district schools has created such uncertainty that it hastened a flight to charters.
Via Laura Waters.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: America’s Public Sector Union Dilemma
There is much less competition in the public sector than the private sector, and that has made all the difference.
Since the Great Recession began in 2008, there has been a growing criticism of public sector unions, reflecting taxpayer concerns about union compensation and unfunded pension liabilities. These concerns have led to proposals to change public sector union policy in very significant ways. Earlier this month, voters in Ohio defeated by a wide margin a law that would have restricted union powers, although polls showed broad support for portions of the law that would have reduced union benefits. In Wisconsin, a state with a long-standing pro-union stance, Governor Scott Walker advanced policy in February that would cut pay and substantially curtail collective bargaining rights of many public sector union workers. In Florida, State Senator John Thrasher introduced legislation that would prevent governments from collecting union dues from union worker state paychecks. And it is not just Ohio, Wisconsin, and Florida that are attempting to change the landscape of public unions. Cash-strapped governments in many states are considering ways to reduce the costs associated with public unions.
It is important to determine why public unionization rates are so much higher than in the private sector, and whether public union employees are excessively raising costs to taxpayers. Public sector workers may be paid significantly more than private sector workers and their pensions and job security are often higher than in the private sector. Factoring in the lower likelihood of dismissal and layoffs in the public sector, public sector compensation may be 10 percent higher than market rates.
I calculate that bringing public sector wages closer in line with private sector wages by reducing them by 5 percent can reduce state fiscal deficits considerably. For California, which is among the most fiscally strapped states in the nation, reducing state worker wages by 5 percent would reduce the state deficit by about 15 percent. Moreover, some public sector workers, such as California prison guards, are paid far in excess of competitive levels, reflecting a strong union and effective lobbying that has fostered rapid compensation growth. Other unions, such as teacher unions, do not drive up compensation nearly as much, but instead have substantial negative impact by protecting poor teachers, which in turn reduces the quality of public education and reduces human capital.
Why People Used to Have Children
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been characterized by a massive decline in fertility, beginning in rich Western countries and spreading all over the world. It is a transformation that is still underway in poor countries today.
Technological advances have, over the same period, radically decreased child mortality and increased life span. Modern parents need not have many children to ensure that one or two survive; almost all children survive to reproductive age. But Darwinian genetic interests cannot explain the modern decline in fertility (if Darwinian interests dominated, fertility should increase with increased survival, as observed in many historical elites). Rather, the fertility decline to present levels is mostly an economic response to the changing value of children, and to the changing economic relationship of parents and children. The economic transformation is not spontaneous, but the product of cultural transformation through education.
The economic value of children has decreased, but this is not the most important cause of the fertility decline. The transformation of countries from predominantly agricultural to predominantly urban reduced the value of children, especially where the industrial employment of children was restricted. Each child’s labor contributed positive value to a family farm or cottage industry, but in an urban setting, children began to have negative economic value. Indeed, the fertility decline correlates somewhat – though not perfectly – with the transformation from agrarian to city life.
But the fertility decline is not merely the product of a price effect – of people having fewer children because children are more costly. Children are not normal goods (or even inferior goods, as might be surmised from low fertility among the highest income groups): they become not goods at all, but rather bundles of claims on their parents. This transformation is a culturally-controlled change in direction of the flow of resources. Before the fertility decline, resources flowed from children to parents (and even up to grandparents and kin); after the transformation, resources flowed from parents to children. In Mass Education as a Determinant of the Timing of the Fertility Decline, John Caldwell argues that the vector of this cultural transformation has been mass education. He characterizes it as the replacement of “family morality,” in which children are expected to “work hard, demand little, and respect the authority of the old,” with “community morality,” in which children are dependent on their parents to become future productive citizens (perhaps even upwardly mobile) for the good of the country.
“We are spending billions of dollars in our K-12 system and these kids ought to be able to meet these standards”
In the world of remedial education, Shine Adams, a Kansas University student, is the exception rather than the rule.
Adams, 38, dropped out of high school, worked for several years and then decided he needed to get his diploma and then a college degree.
Adams got his GED, then, using remedial courses, passed several math classes to satisfy his math requirement and is now working on a degree in social work.
He said he couldn’t have gotten where he is without remedial courses.
But for most students, the remedial courses, sometimes referred to as developmental education, aren’t working.
“We need to do things differently,” said Susan Fish, state director of adult education at the Kansas Board of Regents.
In Kansas, 42 percent of first-time students in two-year colleges and 16 percent in public, four-year colleges enroll in at least one remedial course.
Most students who enroll in remedial courses do not graduate.
State officials say the statistics are cause for alarm as they try to increase the number of people with degrees to meet workforce demands.
“We are spending billions of dollars in our K-12 system and these kids ought to be able to meet these standards. We need to be more honest with ourselves,” said Kansas Board of Regents Chairman Kenny Wilk.
A new report recommends some targeted funding increases and program changes.
The Developmental Education report was put together over the past year by regents staff and leaders at community colleges, four-year colleges and technical colleges.
Shaping a School System, From the Ground Up
In the fall of 2011, an eclectic group of people from the San Francisco Bay Area began making regular trips to Lima, Peru. Among them were architects, mechanical engineers, ethnographers, communication designers and education specialists.
They were all employees of the design company Ideo, which is perhaps best known for designing the first laptop computer and the first Apple computer mouse. But now Ideo had been hired by a Peruvian businessman, Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor, to work on a new type of project: designing a network of low-cost private schools from scratch, including the classrooms, the curriculum, the teacher-training strategies and the business model.
Mr. Rodriguez-Pastor was “trying to break the traditional school model,” he recalled in a recent interview. “We thought, why not get different perspectives rather than build on what we think we know?”
Technology Use in Special Education Classrooms
Eleven-year-old Matthew Votto sits at an iPad, his teacher at his elbow. She holds up a small laminated picture of a $20 bill.
“What money is this?” she asks. Matthew looks at the iPad, touches a square marked “Money Identification” and then presses $20. “20,” the tablet intones, while the teacher, Edwina Rogers, puts another sticker on a pad, bringing Matthew closer to a reward.
They race through more questions. “What day of the week is it?” “What is the weather outside?” “What money is this?” In most cases, Matthew, who has autism, answers verbally, but he is quicker and seems more comfortable on the device.
Why the cool kids from middle school may have trouble down the line
It was, of course, a popular mean girl who made my life miserable in middle school.
She made a point to ask me, in front of whatever audience she could rally around her, if I had attended the big party from the weekend. (I never had.) If I had found a boyfriend. (Nope.) If even I had a clue about the fantastic life she and her friends led. (Not really.)
While her needling seemed like the end of the world when I was 11 and 12, it taught me to have a great deal of compassion for the marginalized as I grew up. I’ve wondered what happened to my young tormentor as the years passed. A new study out of the University of Virginia suggests she should have been nicer.
Published last month in the journal of Child Development, it followed the “cool kids” from middle school for a decade. It’s true what they say about peaking too young. The socially precocious teens in middle school fell lower on the social hierarchy by high school. And in their early 20s, they had more problems with drugs and alcohol, more trouble with the law and were less competent in their friendships.
What’s surprising is that the middle school “fast-track,” as measured in this study, seems tame compared to the images put forth in current pop culture. One of the markers identified middle schoolers who reported becoming seriously romantically involved at this age, as in making out with a boyfriend or girlfriend but not going further than that.
Politics & University Admissions
Speaker Joe Straus and two of his top lieutenants in the Texas House, Reps. Dan Branch and Jim Pitts, sent more letters to the president of the University of Texas on behalf of applicants than anyone else whose correspondence was included in a recent inquiry into admissions favoritism.
Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa’s office recently reviewed 86 “recommendation” letters, almost all of them from lawmakers, sent to UT President Bill Powers instead of through the proper channels.
The inquiry wasn’t exhaustive — those were just the letters uncovered by UT Regent Wallace Hall. Lawmakers launched impeachment proceedings against Hall last June, just two weeks after he began investigating whether the university was giving special treatment to the friends and family of lawmakers.
An update, here.
The Economics of Fake Degrees
It’s surprising how many house pets hold advanced degrees. Last year a dog received his MBA from the American University of London, a non-accredited distance-learning institution. It feels as if I should add “not to be confused with the American University in London,” but getting people to confuse them seems like a pretty basic feature of the whole AUOL marketing strategy.
The dog, identified as “Peter Smith” on his diploma, goes by Pete. He was granted his degree on the basis of “previous experiential learning,” along with payment of 4,500 pounds ($7,723). The funds were provided by a BBC news program, which also helped Pete fill out the paperwork. The American University of London required that Pete submit evidence of his qualifications as well as a photograph. The applicant submitted neither, as the BBC website explains, “since the qualifications did not exist and the applicant was a dog.”
July 2, 2014 Is an MBA worth it?
I have wavered back and forth on the decision to go get an MBA for years. It has always appeared so prestigious and valuable to me. But I have always wondered, is it really that valuable? I have even gone through the trouble of thoroughly researching schools that I would go to, weighed the pros and cons and even spoken to friends who have gotten their MBAs from local state schools all the way up to Ivy League. Every time I venture into those deep waters I come out with the same conclusion; as valuable as it may seem from afar an MBA is not worth the money. Today I was having coffee with an entrepreneur who has those three letters after their name and they confirmed my thoughts.
Their perspective was that starting a business or helping build one early on is just as good and most likely better, than getting an MBA.
Ultimately it boils down to practicality versus theory. Working on a brand new business, such as a startup, is real life hard knocks business school and experience is the best professor. The resounding answer I hear from people who went to business school is that theory can only teach you so much but the network you gain is invaluable. I have a hard time ponying up $100,000+ for a network, some theory and a lot of times a stigma that you don’t deserve. People, unfairly, tend to turn their noses up at those three letters.
There are cases where getting an MBA is worth it, but they are increasingly becoming edge cases. One of my friends who went to Harvard Business School specifically stated that getting an MBA didn’t make sense unless you own a balance sheet. That helps move past theory into the realm of practicality.
Lawsuit Challenges New York’s Teacher Tenure Laws
An education advocacy group on Thursday threw down the first challenge to New York’s teacher tenure laws in the wake of a landmark court decision in California last month finding such laws there unconstitutional.
A lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court on Staten Island argues that the tenure laws violate the State Constitution’s guarantee of a “sound basic education” by making it difficult to fire bad teachers and by protecting the most veteran teachers in the event of layoffs, regardless of their quality. The suit, filed against city and state education officials, names as plaintiffs 11 public school students whose parents belong to a group known as the New York City Parents Union.
The road ahead is less than certain in either state.
Already, the California Federation of Teachers has vowed to appeal the decision in the case, Vergara v. California. And union leaders, legal analysts and others said it would be difficult to gain any traction on the issue in New York’s judiciary.
In state tuition rules tighten
Figuring out how to pay in-state college tuition for a college student who grew up elsewhere is the ultimate money hack.
At desirable flagship universities in states like Michigan and Colorado, the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition for students who get no financial aid can now approach $100,000 per undergraduate degree. And some families may also enjoy thumbing their noses at state legislators who expect affluent parents’ out-of-state tuition to subsidize the ever-lower budget allocations those representatives provide to higher education.
So it should come as little surprise that a service like In-State Angels has emerged to help high school graduates establish residency in another state. This is legal, though complicated, so once the company succeeds, it asks for roughly 10 to 15 percent of the ultimate savings as a fee.
The Misguided Freakout About Basement-Dwelling Millennialist
More than ever, young people are living in their parents’ basements.
You’ve surely heard that one before. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the New Republic, Salon, and others have repeated it over and over in the last few years. More than 15.3 million twentysomethings—and half of young people under 25—live “in their parents’ home,” according to official Census statistics.
There’s just one problem with those official statistics. They’re criminally misleading. When you read the full Census reports, you often come upon this crucial sentence:
It is important to note that the Current Population Survey counts students living in dormitories as living in their parents’ home.
When you were adjusting to your freshman roommate, you were “living with your parents.” When you snagged that sweet triple with your best friends in grad housing, you were “living with your parents.” That one time you launched butt-rattling bottle rockets at the stroke of midnight off your fraternity roof? I hope you didn’t make too much noise. After all, you were “living with your parents,” and mine definitely went to bed around 11.
Pupils on free school meals for only a year become ‘invisible underachievers’
Children who qualify for free school meals for just one year become “invisible underachievers” who receive little government support but achieve similar results to those who remain on free school meals during their entire school career.
Research from education data analysts FFT found that the group makes up around 7% of year 11 pupils, meaning that almost 40,000 students suffer similar levels of deprivation but receive fewer of the benefits, in most cases because their household income is just above the £16,000 threshold.
Those who received FSM for only one year average a D grade at GCSE – only slightly above those who are on the meals continuously, but almost a grade lower than pupils who have never received them.
Locally, Madison plans to expand its “free meal” program. Will this address Madison’s long standing disastrous reading results?
The Changing Economic Advantage from UK Private Schools
Francis Green , Stephen J. Machin, Richard Murphy & Yu Zhu :
Despite its relatively small size, the private school sector plays a prominent role in British society. This paper focuses on changing wage and education differentials between privately educated and state educated individuals in Britain. It reports evidence that the private/state school wage differential has risen significantly over time, despite the rising cost to sending children to private school. A significant factor underpinning this has been faster rising educational attainment for privately educated individuals. Despite these patterns of change, the proportion attending private school has not altered much, nor have the characteristics of those children (and their parents) attending private school. Taken together, our findings are consistent with the idea that the private school sector has been successful in transforming its ability to generate the academic outputs that are most in demand in the modern economy. Because of the increased earnings advantage, private school remains a good investment for parents who want to opt out, but it also contributes more to rising economic and social inequality.
“And the dream at Berkeley is to do social work and then go work for Google or Facebook”
The Chancellor of UC Berkeley, Nicholas Dirks, formerly spent years as a professor at Columbia University. In an Aspen Ideas Festival* panel on the state of the humanities, he summed up the difference between Ivy Leaguers in New York City and graduates of the institution he now runs. “You know, the tradition at Columbia is that you read Aristotle and then you go to Goldman Sachs,” he said. “And the dream at Berkeley is to do social work and then go work for Google or Facebook.”
He added, “All the stereotypes have a lot of truth to them. What I do find interesting is that at Berkeley, about 70 percent of students are taking some computer science across the curriculum. And this, I think, is a national phenomenon. At Stanford I think it’s 90 percent, but that’s Stanford. But we’re actually trying to introduce data science and data analytics into the core arts and sciences curriculum.”
He also noted the decline in English majors at his rival institution:
Wealth by degrees The returns to investing in a university education vary enormously
IS A university degree a good investment? Many potential students are asking the question, especially in countries where the price of a degree is rising, as a result of falling government subsidies. Recent research suggests that the conventional wisdom remains true: a university degree pays handsomely. In America and the euro zone, for example, unemployment rates for graduates are far below average. Yet the benefit of university varies greatly among students, making an investment in higher education a risky bet in some circumstances.
In Major Announcement, FIRE Says It Will Sue Every College With a Speech Code Until Speech Codes Die Forever
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education announced a major litigation effort Tuesday against universities that maintain clearly illegal speech codes.
With help from the law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine, FIRE is suing several universities that manifestly and unconstitutionally deprive their students of First Amendment rights.
“Universities’ stubborn refusal to relinquish their speech codes must not be tolerated,” said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff during a press conference.
For now, suits have been filed against Ohio University, Iowa State University, Chicago State University, and Citrus College in California. These universities have all trampled students’ free speech rights, according to FIRE.
Lukianoff explained that FIRE would not hesitate to expand the suits until all universities abandon their speech codes, which were ruled unconstitutional decades ago but have endured at more than 50 percent of colleges, according to the foundation’s research.
What Stiglitz Misses On Inequality: The Responsibility Of Economists
It is a not novel thought that each profession is acutely aware of the problems caused by others but is often unconscious of the problems for which it is responsible. The education system stifles learning by teaching to the test. Doctors and pharmaceutical companies prescribe medicines that cause new diseases that require new cures. Engineers create time-saving devices that end up wasting large amounts of our time. So it is not entirely a surprise that economists are also blind to problems that their profession has engendered.
At time of austerity, eight universities spent top dollar on Hillary Clinton speeches
Philip Rucker & Tosalind Helderman:
At least eight universities, including four public institutions, have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for Hillary Rodham Clinton to speak on their campuses over the past year, sparking a backlash from some student groups and teachers at a time of austerity in higher education.
In one previously undisclosed transaction, the University of Connecticut — which just raised tuition by 6.5 percent — paid $251,250 for Clinton to speak on campus in April. Other examples include $300,000 to address UCLA in March and $225,000 for a speech scheduled to occur in October at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
In fact, US teachers earn above average for the developed world at every grade and experience level. They earn even more than teachers in Finland!
Do they earn as much as they should? No, they do not (more on that below). This is a serious, intellectual job that demands serious pay. But if we keep exaggerating how bad our teachers have it, no one will want to become a teacher–and policy makers will continue to dismiss salary increases as an unimaginably expensive reform.
On the other hand, if we ground the conversation in facts, we might discover that the situation is not as overwhelmingly hopeless as we thought.
First things first: What does the evidence show about how well US teachers are paid? There are different ways to compare salaries. One way is the straightfoward way: compare teacher salaries across countries. To do this, you take a country’s average teacher salary at different grade and experience levels, convert the figure into equivalent US dollars using Purchasing Power Parities to adjust for cost-of-living differences, and see how things stack up.
When you do this, as the OECD does, then you find out a startling truth: US teachers make more than teachers in Finland at every grade and experience level.
The pay gap is most glaring for elementary teachers. Here is the average salary (in equivalent USD converted using PPPs) for new elementary-school teachers in 15 countries:
1. Luxembourg $64,043
2. Germany $47,488
3. Switzerland $47,330
4. Denmark $43,461
5. United States $37,595
6. Netherlands $36,626
7. Spain $35,881
8. Canada $35,534
9. Australia $34,610
10. Ireland $33,484
11. Norway $33,350
12. Belgium (Fl.) $32,095
12. Belgium (Fr.) $31,515
13. Austria $31,501
14. Portugal $30,946
15. Finland $30,587
Harris v. Quinn ruling: Unions hit, but not fatally
An Update On Redistributed Wisconsin Tax Dollars for K-12 Budgets
Whether the district will need to scale back its planned spending for the 2014-15 school year is a “good question,” Howard said. “I’m not sure what it means.”
McCarthy said Madison’s aid has only hit the $60 million mark once, during the 2008-09 school year when total state aid levels peaked at $4.7 billion. The district received $58.4 million during the 2012-13 school year, which was about $11 million more than the district projected at the time, but aid has ranged between $43.2 million and $52.2 million since the 2009-10 school year.
In the last three years, the district has ended up receiving more in state aid than DPI’s July 1 figures predicted. Last year, the district received about $2.6 million more than DPI first estimated and $4.2 million more in 2012. In 2011, the district received less than $1 million more.
Much more on the Madison School District’s 2014-2015 budget, here.
Misleading Brookings study latest attempt to bury student debt crisis
For the last few years, even higher education’s most ardent boosters have admitted the industry has a serious cost problem. They try to console borrowers with stories about the value — both transcendent and practical — of a college diploma. The best salespeople liberally sprinkle in empathy for families who are paying truly outrageous attendance costs. As student debt grows unabated, however, we’re now witnessing the emergence of a new line: The problem is not so bad.
Earlier this week, a report from the Brookings Institution made waves for implying that the answer to its titular question “Is a Student Loan Crisis on the Horizon?” is “no.” The report’s authors Beth Akers and Matthew Chingos conclude, after a very narrow evaluation of cherry-picked data sets, that borrowers can afford the cost of higher education, and that the system is not out of whack. David Leonhardt, managing editor of the New York Times explainer vertical The Upshot, more or less reprinted a dissent-free summary of the report as fact on the paper’s third page — near-perfect traction for Brookings.
Some other commentators have poked holes in the Brookings report, but the Times placement means it’s probably too late. Already in offices and classrooms and bars across the nation, citizens who fancy themselves well informed are no doubt third-hand-explaining away the student debt crisis. Maybe the incoming class of 2018 took a deep sigh of relief when they opened Tuesday’s paper and emailed it around. Akers and Chingos have changed the conversation on student loans, but not for the better. At least not for borrowers.
9 Things I Learned as a Software Engineer
Three years ago I was working in a neuroscience lab in Barcelona, busy putting electrodes on people and teaching classes on cognitive systems. Today I design and write software for a living.
Of course back in science I wrote a lot of software — if you want to make any sense of 40 GB of brain scan data you’ll have to roll up your sleeves and write scripts to crunch those numbers, and I was always a good programmer. But it wasn’t until I quit my job (and possibly my future) in academia and started working for a small and ambitious start-up that I understood what being a software engineer — and more importantly, being in the business of software engineering — is really about. It’s not knowing more programming languages, libraries, algorithms, and design patterns. It’s a mindset.
Poor progress of UK disadvantaged pupils a waste of talent, says Alan Milburn
England’s education system is wasting young talent “on an industrial scale” because of poor progress made by the brightest disadvantaged children once they leave primary school, Alan Milburn, chair of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, said after publication of a report detailing the educational differences that emerge by the age of seven.
Advertisement
The report found that children from poor or disadvantaged backgrounds who achieve the highest levels at primary school have in most cases fallen behind their less able but better-off peers by the time they sit GCSE exams five years later.
Of almost 8,000 disadvantaged students who achieved top grades in English and maths standardised tests at age 11, only 900 went on to study at an elite university. But if disadvantaged children performed as well at secondary school as their better off peers, another 2,200 would later study at the likes of Oxford or Manchester universities.
Related:“They are all rich white kids & they will do just fine – not”.
Nearly 40% of Fairfax County, VA Requires additional English Instruction
The kindergartners of the Class of 2026, who finished their first year in Fairfax County schools Wednesday, constitute the largest and one of the most ethnically, culturally and socioeconomically diverse groups of students the county has seen, a fact that school system administrators say could pose significant challenges in the decade to come.
Long an enclave of predominantly white, middle-class families with a top-class school system, Fairfax has experienced a dramatic demographic shift in recent years that is nowhere more obvious than in the county’s kindergarten classrooms. The white student population is receding and is being replaced with fast-growing numbers of poor students and children of immigrants for whom English is a second language.
More than one-third of the 13,424 kindergartners in the county this year qualified for free or reduced-price meals, a federal measure of poverty, and close to 40 percent of the Class of 2026 requires additional English instruction, among the most ever for a Fairfax kindergarten class.
The demographic changes in Fairfax are likely to have long-term implications for the school system: Most of this year’s kindergarten class will spend the next 12 years in county schools. Schools officials believe that the challenges that come with a less-affluent and less-prepared population will exacerbate the system’s struggles with a widening achievement gap for minorities and ballooning class sizes.
The rising enrollment — the overall student body has surged by more than 22,000 since 2004 — is not sustainable at the current funding level, schools officials said, which could intensify already contentious battles for tax dollars with the county’s Board of Supervisors. School Board member Ted Velkoff (At Large), chairman of its Budget Committee, said the increasing number of immigrant families in Fairfax has affected — and will continue to affect — the school system’s bottom line.
Americans think we have the world’s best colleges. We Don’t
Americans have a split vision of education. Conventional wisdom has long held that our K-12 schools are mediocre or worse, while our colleges and universities are world class. While policy wonks hotly debate K-12 reform ideas like vouchers and the Common Core state standards, higher education is largely left to its own devices. Many families are worried about how to get into and pay for increasingly expensive colleges. But the stellar quality of those institutions is assumed.
Yet a recent multinational study of adult literacy and numeracy skills suggests that this view is wrong. America’s schools and colleges are actually far more alike than people believe — and not in a good way. The nation’s deep education problems, the data suggest, don’t magically disappear once students disappear behind ivy-covered walls.
The standard negative view of American K-12 schools has been highly influenced by international comparisons. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, for example, periodically administers an exam called PISA to 15-year-olds in 69 countries. While results vary somewhat depending on the subject and grade level, America never looks very good. The same is true of other international tests. In PISA’s math test, the United States battles it out for last place among developed countries, along with Hungary and Lithuania.
Firing Bad Teachers: A Superintendent and a Teacher’s Union Official Debate
Dr. John E. Deasy, Superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, supports the California lawsuit against the state’s tenure, layoff and termination rules. He believes that the current system has a disparate impact on the quality of education offered to poor students and minorities, and is therefore unconstitutional.
Randi Weingarten is the president of the American Federation of Teachers (a separate entity from the California Teacher’s Association, which represents Golden State teachers). Her organization opposed the lawsuit. “While teachers led their classrooms, a judge in a Los Angeles courtroom said that for students to win, teachers have to lose,” the AFT stated after the plaintiffs won the case, which is being appealed. “Vergara v. California was a blow to public education everywhere, but especially demoralizing to hundreds of thousands of teachers who dedicate their lives to lifting up California’s students…Our opponents have spent months—and millions—vilifying California teachers to push a political agenda. We’re fighting back—in the media, on the ground, in the legislature and in the courts.”
These two shared a stage in Aspen this weekend, where they debated the lawsuit, teacher tenure, accountability, and related issues. The video of the entire panel is here:
Why Teenagers Act Crazy
ADOLESCENCE is practically synonymous in our culture with risk taking, emotional drama and all forms of outlandish behavior. Until very recently, the widely accepted explanation for adolescent angst has been psychological. Developmentally, teenagers face a number of social and emotional challenges, like starting to separate from their parents, getting accepted into a peer group and figuring out who they really are. It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to realize that these are anxiety-provoking transitions.
But there is a darker side to adolescence that, until now, was poorly understood: a surge during teenage years in anxiety and fearfulness. Largely because of a quirk of brain development, adolescents, on average, experience more anxiety and fear and have a harder time learning how not to be afraid than either children or adults.
Facebook has conducted a secret massive psychology experiment on its users to find out how they respond to positive and negative messages – without telling participants
Over 600,000 Facebook users have taken part in a psychological experiment organised by the social media company, without their knowledge.
Facebook altered the tone of the users’ news feed to highlight either positive or negative posts from their friends, which were seen on their news feed.
They then monitored the users’ response, to see whether their friends’ attitude had an impact on their own.
“The results show emotional contagion,” wrote a team of Facebook scientists, in a paper published by the PNAS journal – Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists of the United States.
Anatomy of a Swim Meet
I have three kids, and they all swim on a swim team every summer. I decided to capture my experience at a morning swim meet, for those of you not in the water cult.
6:00 a.m.: Wake up, drink coffee. Wake up grouchy children.
6:45 a.m.: Arrive at pool. Parking lot is already full. Let the kids out and park far away. Carry/drag chairs, bags and a cooler as if I were large pack animal. It occurs to me suddenly that as mother of three there is no denying that I am a large pack animal.
6:58 a.m.: Small miracle occurs. I find a great place to set up chairs, etc. Next to friends. With a good view of the pool. In full shade. Wish I’d brought a sweatshirt actually, it’s kind of chilly.
7:00 a.m.: Kids jump into the freezing cold pool for warm-ups and exchange looks with each other like — WHY DO WE DO THIS AGAIN?
7:30 a.m.: Children begin harassing me for money for the snack bar. I try to hand them something healthy from the cooler. Suddenly every other kid at the swim meet is eating large, chocolate-frosted doughnuts.
Over 100,000 African-American Parents Are Now Homeschooling Their Children
We hear so much about the plight of Black children and their low test scores. We have not heard that African American children who are homeschooled are scoring at the 82% in reading and 77% in math. This is 30-40% above their counterparts being taught in school. There is a 30% racial gap in schools, but there is no racial gap in reading if taught in the home and only a 5% gap in math.
What explains the success of African American students being taught by their parents? I believe that it’s love and high expectations. I am reminded of Booker T. Washington High School. They were honored several years ago for producing the greatest turnaround as a Recovery school. The principal had the opportunity to pick and choose her staff and emphatically stated, “If you want to teach in this school you must love the students”. Researchers love promoting that the racial gap is based on income, marital status, and the educational background of the parents. Seldom, if ever, do they research the impact of love and high expectations.
Since the landmark decision, Brown vs. Topeka in 1954, there has been a 66% decline in African American teachers. Many African American students are in classrooms where they are not loved, liked, or respected. Their culture is not honored and bonding is not considered. They are given low expectations – which helps to explain how students can be promoted from one grade to another without mastery of the content.
There are so many benefits to homeschooling beyond academics. Most schools spend more than 33% of the day disciplining students. And bullying has become a significant issue. One of every 6 Black males is suspended and large numbers are given Ritalin and placed in Special Education. These problems seldom, if ever, exist in the Homeschool environment.
Another major benefit is the summer months. Research shows that there is a 3 year gap between White and Black students. Some students do not read or are involved in any academic endeavor during the summer. Those students lose 36 months or 3 years if you multiply 3 months times 12 years (grades first -12) Homeschool parents do not allow academics to be forsaken for 3 months.
Finally, in the homeschool environment, parents are allowed to teach their children
Related: Madison’s long term disastrous reading results.
Why I’m No Longer a Professor
I have been a professor for 25 years—most of my professional life. Even when I had full-time corporate jobs, I always took salary cuts to be able to maintain my professor role…because teaching has given me about as much joy as anything in my life. Watching students learn, improve, and gain confidence is an amazing thing! But, last spring, for the first time in three decades—since I first imagined emulating my favorite high school teachers—I realized I have no compulsion to ever be in front of a classroom ever again.
The morning after I realized the joy had gone out of my work, I saw a news article about suicides among 50-something men in the US going up by 50%. And I understood.
I now comprehend how others who have lost their passion for their jobs might lose their passion for life at the same time. If I had always defined myself and my worth by my teaching profession, the realization that teaching is no longer offering me any joy came as an awful discovery.
Fortunately, I am not on the verge of sharpening straight razors and filling bathtubs. My whole life, I’ve been a bit of a…a…and I’m going to make up a word here: a polyopus. In other words, I’ve always had multiple jobs at any given time. Though I’m giving up on teaching, I’m not giving up on life. I still love writing and advisory work—I’m sure I’ll continue those.
Still, leaving the classroom is heartbreaking; teaching has always been a big part of my life. As an adjunct, visiting, or full professor, I’ve taught in more than a dozen business schools around the world—all these job comings and goings because of one event twenty-five years ago.
So where did the joy go?
I think it went where the joy of work goes for many people of my age. It wasn’t just one thing; it was an accumulation. Perhaps the work itself—if it could be done in a vacuum—would continue to be attractive and even fun. But organizations, bosses, and coworkers impinge in ways that subtract more and more from the joyful (or good) parts until there is none left. I think there’s also less resilience toward all those interferences as I age. In the process, joy eventually became a casualty.
It’s important to note two things: 1) I am one of the lucky teachers working in higher education where I could exercise a lot of autonomy compared to teachers in primary and secondary schools; and 2) that none of the interventions in the stories above had much to do with my real job of preparing young people to be leaders of tomorrow’s organizations. But today’s organizations get in the way—impeding, what I believe is, my pretty damn hallowed calling of being a teacher. My obligation is to impart to students all the most important things that I’ve ever learned in my life—then challenge them to be better and smarter than I ever hoped to be.
Wealth by degrees The returns to investing in a university education vary enormously
IS A university degree a good investment? Many potential students are asking the question, especially in countries where the price of a degree is rising, as a result of falling government subsidies. Recent research suggests that the conventional wisdom remains true: a university degree pays handsomely. In America and the euro zone, for example, unemployment rates for graduates are far below average. Yet the benefit of university varies greatly among students, making an investment in higher education a risky bet in some circumstances.
The value of a degree, like so much else in economics, boils down to supply and demand. The gap between average pay for university graduates and those with secondary-school degrees is commonly called the “college wage premium”. When firms are hungry for skilled workers their demand for university graduates grows, and the premium tends to rise. When the supply of graduates grows faster than that of less-educated workers, in contrast, the premium will stabilise or fall.
The Rise Of The A**hole Sports Dad (And How To Avoid Turning Into One)
Children, in general, suck at sports. And as a parent, watching them suck evokes all kinds of emotions—fierce protectiveness, embarrassment, self-loathing (Oh God, I gave them those genes)—which many of us have difficulty handling. My kid played second-grade basketball this winter, and when she failed to make a shot the entire season, it took everything in my power not to storm the court, clear out an area around the basket with police tape, and let her shoot until she got the fucking thing in.
Being a sports parent is a remarkable test of self-restraint. We’re so used to being sports fans and watching pro and college sports played at a high level that it’s jarring to witness children flail as they learn the idea of sports: competing, knowing the rules, positioning yourself to make a play, etc. This is assuming your child even wants to learn. Half the time, my kid stood at midcourt chatting with friends, only to have the ref come up and say, “Hey, guys, you have to actually play now.” And this is before you factor in all the other parents and coaches acting like dicks and raising your blood pressure even more.
That’s when the yelling begins. That’s when you go from silently clapping to breaking the ice with a “Get back on D, son!” to going Full Pitino. That crazy dad next to you, drenching everyone in frothed spittle? He was you once. And if you aren’t careful, you could become him. Here’s how to keep that from happening.
1. Only the coach gets to coach. He (or she) is the one who volunteered his time for the gig. He’s the one who planned the practices and coordinated the schedule and reserved court time at the nearby Sportsthunderplex. He’s the one who drags that big-ass mesh bag filled with balls from his car every weekend. If you’re not willing to make that sacrifice, you don’t get to show up on game day and act like you’re Nick Saban.
2. Don’t get too jealous of that one good kid on the field. Every kiddie game features at least one child who is a genetically superior mutant sent from the future. She can make shots. She plays tight defense. She runs fast. She never gets distracted by shiny whistles. This mini Bron-Bron will NEVER be your kid. Your kid will look like an invalid by comparison, and that is (deep breath) okay. At this level, every sports league is an experiment. Some kids get the hang of it right away. Some kids are late bloomers. And some kids want practice to end so they can go watch Frozen for the sixtieth time. So don’t get discouraged when a ringer comes along. Chances are that kid will burn out and become an alkie by 17, and you’ll have the last laugh!
How a Russian mathematician constructed a decision tree – by hand – to solve a medical problem
Here’s an excerpt from Love and Math, a book by Edward Frenkel. The author writes about mathematics and his career. One of the stories is about how during his studies in the 80s he built a decision tree to help with kidney transplants. There was no machine to learn from data so humans had to do the work.
The third, and last, medical project I worked on was the most interesting one for me. A young doctor, Sergei Arutyunyan – who also needed help to analyze his data for a thesis – and I had a great rapport. He was working with patients whose immune systems were rejecting transplanted kidneys. In such situation the doctor has to make a quick decision whether to fight for the kidney or remove it, with far-reaching consequences: if they kept the kidney, the patient could die, but if they removed it, the patient would need another one, which would be very difficult to find.
Creative destruction: A cost crisis, changing labour markets and new technology will turn an old institution on its head
HIGHER education is one of the great successes of the welfare state. What was once the privilege of a few has become a middle-class entitlement, thanks mainly to government support. Some 3.5m Americans and 5m Europeans will graduate this summer. In the emerging world universities are booming: China has added nearly 30m places in 20 years. Yet the business has changed little since Aristotle taught at the Athenian Lyceum: young students still gather at an appointed time and place to listen to the wisdom of scholars.
Now a revolution has begun (see article), thanks to three forces: rising costs, changing demand and disruptive technology. The result will be the reinvention of the university.
Off campus, online
Higher education suffers from Baumol’s disease—the tendency of costs to soar in labour-intensive sectors with stagnant productivity. Whereas the prices of cars, computers and much else have fallen dramatically, universities, protected by public-sector funding and the premium employers place on degrees, have been able to charge ever more for the same service. For two decades the cost of going to college in America has risen by 1.6 percentage points more than inflation every year.
Michigan spends $1B on charter schools but fails to hold them accountable
Michigan taxpayers pour nearly $1 billion a year into charter schools — but state laws regulating charters are among the nation’s weakest, and the state demands little accountability in how taxpayer dollars are spent and how well children are educated.
A yearlong investigation by the Detroit Free Press reveals that Michigan’s lax oversight has enabled a range of abuses in a system now responsible for more than 140,000 Michigan children. That figure is growing as more parents try charter schools as an alternative to traditional districts.
In reviewing two decades of charter school records, the Free Press found:
Are all publicly funded schools held to the same oversight standards?
California voters reject tenure, layoff rules for public school teachers
The PACE/USC Rossier School of Education Poll showed that two-thirds of voters (68 percent) agree that the state should do away with “Last In, First Out,” a policy that requires the newest K-12 teachers be laid off first, regardless of merit. Just 17 percent said California should continue to conduct teacher layoffs in order of seniority, according to the poll. PACE stands for Policy Analysis for California Education.
California voters also largely opposed the state’s tenure laws for public school teachers, according to the poll. Six in 10 California voters said teachers should not continue to receive tenure, as it makes firing bad teachers difficult. Twenty-five percent of voters said the state should keep tenure for public school teachers to provide them job protections and the freedom to teach potentially controversial topics without fear of reprisals.
One-time Jindal ally blasts Common Core move
A longtime ally of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is accusing the governor of violating the civil rights of poor children with his abrupt decision last week to renounce the Common Core academic standards.
State Superintendent John White has previously said the governor had no authority to scrap the Common Core or to pull out of a federally funded consortium that has been developing new reading, writing and math tests aligned to the academic standards.
On Wednesday, he ramped up his rhetoric considerably, telling POLITICO in an interview that Jindal is breaking the law, trampling the state constitution — and crushing the dreams of low-income minority students.
What The $1+ Trillion Student Debt Bubble Is Being Spent On
By now everyone knows there is an unprecedented student debt bubble, amounting to well over $1 trillion and rising at a rate of nearly $200 billion per year. However, what is far less known, is what all these hundreds of billions in government loan proceeds are being spent on. The following two charts should shed some light on this all important matter just how Government money goes from Point A to Point B, using indebted to the hilt students as a pass-thru.
First, the change in the number of higher education employees since the mid-1970s, broken down by job category. One can almost see why preserving the status quo of the Keynesian religion is the lifetime goal of most professors.
And then, the change in average salaries across the higher education spectrum. It would appear the only thing Krugman would want more than being a tenured op-ed writer, pardon professor, is CEO of a private college.
Obama alums join anti teachers union case
Teachers unions are girding for a tough fight to defend tenure laws against a coming blitz of lawsuits — and an all-out public relations campaign led by former aides to President Barack Obama.
The Incite Agency, founded by former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and former Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt, will lead a national public relations drive to support a series of lawsuits aimed at challenging tenure, seniority and other job protections that teachers unions have defended ferociously. LaBolt and another former Obama aide, Jon Jones — the first digital strategist of the 2008 campaign — will take the lead in the public relations initiative.
The involvement of such high-profile Obama alumni highlights the sharp schism within the Democratic Party over education reform.
Teachers unions have long counted on Democrats as their most loyal allies. But in the past decade, more and more big-name Democrats have split with the unions to support charter schools, tenure reform and accountability measures that hold teachers responsible for raising students’ scores on standardized tests.
The national legal campaign is being organized by Campbell Brown, a former CNN anchor who told POLITICO that she has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent months to get the effort off the ground. She intends to start with a lawsuit in New York, to be filed within the next few weeks, and follow up with similar cases around the country. Her plans for the New York lawsuit were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
eBooks vs Paper
Choosing books to take on holiday has got more difficult in recent years. Now it is a question not just of what to read but how – on paper, tablet, e-reader, or perhaps even a phone – and people have strong opinions on which is best. But is there any more to the decision than cost and convenience? On this question, the answer suggested by numerous studies into the neuroscience and psychology of reading in different formats is an emphatic yes.
There is no shortage of people warning of the risks attendant on the rise of “screen culture”, as the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield calls it. Greenfield has repeatedly expressed concern that, as technology takes us into unknown territory, “the brain may be adapting in unprecedented ways”. Though she tends to stress that these changes might be good or bad, that hasn’t stopped her more negative speculations being picked up in the media and amplified in far more strident terms.
On the other side of the two cultures divide, the novelist and critic Will Self recently argued that the connectivity of the digital world was fatal for the serious novel, which requires all the reader’s attention. Looking ahead 20 years, he posed a question: “If you accept that by then the vast majority of text will be read in digital form on devices linked to the web, do you also believe that those readers will voluntarily choose to disable that connectivity? If your answer to this is no, then the death of the novel is sealed out of your own mouth.”
E-reading is certainly on the rise. The Pew Research Center reports that, as recently as 2010, hardly anyone in the US had an e-reader or tablet. Now half do. The proportion of the population who have read an ebook in the past year rose from 17 per cent in 2011 to 28 per cent just three years later. In the UK, figures from Nielsen, which monitors book sales, showed that one in four consumer titles bought in 2013 was an ebook, up from one in five a year earlier.
Surprising Findings on Two-Year vs. Four-Year Degrees Return on Investment Holds Steady at About 15% for Recent Graduates
A college degree is worth it even as the cost of going to school rapidly escalates and real wages decline for graduates, WSJ’s Mark Peters reports on Lunch Break with Tanya Rivero. Photo: Getty
Who earns more, a recent graduate from a flagship state university with a bachelor’s degree or one who finishes a two-year program at a little-known community college?
The answer isn’t so clear.
As states for the first time mine graduates’ salary data from public colleges, they are finding that paychecks for holders of associate degrees in a technical field are outstripping many grads with four-year degrees, at least early in a career.
The growing body of data, from states including Texas, Colorado and Indiana, provides a sober new look at the value of a postsecondary education in a slowly recovering economy.
Overall, the findings reinforce the belief that a college degree is worth the investment. But they highlight the reconsideration of a long-held article of faith that a four-year college degree guarantees at least a middle-class life, while an associate degree is its poor country cousin.
In Indiana, figures show that after a year in the workforce there, a graduate of Ivy Tech Community College makes more on average than a graduate of Indiana University.
Teachers’ Job Security More Important than Kids’ Futures?
Having organized a labor union at a Boston candy store when I was 15, during the Depression — where students worked nights and weekends for 35 cents an hour — I am not anti-labor union. Threatening a strike as Christmas business neared, we won our 50 cents an hour.
But in recent years, as a reporter on education, I have found teachers’ unions bullishly and contractually protective of their members’ jobs, most commonly at the expense of low-income and minority students.
For one example, “The dismissal process for grossly ineffective teachers in California is so complex and costly that it does not work; many districts do not even bother trying” (“A historic victory for America’s kids,” Campbell Brown, New York Daily News, June 11).
The “historic victory” was in Vergara v. California, a case brought by nine student plaintiffs, decided on June 10 (“Historic Victory for Students in Vergara v. California: Court Strikes Down Five Provisions of the California Education Code as Unconstitutional,” studentsmatter.org/victory).
This decision, from Judge Rolf M. Treu of the California Superior Court for the County of Los Angeles, is not final. He had to order a stay pending an appeal — inevitable in this case.
Nonetheless, as news of this potentially huge setback for other states’ teachers’ unions spreads, many parents of public school students are organizing to bring this life-changing equal-protection reform to their children.
Do the Benefits of College Still Outweigh the Costs?
Jaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz:
In recent years, students have been paying more to attend college and earning less upon graduation—trends that have led many observers to question whether a college education remains a good investment. However, an analysis of the economic returns to college since the 1970s demonstrates that the benefits of both a bachelor’s degree and an associate’s degree still tend to outweigh the costs, with both degrees earning a return of about 15 percent over the past decade. The return has remained high in spite of rising tuition and falling earnings because the wages of those without a college degree have also been falling, keeping the college wage premium near an all-time high while reducing the opportunity cost of going to school.
Locked up in America
The Reality of Student Debt Is Different From the Clichés
The deeply indebted college graduate has become a stock character in the national conversation: the art history major with $50,000 in debt, the underemployed barista with $75,000, the struggling poet with $100,000.
The anecdotes have created the impression that such high levels of student debt are typical. But they’re not. They are outliers, and they’re warping our understanding of bigger economic problems.
In fact, the share of income that young adults are devoting to loan repayment has remained fairly steady over the last two decades, according to data the Brookings Institutions is releasing on Tuesday. Only 7 percent of young-adult households with education debt have $50,000 or more of it. By contrast, 58 percent of such households have less than $10,000 in debt, and an additional 18 percent have between $10,000 and $20,000.
Changing Fertility Regimes and the Transition to Adulthood: Evidence from a Recent Cohort.
Andrew J. Cherlin Elizabeth Talbert and Suzumi Yasutake:
Recent demographic trends have produced a distinctive fertility regime among young women and men in their teenage years and their twenties — a period sometimes called early adulthood. Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort, show that by the time the cohort had reached ages 26-31 in 2011, 81% of births reported by women and 87% of births reported by men had occurred to non-college graduates. In addition, 57% of births had occurred outside of marriage for both men and women. Moreover, 64% of women (and 63% of men) who reported a birth had at least one child outside of marriage, a figure that rose to 74% among women (and 70% among men) without 4-year college degrees. It is now unusual for non- college-graduates who have children in their teens and twenties to have all of them within marriage. The implications of these developments are discussed in light of the differing transitions to adulthood of non-college-graduates versus college-graduates and the growing social class inequalities in family patterns.
Trial Balloon on Raising Madison’s Property Taxes via another School Referendum? Homeowners compare communities…..
There’s been little movement since mid-March when Madison School District Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham proposed asking voters in November for $39.5 million in borrowing to upgrade facilities and address crowding.
The proposed referendum’s annual impact on property taxes on a $200,000 Madison home could range from $32 to $44, according to the district.
After discussing the idea, School Board members said that the always contentious idea of changes to school boundaries would at least have to be publicly vetted as a possible solution to crowding before moving forward with a referendum. There have not been any public discussions on the matter since.
Spending and accounting problems with the last maintenance referendum (2005) lead to a discussion of an audit.
I recently met a young “Epic” husband and wife who are moving from their Madison townhouse to the Middleton/Cross Plains area. I asked them what prompted the move? “Costs and taxes per square foot are quite a bit less” as they begin planning a family. See “Where have all the students gone“.
Their attention to detail is unsurprising, particularly with so many young people supporting enormous student loans.
Madison spends double the national average per student. I hope that District seeks more efficient use of it’s $402,464,374 2014-2015 budget before raising property taxes.
Dive deeper into the charts, here.
The five trillion dollar question
And if the “doubling” part may seem a little ambitious, remember this. If every class in every school in every country that participates in PISA could get even close to the highest performing comparable ones, you would comfortably achieve that goal of doubling learning outcomes.
This is the challenge: how can we help to replicate educational excellence at scale? And, in doing so, what’s the balance to be struck, to use the language of the moment, between sustaining and disruptive innovation?
Take one of the world’s best known education institutions, Harvard Business School, as an example. It is grappling with its biggest strategic decision in 90 years: should it move online, and risk devaluing its on-campus education? Or stand apart and risk being left behind?
This absolute juxtaposition of “sustaining innovation” versus “disruption” is, I would argue, a false dichotomy that we can add to the long list that already bedevil the world of education: teachers versus technology, knowledge versus skills, outcomes versus process, to name a few.
At Pearson, when we ask ourselves how we can help to achieve that goal of doubling the amount of really high value learning, we think about four things.
Mapping the New Jersey High School Class of 2013
It’s graduation season in New Jersey’s nearly 400 public and charter high schools and, if last year’s trend holds true this June, about 93,000 seniors will have received diplomas by the end of the month — according to the state Department of Education.
In 2013, New Jersey’s graduation rate was 87.5 percent. The state likely won’t release the exact numbers of graduates until the fall, but odds are that greater percentages of Asian and white students finished high school than Hispanic or blacks. And students from wealthier communities, regardless of race or ethnicity, were more likely to get a diploma than those from low-income households.
Earlier this year, America’s Promise Alliance, founded by former Gen. Colin Powell to improve the lives of young people, released a report showing that low-income students graduate at much lower rates than the typical student. It reported that in 2011-2012 in New Jersey, 75 percent of low-income students graduated, while 90 percent of students at mid- and upper-income levels finished high school.
“Far too many young people still do not earn a high school diploma, and the number of non-graduates remains alarmingly high among young people of color and those from low-income communities,” wrote Powell and his wife Alma in a letter opening the 2014 report Building a Grad Nation released by America’s Promise Alliance in conjunction with several other groups. “In other words, a young person’s chances for success still depend too much on his or her zip code and skin color and too little on his or her abilities and effort.”
Via Laura Waters.
What elite universities can learn from high fashion
Harvard Business School is launching an online program today. And , no, you’re not going to be able to get your MBA for free.
The school is rolling out something it calls HBX Core. For $1,500, students take three basic business classes. The program is being billed as a pre-MBA.
And it’s the latest attempt by an elite university to open up classes to more people—without diluting its brand. It’s a trick the fashion industry has gotten very good at over the years.
You may not remember French designer Pierre Cardin. But in the ’60s and ’70s, his name was synonymous with very high fashion. Models in Vogue posed in his futuristic dresses. He dressed The Beatles.
These days, you can walk into Sears and find Pierre Cardin men’s shirts stacked on a table. Poly-cotton blends; marked down to $17.99.
You see, Cardin’s haute- couture was not his only claim to fame. He was also the first high-end designer to expand his brand to the masses. Over the years, he put his name on everything, from baseball caps to toilet-seat covers.
“He took a very powerful, designer, marquee brand and diluted it to the point it had no value and no meaning,” said Mark Cohen, a professor of retail marketing at Columbia Business School.
A ‘Wimpy’ Plan to Save the Physical Book
Jeff Kinney, the man behind the astonishingly powerful Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, is leading the revolution.
That’s been the theory behind the bestselling author’s just-announced plans to open up an indie bookstore in tiny Plainville, Massachusetts. It’s been framed as a call-to-arms against Amazon in the wake of its strong-arming tactics in negotiating with the big five publishing houses, starting with (fellow giant) Hachette.
Take back the power, fight the system, and all that, right?
Wrong.
If Kinney’s stoking a counterculture, it’s to harken back to the past. In his Plainville shop, he imagines a cozy, well-worn space with old tomes and tea, frequented by locals and writerly souls. “A physical book has a heft, a permanence that you don’t get digitally,” says Kinney in an interview. “So our hope is that the bookstore will remain a vital, important part of communities across the country and the world.”
He’s not the only author to venture into the territory; others include the renowned Ann Patchett, who owns Parnassus Books in Nashville.
But they are few, notably because most published authors know the bottom line: increasingly slim profit margins and shuttered doors mark publishing’s recent history, with the closing of Borders, several branches of Barnes & Nobles, and smaller brick-and-mortar stores nationwide
Teachers’ Unions: Moment of Truth
War appears to be imminent. A California judge has ruled that tenure, seniority rights and other core provisions of the typical teachers’ contract are unconstitutional in the state, because they subvert students’ constitutional right to competent teachers. The teachers will, we presume, appeal. On the other side is a determined and very well funded coalition that sees an opportunity to critically weaken if not completely eviscerate the unions, not just in California, but nationally. In their eyes, the unions may be the single most important obstacle to real education reform.
The opponents have the inestimable advantage of being able to frame the issue. Traditionally, democrats and liberals have been dependably in the camp of the unions. But, in this case, as the judge pointed out, they have to choose between the unions and poor and minority children. Faced with that choice, they are bolting to the children, leaving the unions isolated.
This Is Your Brain on Writing
A novelist scrawling away in a notebook in seclusion may not seem to have much in common with an NBA player doing a reverse layup on a basketball court before a screaming crowd. But if you could peer inside their heads, you might see some striking similarities in how their brains were churning.
That’s one of the implications of new research on the neuroscience of creative writing. For the first time, neuroscientists have used fMRI scanners to track the brain activity of both experienced and novice writers as they sat down — or, in this case, lay down — to turn out a piece of fiction.
The researchers, led by Martin Lotze of the University of Greifswald in Germany, observed a broad network of regions in the brain working together as people produced their stories. But there were notable differences between the two groups of subjects. The inner workings of the professionally trained writers in the bunch, the scientists argue, showed some similarities to people who are skilled at other complex actions, like music or sports.
China: Students Use High Tech ‘James Bond’ Spy Devices to Cheat in College Exams
Nearly 10 million high school students sat China’s national college entrance exams last weekend. The ‘Gaokao‘ is a fiercely competitive, make-or-break test that determines the path of a student’s life. Some tried to improve their chances by using high-tech equipment straight out of a James Bond film.
Police have released photos of some of the devices they confiscated, such as a camera hidden in a pair of glasses and a tiny receiver that looks like a coin.
A hidden coil in a shirt, two batteries, a mobile phone and a receiver are displayed after being found on a student about to take an exam, in Chengdu, Sichuan province, China.Reuters
Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone paying tuition should care.
When Mary Margaret Vojtko died last September—penniless and virtually homeless and eighty-three years old, having been referred to Adult Protective Services because the effects of living in poverty made it seem to some that she was incapable of caring for herself—it made the news because she was a professor. That a French professor of twenty-five years would be let go from her job without retirement benefits, without even severance, sounded like some tragic mistake. In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette op-ed that broke the story, Vojtko’s friend and attorney Daniel Kovalik describes an exchange he had with a caseworker from Adult Protective Services: “The caseworker paused and asked with incredulity, ‘She was a professor?’ I said yes. The caseworker was shocked; this was not the usual type of person for whom she was called in to help.” A professor belongs to the professional class, a professor earns a salary and owns a home, probably with a leafy yard, and has good health insurance and a retirement account. In the American imagination, a professor is perhaps disheveled, but as a product of brainy eccentricity, not of penury. In the American university, this is not the case.
Most university-level instructors are, like Vojtko, contingent employees, working on a contract basis year to year or semester to semester. Some of these contingent employees are full-time lecturers, and many are adjunct instructors: part-time employees, paid per class, often without health insurance or retirement benefits. This is a relatively new phenomenon: in 1969, 78 percent of professors held tenure-track positions. By 2009 this percentage had shrunk to 33.5. The rest of the professors holding jobs—whether part time or full time—do so without any job security. These are the conditions that left Vojtko in such a vulnerable position after twenty-five years at Duquesne University. Vojtko was earning between $3,000 and $3,500 per three-credit course. During years when she taught three courses per semester, and an additional two over the summer, she made less than $25,000, and received no health benefits through her employer. Though many universities limit the number of hours that adjunct professors can work each semester, keeping them nominally “part-time” employees, teaching three three-credit courses is certainly a full-time job. These circumstances are now the norm for university instructors, as the number of tenured and tenure-track positions shrinks and the ranks of contingent laborers swell.
Google Sells Parent Status to Advertisers
If you’ve ever read “What to Expect When You’re Expecting”, you probably didn’t notice a chapter about Google tracking your parental status in AdWords. Well, this is exactly what Google is doing, as Parental Status is now a demographic subset that advertisers can explicitly target.
This feature went live within the past 12 hours or so, and Google has yet to make an official announcement. However, we’ve already seen it in action, as you can see in the following figure:
Note that many schools, including Madison, use google email and other services.
Unblinking Eyes Track Employees
A digital Big Brother is coming to work, for better or worse.
Advanced technological tools are beginning to make it possible to measure and monitor employees as never before, with the promise of fundamentally changing how we work — along with raising concerns about privacy and the specter of unchecked surveillance in the workplace.
Through these new means, companies have found, for example, that workers are more productive if they have more social interaction. So a bank’s call center introduced a shared 15-minute coffee break, and a pharmaceutical company replaced coffee makers used by a few marketing workers with a larger cafe area. The result? Increased sales and less turnover.
Somewhat related: TeacherMatch.
New, New Inner City Fatherhood
When 15-year old Andre Green found out that his ex-girlfriend, Sonya, was pregnant with his child, he was living with six members of his extended family in a small row house in Camden, New Jersey. His mother was a drug addict. His father, in Andre’s words, was a “dog” who had never even told Andre that he had several half-brothers kicking around the neighborhood. (The boy found out gradually, when he noticed similar-looking children in school and at the supermarket, and asked them who their father was.) Yet despite his poverty, lack of parental support, and the fact that his romantic relationship with Sonya had ended, Andre was excited—even thrilled—to become a father.
“I was like, “Yes! Thank you, Jesus!” he told sociologists Kathryn Edin and Timothy Nelson. Indeed, within several months of his daughter’s birth, Andre had dropped out of school to become Jalissa’s primary caregiver. He took great pride in keeping her well fed, nicely dressed, and even taking her to church. There, despite his youth and joblessness, Andre was celebrated as a devoted dad. “People say, ‘Oh Andre, you’re doing a beautiful job,’” he told the researchers. “They’re like, ‘Andre, I’m very proud of you.’”
Self-Delusion Spreads from Professional to Graduate Education; Consternation Curiously Absent
I want to be clear at the outset: I love literature. I was an English major, and I’ve never regretted it for a moment. I seriously considered pursuing a Ph.D. in English. I could not have a deeper faith in the liberal arts as a path to the betterment of all mankind.
So imagine my dismay at some recent reportage in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Graduate programs in languages and literature are suffering troubles all too familiar to the readers of these pages: In these straitened times, the tenure-track academic appointments for which a doctoral degree is the traditional and necessary preparation are available for only about 60% of the recipients of doctorates in language or literature (a number chillingly reminiscent of the 56%-57% of the last two law-school graduating classes who managed to find a full-time, long-term job requiring a law license within 9-10 months of graduation, though when you exclude school-funded and self-employed positions as well as a few other confounders and irrelevancies, that number is closer to 53%). The Modern Language Association (a trade group for college and graduate educators and scholars in language and literature analogous to AALS) recently released a report conceding “[w]e are faced with an unsustainable reality.”
Chess Site Now Accessible to Visually Impaired People
Thanks to recent improvements, it is really easy to start playing chess games through Lichess using screenreader. The first thing you need to do is to press “Enable blind mode” button, which should be one of first elements you encounter on the site. It is not really possible to play games without blind mode turned on.
If blind mode is on, you are offered textual description of moves and you are presented with labelled buttons. Now it is really easy – pick a player or just choose to play against computer and fun begins. During the game there is a heading called “Textual representation” and following this heading are following information:
Why Free Play Is the Best Summer School
Most schools across the nation have marked the end of another academic year, and it’s time for summer. Time for kids to bolt for the schoolhouse doors for two long months of play, to explore their neighborhoods and discover the mysteries, treasures, and dramas they have to offer. This childhood idyll will hold true for some children, but for many kids, the coming of summer signals little more than a seasonal shift from one set of scheduled, adult-supervised lessons and activities to another.
Unscheduled, unsupervised, playtime is one of the most valuable educational opportunities we give our children. It is fertile ground; the place where children strengthen social bonds, build emotional maturity, develop cognitive skills, and shore up their physical health. The value of free play, daydreaming, risk-taking, and independent discovery have been much in the news this year, and a new study by psychologists at the University of Colorado reveals just how important these activities are in the development of children’s executive functioning.
Executive function is a broad term for cognitive skills such as organization, long-term planning, self-regulation, task initiation, and the ability to switch between activities. It is a vital part of school preparedness and has long been accepted as a powerful predictor of academic performance and other positive life outcomes such as health and wealth. The focus of this study is “self-directed executive function,” or the ability to generate personal goals and determine how to achieve them on a practical level. The power of self-direction is an underrated and invaluable skill that allows students to act productively in order to achieve their own goals.
The EdTech Failings of Silicon Valley
In the last three month period, EdTech attracted $690 million of venture capital, reaching $4 billion of total private investment for the year, up two thirds from the previous year and quadruple two years prior.
This was the trendline for EdTech venture capital investment at the end of 2000.
After the dotCom crash, it would be another decade until 2012 when EdTech would again draw in $1 billion of total private investment, repeating in 2013 and likely again in 2014, with nearly $600 million raised in Q1 2014 alone. The leanest post-Bubble years of 2002 – 2005 would see less than $100mm of annual venture capital inflow, with 2005′s haul perhaps just $50 million, a pathetic 3.5% CAGR from the $30 million of total private investment generated 15 years prior in 1990 at the industry’s dawn.
While the Internet Bubble and its burst were extreme events, the 1997-2001 period does present several interesting parallels with the current market, with capital flowing freely across all sectors (from K-12 through “MOOCs”) and a diverse range of investors, from mission aligned super angels including the co-founders of the leading technology companies (e.g., Microsoft, Oracle, Netscape, AOL), education funds like New Schools Venture Fund (founded then by Jim Barksdale and Steve Case) and the venture funds of ”Silicon Valley” (not to mention “Silicon Alley” and Boston) that are still leading the tech markets today (i.e., KPCB, Accel, Bessemer, Charles River Ventures, Warburg, Maveron, Sequoia, etc). Only the individual names involved differ from then: Paul Allen then and Bill Gates today; Jim Barksdale then and Marc Andreessen today; John Doerr then…and, well, John Doerr still again.
UW-Madison’s Julie Underwood says controversial teacher education rankings “don’t mean much”
“So whether the ratings are lackluster, or horrible, or great doesn’t mean much to me,” she said.
UW-Madison School of Education programs in secondary education were deemed to be in the bottom half nationwide and were not ranked.
Underwood is not the only educator skewering the NTCQ ratings released this week that discredit Wisconsin teacher training pretty much across the board, as charted in a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article.
The Wisconsin Association of Colleges for Teacher Education rejected the evaluations in a statement this week, calling Washington-based NCTQ “a private political advocacy organization” with no standing to review teacher preparation programs in Wisconsin.
“However well-intentioned NCTQ’s review process may be, it does not reflect good practice in program evaluation, is not sensitive to the particular needs of this state, and represents a politically-motivated intrusion into the state’s rights and responsibilities to oversee its education system and licensing practices,” the association concluded.
Underwood was less optimistic about the intentions of the ratings.
NCTQ.
Wisconsin takes a baby step toward teacher content knowledge requirements via MTEL elementary language standards.
LIFO keeps N.J. from true teacher tenure reform
Public school calendars may be winding down, but education rhetoric is heating up after a startling ruling last week in Los Angeles that, some pundits say, has national implications. In a case called Vergara v. California, nine Los Angeles public school students argued in County Superior Court that state tenure laws, which require schools to lay off teachers in order of seniority, had violated their constitutional rights by depriving them of effective teachers. Judge Rolf Treu ruled that the students were right.
But New Jerseyans who deplore seniority-based job security, also known as LIFO or “last in, first out,” shouldn’t get ahead of themselves. The Vergara ruling is important and will continue to inform discussions about improving America’s teacher quality and educational equity. But Los Angeles’ tenure laws are so far off the bell curve that they’re hardly a test case for the rest of the nation, even in the 11 states in the country that still adhere to the practice of seniority-based lay-offs.
But don’t underestimate the power of Judge Treu’s declaration that “evidence has been elicited in this trial of the specific effect of grossly ineffective teachers on students. The evidence is compelling. Indeed it shocks the conscience.”
Students with Special Needs Less Likely to Leave Charter Schools than Traditional Public Schools
Center for Reinventing Public Education, via a kind Deb Britt email:
CRPE commissioned Dr. Marcus Winters to analyze the factors driving the special education gap between Denver’s charter and traditional public elementary and middle schools.
Using student-level data, Winters shows that Denver’s special education enrollment gap starts at roughly 2 percentage points in kindergarten and is more than triple that in eighth grade. However, it doesn’t appear to be caused by charter schools pushing students out. Instead, the gap is mostly due to student preferences for different types of schools, how schools classify and declassify students, and the movement of students without disabilities across sectors.
Among the key findings:
Students with special needs are less likely to apply to charter schools in kindergarten and sixth grade: In the gateway grades, when students are most likely to choose schools, those with disabilities are significantly less likely to apply to charter schools than are students without disabilities. This difference explains the majority of the gap in middle school grades, particularly for certain categories of disability.The gap grows significantly between kindergarten and fifth grade: 46% of the growth occurs because charter schools are less likely to classify students as special education, and more likely to declassify them; 54% is due to the number of new general education students enrolling in charter schools, not from the number of students with special needs going down.
Students with special needs in charter schools change schools less often than those in traditional public schools: Five years after enrolling in kindergarten, about 65 percent of charter students with special needs are still in their original schools, while only 37 percent of traditional public school students with special needs are still in their original schools.
What the NJEA Is Not Telling Its Members
In the fight over getting New Jersey to make its pension contributions the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) is urging its members to contact their legislators to ‘uphold the law’ and offering a Q & A for NJEA members on “The New Jersey Pension Crisis” where they cover the pertinent Qs but their As are mostly wrong or deceptive. My suggestion for more accurate (and helpful) answers to the questions they pose:
How much does the state contribute to the pension system?Whatever they damn well please. There are no funding rules and contribution amounts are manufactured to politicians’ specifications. (nb: the NJEA in their answer left out completely any mention that the contributions also include an amortization of the shortfall which for a variety of reasons is the biggest chunk of those contributions).
Does the state always make its required contribution?
The state never makes its required contribution and even that required contribution is based on willfully deceptive assumptions.
What happens when the state skips payments or makes only partial payments?Nothing – to the state but your pensions will be summarily and arbitrarily reduced when the money runs out.
Why Boarding Schools Produce Bad Leaders
In Britain, the link between private boarding education and leadership is gold-plated. If their parents can afford it, children are sent away from home to walk a well-trodden path that leads straight from boarding school through Oxbridge to high office in institutions such as the judiciary, the army, the City and, especially, government. Our prime minister was only seven when he was sent away to board at Heatherdown preparatory school in Berkshire. Like so many of the men who hold leadership roles in Britain, he learned to adapt his young character to survive both the loss of his family and the demands of boarding school culture. The psychological impact of these formative experiences on Cameron and other boys who grow up to occupy positions of great power and responsibility cannot be overstated. It leaves them ill-prepared for relationships in the adult world and the nation with a cadre of leaders who perpetuate a culture of elitism, bullying and misogyny affecting the whole of society.
Nevertheless, this golden path is as sure today as it was 100 years ago, when men from such backgrounds led us into a disastrous war; it is familiar, sometimes mocked, but taken for granted. But it is less well known that costly, elite boarding consistently turns out people who appear much more competent than they actually are. They are particularly deficient in non-rational skills, such as those needed to sustain relationships, and are not, in fact, well-equipped to be leaders in today’s world
The Most Comprehensive Review of Comic Books Teaching Statistics
As I’m more or less an autodidact when it comes to statistics, I have a weak spot for books that try to introduce statistics in an accessible and pedagogical way. I have therefore collected what I believe are all books that introduces statistics using comics (at least those written in English). What follows are highly subjective reviews of those four books. If you know of any other comic book on statistics, please do tell me!
I’ll start with a tl;dr version of the reviews, but first here are the four books:
High-School Dropouts and College Grads Are Moving to Very Different Places
The ability to attract skilled workers is a key factor, if not the key factor, in the growth of cities and metro regions. Cities themselves are understandably keen to tout when their populations are growing, but just tracking overall population can mask the underlying trends that will truly shape the future of our metro areas.
A few weeks ago, I looked at the different places both recent immigrants and U.S.-born Americans are moving since the recession began. But, as I noted then, even these big-picture figures tell us little about the educational levels and skills of the people that are moving and staying. Writing in The Atlantic several years ago, I pointed out that the “means migration”—the movement of highly educated and highly skilled people—is a key factor that shapes which cities will thrive and which will struggle.
What the United States has been seeing is, so to speak, a big talent sort. There have been very different patterns of migration by education and skill, with the highly educated and highly skilled going some places and the less educated and less skilled going to others.
Michael Gove, school swot. The UK Tory education secretary stirs strong feelings. That is largely to his credit
Bagehot did not mean to write to the courteous IT consultant from Nashville, Tennessee, whose e-mail address he mistakenly saved to his phone. He was after another Michael Gove, the British education secretary, who hardly anyone would wish to be confused with just now.
This Mr Gove is one of the most disliked men in British politics—unfairly, in Bagehot’s view, and worryingly. For it is an indicator of how diminished is the radical centrism that David Cameron’s coalition government once promised and of which he is the last undaunted exponent.
The battering comes from all sides. The opposition Labour Party calls his effort to free schools from local-authority control a wrecking job. A senior Liberal Democrat, the coalition’s junior partner, calls Mr Gove an “ideologically obsessed zealot”—a phrase that denigrates him without quite dissociating the Lib Dems from reforms they helped pass. A petition calling for Mr Gove’s sacking has over 120,000 signatures, and more will be added. Hating Mr Gove unites not only the self-righteous teachers’ unions but also the legions of teaching assistants, caretakers, dinner ladies, lollipop men and parents—half of society, at least—who come under their influence. “It’s amazing how many people loathe him,” says a Tory high-up.
For Mr Gove and his small band of diehard supporters, the abuse is an unpleasant sort of vindication. It reflects how entrenched and widespread are the interests they are attacking: a complacent and self-serving education establishment, whose ill-deserved privileges Mr Gove has dedicated himself to removing. Besides liberating existing schools and allowing parents to launch new ones, he has accordingly pushed performance-based pay for teachers while shaking up exam boards, the curriculum and the schools inspectorate. In the process he has reversed a long demise in foreign language and science teaching, and brought many smaller changes besides. He has done so, moreover, while repeatedly demonstrating that he is not the high-handed elitist his critics describe. Mr Gove is a high-handed liberal, who sees good, state-provided education as a form of social justice. Having enjoyed a poor start in life—he was given up for adoption as the newborn baby of an unknown mother—he is messianic in his regard for education’s transformative power, especially among the poor.
Starbucks to Provide Free (online) College Education to Thousands of Workers
Starbucks will provide a free online college education to thousands of its workers, without requiring that they remain with the company, through an unusual arrangement with Arizona State University, the company and the university will announce on Monday.
The program is open to any of the company’s 135,000 United States employees, provided they work at least 20 hours a week and have the grades and test scores to gain admission to Arizona State. For a barista with at least two years of college credit, the company will pay full tuition; for those with fewer credits it will pay part of the cost, but even for many of them, courses will be free, with government and university aid.
“Starbucks is going where no other major corporation has gone,” said Jamie P. Merisotis, president and chief executive of the Lumina Foundation, a group focused on education. “For many of these Starbucks employees, an online university education is the only reasonable way they’re going to get a bachelor’s degree.”
Adults lying to them
A year or so ago, I was a guest lecturer in NYU’s Intro to Journalism class, 200 or so sophomores interested in adding journalism as a second major. (We don’t allow students to major in journalism alone, for the obvious reason.) One of the students had been dispatched to interview me in front of the class, and two or three questions in, she asked “So how do we save print?”
I was speechless for a moment, then exploded, telling her that print was in terminal decline and that everyone in the class needed to understand this if they were thinking of journalism as a major or a profession.
The students were shocked — for many of them, it was the first time anyone had talked to them that way. Even a prompt from me to predict the date of Time magazine’s demise elicited a small gasp. This was a room full of people would would rather lick asphalt than subscribe to a paper publication; what on earth would make them think print was anything other than a wasting asset?
And the answer is “Adults lying to them.” Our students were persuaded to discount their own experience in favor of what the grownups who cover the media industry were saying, and those grownups were saying that strategies like Kushner’s might just work.
People who ought to have known better, like Ryan Chittum at Columbia Journalism Review and Ken Doctor at Nieman, wrote puff pieces for Kushner, because they couldn’t bear to treat him like the snake-oil salesman he is.
Related: the human price of collectivism.
The Tuition Puzzle
This is the first of what will probably be several posts about the extraordinary increases in law school tuition over the past half century (In this as in so many other respects, law school is merely a particularly extreme version of something that has happened all across higher education in America).
First, some numbers:
Law School Transparency has done a nice job graphing what has happened to law school tuition since 1985, in both current and inflation-adjusted dollars. Private law school tuition has gone from just over $16K to just under $42K in 2013 dollars. Public resident tuition has gone up even more sharply, from $4,300 to $23,000, again in constant inflation-adjusted dollars.
These numbers are startling enough, but they obscure the extent to which by the mid-1980s tuition had already skyrocketed over the course of the previous 25 years. LST is using data the ABA posts on its web site, which only go back to 1985. Looking back to 1960, private law school tuition averaged around $7000 in 2013 dollars, while public law school tuition was perhaps a third of that, i.e., essentially nominal (These estimates are based on Harvard’s and Michigan’s law school tuition at the time. They assume that tuition at HLS was around 20% higher than at the average private law school, which has been the norm over the past three decades, and that Michigan’s resident tuition was typical of state law school resident tuition. If anything this latter estimate probably overstates public law school resident tuition in the 1960s).
This is, in the context of normal economic activity, a remarkable situation. People often speak these days of a “tuition bubble,” but a classic price bubble involves a sharp short-term run-up in prices, followed by an even more sudden collapse when the bubble bursts. For example, the US housing market was relatively stable between 1970 and 2000, with median home prices staying between $150,000 and $180,000 in real terms. The housing bubble featured a five-year run up, during which the median price rose by nearly 70%, before falling back to pre-bubble levels just three years after the peak.
Greased palms and dried fruit
OBESITY, according to a government-sponsored report, could make the current generation of Americans the first in history to live shorter lives than the previous one. A major change in food habits is needed to reverse the trend of widening waistlines (a development which we recently illustrated on our blog Graphic detail). Recognising that people’s dietary preferences develop at an early age, John List of the University of Chicago and Anya Savikhin Samek of the University of Wisconsin-Madison examined in a recent study whether children can be “nudged” (or incentivised) to eat more fruits and less sweets. Their results suggest that the answer is yes.
In a field experiment carried out in Chicago over several weeks, Mr List and Ms Savikhin Samek tested the impact of giving kids an incentive to choose food they normally would not. During after-school programmes dubbed “Kids’ Cafes” in 24 different locations across the city, children aged 6-18 were offered a free snack and could select either a cup with dried fruit (dried banana with acai or dried mango) or a cookie (such as snickerdoodle or chocolate chip). A group of the Kids’ Cafes was randomly selected to offer the children at their particular site an incentive to pick the cup; each time an individual chose the dried fruit over the cookie and ate it in the cafeteria, he or she would receive a small prize worth 50 cents or less (for example a wristband, pen or keychain).
In Defense of Laptops in the Classroom
Years later, as a professor, I feel embarrassed by that interaction, and not just because I lost my cool and used the F-word to a U-grad. The laptop is now endemic in the modern classroom, with most students using them—purportedly—to take notes and access course materials. Of course, they’re also (often primarily) used to do anything but classwork: games, Snapchat, shopping—even porn. Thus many professors police the ways students use their laptops, and some are banning them outright. But what good does that do? The Laptop Police just seems like one more way of helicoptering students instead of letting them learn how to be students—indeed, how to be adults.
The case for a laptop-free classroom is indeed strong. Last week on The New Yorker’s website, Dartmouth professor Dan Rockmore wrote that he’s banned laptops for years, explaining that “any advantage that might be gained by having a machine at the ready, or available for the primary goal of taking notes, was negligible at best” for his curriculum. What surprised him, though, was that most of his computer science department agreed. No computers in a CompSci class! But, Rockmore argued, research—such as Cornell’s 2003 landmark study “The Laptop and the Lecture” and recent studies out of UCLA and Princeton—shows over and over that students simply learn better when taking notes in old-fashioned chicken scratches.
Want better schools America? Make it harder to become a teacher.
So far this month in education news, a California court has decimated rigid job protections for teachers, and Oklahoma’s governor has abolished the most rigorous learning standards that state has ever had. Back and forth we go in America’s exhausting tug-of-war over schools—local versus federal control, union versus management, us versus them.
But something else is happening, too. Something that hasn’t made many headlines but has the potential to finally revolutionize education in ways these nasty feuds never will.
In a handful of statehouses and universities across the country, a few farsighted Americans are finally pursuing what the world’s smartest countries have found to be the most efficient education reform ever tried. They are making it harder to become a teacher. Ever so slowly, these legislators and educators are beginning to treat the preparation of teachers the way we treat the training of surgeons and pilots—rendering it dramatically more selective, practical, and rigorous. All of which could transform not only the quality of teaching in America but the way the rest of us think about school and learning.
Over the past two years, according to a report out Tuesday from the National Council on Teacher Quality, 33 states have passed meaningful new oversight laws or regulations to elevate teacher education in ways that are much harder for universities to game or ignore. The report, which ranks 836 education colleges, found that only 13 percent made its list of top-ranked programs. But “a number of programs worked hard and at lightning speed” to improve. Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas now have the most top-ranked programs. This summer, meanwhile, the Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation is finalizing new standards, which Education Week called“leaner, more specific and more outcomes-focused than any prior set in the 60-year history of national teacher-college accreditation.”
