schoolinfosystem.org
Aaron Renn: This is an absolute blowout, with a massive amount of red on the map showing areas to which Chicago is actually losing young adults. Honestly, this only makes sense given the well known headline negative domestic migration numbers for Chicago. I do find it interesting that there’s a strong draw from Michigan. Clearly […]
Andrada Fiscutean: Students who want to dodge the tens of thousands of euros in fees and living expenses that come with getting a degree in IT might want to consider Romania. Landing a good job in technology often means spending several years at university, and racking up a huge bill. However, there are ways to […]
Barry Garelick, via a kind email: Back in September, when I was doing my sub-assignment for the high school, I attended a math department meeting the day before school began. Sally from the District office presided, and among the many things she told us at that session was that this year the students in the […]
Kevin Roose interviews Wisconsin native Marc Andreesen: But let’s just project forward. In ten years, what if we had Math 101 online, and what if it was well regarded and you got fully accredited and certified? What if we knew that we were going to have a million students per semester? And what if we […]
Laura Waters: Last Thursday, the New Jersey Senate Education Committee heard testimony on Sen. Teresa Ruiz’s new charter school bill. One of the lobbyists there was New Jersey Education Association President Wendell Steinhauer and as he approached the podium you couldn’t help but feel sorry for the guy. This well-spoken and diplomatic head of NJ’s […]
Davud Edwards: Are Americans getting dumber? Our math skills are falling. Our reading skills are weakening. Our children have become less literate than children in many developed countries. But the crisis in American education may be more than a matter of sliding rankings on world educational performance scales. Our kids learn within a system of […]
Marketplace: Illinois based-Paragon Marketing Group is working on a deal to bring high school football to a national audience. The group – which brought LeBron James’s high school basketball games to TV – is currently in negotiations with several states and ESPN to bring some type of high school football playoff to television. ESPN wouldn’t […]
Dave Girard: Last November, my father took his own life. I’m frequently aware of the fact that the depression which helped drive him to that dark fate lives on in my genes. That’s a doozy of a legacy to inherit, but it’s one that has not been wholly negative for me. Getting to the point […]
Beth Akers: In response to growing concerns over the issue of higher education finance, policy makers, advocates, and entrepreneurs have developed and proposed an array of solutions to address the shortcomings of our current system. Income Share Agreements (ISAs) are one such proposal that deserves more attention. ISAs allow students to raise funds to pay […]
Via a kind Will Fitzhugh email: The Concord Review Academic Coaching Service, founded in 2014, provides individual online guidance for students worldwide in writing high-caliber history and social-science research papers of around 6,000 words or more. Our service provides the necessary support for high school students who are able to and interested in going academically […]
Matthew M. Chingos, Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst & Katharine M. Lindquist: Superintendents are highly visible actors in the American education system. As the highest ranking official in a school district, the superintendent receives a lot of credit when things go well, and just as much blame when they don’t. But should they? Research emerging over […]
Pamela Druckerman: I recently spent the afternoon with some Norwegians who are making a documentary about French child-rearing. Why would people in one of the world’s most successful countries care how anyone else raises kids? In Norway “we have brats, child kings, and many of us suffer from hyper-parenting. We’re spoiling them,” explained the producer, […]
Ilya Somin: On several important issues, majority opinion has actually flipped over the last forty years, shifting from a majority in favor of federal dominance to a majority against it. For example, the percentage of Americans who believe that state or local government should make the major decisions on drug policy has increased from 39% […]
Sonali Kohli: Princeton University faculty voted to end their practice of grade deflation, bowing to concerns that it creates a negative campus atmosphere and can be a turnoff for applicants to the school. For the past 10 years, each department had been asked to give A’s to no more than 35% of course work—the intent […]
Motoko Rich: Monica DeSantiago wondered how in the world she would get the students to respect her. It was the beginning of her yearlong apprenticeship as a math teacher at Berkley Maynard Academy, a charter school in this diverse city east of San Francisco. The petite, soft-spoken Ms. DeSantiago, 23, had heard the incoming sixth […]
Jeffrey Blitz: One Saturday afternoon last month, six second graders from P.S. 295 in Brooklyn got a head start on the fine-dining life when they visited the acclaimed French restaurant Daniel. There, five waiters presented them with a seven-course tasting menu (after the trio of canapés and an amuse-bouche, naturellement). The meal was overseen by […]
Ulrich Boser, Megan Wilhelm, and Robert Hanna: People do better when more is expected of them. In education circles, this is called the Pygmalion Effect. It has been demonstrated in study after study, and the results can sometimes be quite significant. In one research project, for instance, teacher expectations of a pre-schooler’s ability was a […]
Barry Garelick, via a kind email: Mrs. Halloran, the teacher for whom I was subbing, was known for her strictness. On the day I met with her, she had me observe some of her classes and she introduced me. She told the students “I expect you all to behave well with Mr. Garelick. He and […]
Rebecca Winthrop and Eileen McGivney: This week, we’re focusing on the challenges facing millions of marginalized girls who can’t access a safe, high-quality education. Yesterday we explored the data on enrollment, child marriage and attacks against girls’ education and identified hotspots—areas where girls do not have the same access to education as boys. Today, we […]
Jay Matthews: A new book out by nationally known gifted-education expert James R. Delisle, a former fifth grade special education teacher and Kent State University professor, says our schools are making war on our nation’s finest young minds by failing to fund enough programs for the gifted. What’s the problem with that? He — and […]
Liz Peek: Unfortunately, it turnsout the numbers are bogus. In keeping with a White House that talks a good game on transparency but that is cloaked in secrecy, the Department of Education moved the goalposts at the last minute, changing how the default rates were calculated and thus sparing some colleges from tough penalties. It […]
Edoardo Porter: In 1987, when he was Ronald Reagan’s education secretary, the conservative culture warrior William J. Bennett wrote a famous essay denouncing federal aid for higher education because it allowed colleges “blithely to raise their tuitions,” at little benefit to students. Nearly two decades later, it seems, he was broadly right. Indeed, he didn’t […]
Ginia Bellafonte: On a Friday afternoon last spring, Dennis D’Amelio, an artist and teacher in late middle age was presiding over a class in color theory at LaGuardia Community College, whose location in the immigrant hub of western Queens makes it one of the most ethnically diverse colleges in the country. It was the end […]
Bob Herbert: Bill Gates had an idea. He was passionate about it, absolutely sure he had a winner. His idea? America’s high schools were too big. When a multibillionaire gets an idea, just about everybody leans in to listen. And when that idea has to do with matters of important public policy and the billionaire […]
Nate Hoffelder: Adobe has just given us a graphic demonstration of how not to handle security and privacy issues. A hacker acquaintance of mine has tipped me to a huge security and privacy violation on the part of Adobe. That anonymous acquaintance was examining Adobe’s DRm for educational purposes when they noticed that Digital Editions […]
Meghan Murphy: For an entire school year Hillsborough, New Jersey, educators undertook an experiment, asking: Is the iPad really the best device for interactive learning? It’s a question that has been on many minds since 2010, when Apple released the iPad and schools began experimenting with it. The devices came along at a time when […]
Anthony Sanders US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew repeated First Lady Michelle Obama’s talking points that “the US Economy is Moving Strongly in the Right Direction!” It has been six years since the Great Recession ended in June 2009. This misleading statement will be repeated many, many times leading up to the mid-term elections in November. […]
Adam Grant: THE college admissions system is broken. When students submit applications, colleges learn a great deal about their competence from grades and test scores, but remain in the dark about their creativity and character. Essays, recommendation letters and alumni interviews provide incomplete information about students’ values, social and emotional skills, and capacities for developing […]
Dan Simmons: About 800 fewer students are on campuses that make up the sprawling University of Wisconsin System this fall, a drop of about half a percentage point from last year, the System announced Wednesday. Among freshmen, the drop is more dramatic, at 2.2 percent. System officials said the drop was expected due to an […]
Planet Money Podcast: Prices of new textbooks have been going up like crazy. Faster than clothing, food, cars, and even healthcare. Listeners have been asking for years why textbooks are getting so expensive. On today’s show, we actually find an answer.
Lisa Hansel: You might expect to see a headline like this in the Onion, but you won’t. The Onion can’t run it because it isn’t just ironic—it’s 100% true. A few years ago, a researcher at one of the big testing companies told me that when developing a reading comprehension test, knowledge is a source […]
Howard Hotson: During the past eight years, university tuition fees were introduced into most west German federal states. Yet in a few months, every single state will have abolished them. These facts raise a series of topical questions that cast current English higher education policy in a fresh and revealing light. Why did Germany introduce […]
Student Union of Michigan: Like many public research universities around the country, the University of Michigan has raised tuition significantly over the past two decades. But administrators argue that in the end tuition hikes don’t make it harder for low-income students to attend.[1] Through financial aid, they claim, the high tuition paid by wealthier students […]
Dmitri Mehlhorn: One of the most-hotly debated questions is how strong is the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers compared to the school reform movement. When it comes to the money that is key to political influence, there is no doubt: The NEA and AFT together spend roughly $700 million per year, […]
Erin Richards: Milwaukee’s long-running school voucher program that allows certain children to attend private and religious schools at taxpayer expense has saved Wisconsin more than $238 million since its inception in 1990, according to a new study by a national voucher advocacy group. The study released Tuesday by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice said […]
Barry Garelick, via a kind email: After my assignment at the high school I took on various short-term sub assignments. These seemed relatively straightforward compared to the difficulties I had been through. In fact, I was reluctant to start subbing at first, but after the first few times, I started to regain my confidence. I […]
Allison Slater Tate: On the days that I drive the middle school carpool, I purposely choose a route that takes us past a huge river. Some mornings, the water looks like glass; others, it reflects the moody clouds above with choppy waves – either way, it’s gorgeous. Every time we drive past it, I point […]
United States Census: College enrollment declined by close to half a million (463,000) between 2012 and 2013, marking the second year in a row that a drop of this magnitude has occurred. The cumulative two-year drop of 930,000 was larger than any college enrollment drop before the recent recession, according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics […]
Bureau of Labor Statistics: A study using Current Population Survey data shows that, from 1996 to 2012, elementary, middle, and high school teachers earned less than other college graduates, but the gap was smaller for public school teachers and smaller still if they had union representation; moreover, the mitigating effects are stronger for female than […]
Erin Richards: How long you’ve lived in Milwaukee and Wisconsin likely correlates with how you heard of Howard Fuller. As director of Marquette University’s Institute for the Transformation of Learning and board chair of charter school Milwaukee Collegiate Academy? Young, or recent transplant. As the former superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools and initial champion of […]
Jeannie Whalen: Once a week, members of a Wellington, New Zealand, book club arrive at a cafe, grab a drink and shut off their cellphones. Then they sink into cozy chairs and read in silence for an hour. The point of the club isn’t to talk about literature, but to get away from pinging electronic […]
by Lada Adamic and Pinkesh Patel @ Facebook Data Science Favorite books are something friends like to share and discuss. A Facebook meme facilitates this very interaction. You may have seen one of your friends post something like “List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take more than a few […]
Kevin Carey: Four years ago, the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa dropped a bomb on American higher education. Their groundbreaking book, “Academically Adrift,” found that many students experience “limited or no learning” in college. Today, they released a follow-up study, tracking the same students for two years after graduation, into the workplace, adult relationships […]
Jennifer Ouellette: 1. Number: The Language of Science Tobias Dantzig Plume, 2007 “First published in 1930, this classic text traces the evolution of the concept of a number in clear, accessible prose. (None other than Albert Einstein sang its praises.) A Latvian mathematician who studied under Henri Poincare, Dantzig covers all the bases, from counting, […]
Sol Stern & Peter Wood he political fortunes of the Common Core are fast changing. When the Common Core first caught public attention in early 2010, it seemed like an unstoppable locomotive. It had the support of President Obama, and within a matter of a few months forty states and the District of Columbia had […]
Saptarishi Dutta: India and China already compete over global influence and natural resources. Here’s a new area of rivalry—the number of students each has in America. From 2008-12, India sent 168,034 students to the US, accounting for 15% of the total foreign students studying there, according to a new Brookings Institution report. This number is […]
Wisconsin Reading Coalition via a kind email: With the beginning of a new school year, here is some timely information and inspiration. You can make a difference: At WRC, we are often focused on top-down systemic change that can improve reading outcomes for students across our state. However, bottom-up, individual efforts are equally important. A […]
Philip Guo: I’m not yet qualified to give general life advice to kids, but I would like to share one simple piece of advice that I would’ve liked to hear when I was a kid: Find something you genuinely enjoy doing for its own sake, stick with it, keep learning more about it, and after […]
Arjun K. Manrai, AB; Gaurav Bhatia, MS; Judith Strymish, MD; Isaac S. Kohane, MD, PhD, Sachin H. Jain, MD: In 1978, Casscells et al1 published a small but important study showing that the majority of physicians, house officers, and students overestimated the positive predictive value (PPV) of a laboratory test result using prevalence and false […]
Molly Beck, via a kind reader: One in three black students was chronically absent from school during the 2013-14 school year, according to a Madison School District report. Thirty-six percent of the district’s black students have an attendance rate lower than 90 percent. That corresponds to missing, on average, one half day of school every […]
Alan Borsuk: Grit — it’s been a hot term in education. To succeed, students need grit, meaning determination, persistence, the capacity to deal with challenges, and resilience when something doesn’t go right. Schools need grit, too. That’s true in any circumstance, but it’s especially true for schools starting up in places where the challenges are […]
Alexander Nazaryan In 1911, the fictional Dink Stover arrived at Yale, “leisurely divested himself of his trim overcoat” and coolly strolled into campus life. “He had come to conquer,” writes Owen Johnson in the 1912 novel called Stover at Yale, “and zest was in his step.” Stover’s zest has little to do with intellectual inquest, […]
Liz Bowie: As principal of a small Southeast Baltimore school, Anthony Ruby has guided an array of first-year teachers, from the stars who seem to have an innate sense of how to handle a class to those who were so ineffective he declined to renew their contracts. When teachers aren’t effective, he said, “it is […]
The Economist: IT MAY have invented trust-busting, but for decades America has tolerated an insidious cartel. Unlike most price-fixers, who seek to inflate their products’ value, this one acts as a monopsony—using market power to obtain cheaper inputs—to squeeze its vulnerable employees. The name of this syndicate is the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the […]
Anjana Ahuja: It was called the “Ten-Martini Problem”, a notorious mathematical conundrum considered so hard that its originator promised 10 cocktails to whoever solved it. Artur Avila was the little-known Brazilian wunderkind who conjured up the required algebra nine years ago, leaving Ivy League professors shaken and stirred, and announcing his arrival as one of […]
Victor Luckerson: Improving lives in unexpected ways The most essential app Aimee Copeland has downloaded for her iPhone isn’t Facebook, Candy Crush Saga or Evernote. It’s “my i-limb,” an app that allows her to easily change the gestures her two prosthetic hands can make while on the go. Copeland, who lost her hands after a […]
Leslie Brody: The New York City Department of Education said Thursday it would pay $1.8 million in buyout packages for 115 teachers and other staff who had stayed on the payroll even though they had no permanent jobs. The move aims to reduce an oft-criticized pool of tenured teachers called the Absent Teacher Reserve who […]
Dick Resch Americans could use a crash course in math. According to a new study from the Brookings Institution, jobs in science, technology, engineering and math are vacant for more than twice as long as other positions — largely because employers can’t find people with the math and science skills to fill them. In fact, […]
Pat Schneider: As Madison teachers prepare to head back to school, big changes they’re facing include a new teacher evaluation system mandated by the state and a new discipline policy adopted by the Madison School Board, according to Madison Teachers Inc. president Mike Lipp. “There’s a lot of confusion and some apprehension” about the new […]
Molly Hensley-Clancy: Five years ago, Arizona State University (ASU), like many other giant public universities, was lagging in the field of online education, with just 1,200 students enrolled in its degree programs. Today, that enrollment has swelled to 10,000, and by next year, when an influx of Starbucks baristas enroll in online programs through a […]
Sam Levin: In an effort to establish better working conditions and increased job security, 78 percent of adjunct faculty at Mills voted in May to join SEIU Local 1021, the union that represents more than 50,000 public sector and nonprofit workers in Northern California. That means that non-tenured professors at the college now have basic […]
Angela Wang: Following decades of rampant grade inflation, the average GPA and fraction of A-grades given dropped dramatically from 2003-05 — the years right before the current grading policy was implemented — according to a report released by the University on Tuesday morning. The report, which was prepared at the request of University President Christopher […]
John P. A. Ioannidis, Kevin W. Boyack, Richard Klavans: The ability of a scientist to maintain a continuous stream of publication may be important, because research requires continuity of effort. However, there is no data on what proportion of scientists manages to publish each and every year over long periods of time. Methodology/Principal Findings Using […]
Cory Doctorow: A deep, carefully argued, carefully research report from Debt and Society makes a strong case that sky-high tuition (and brutal, lifelong student debt, up 1000% in 15 years) is not primarily caused by bloated administrations or high professors’ salaries. The explanation is a lot more banker-y. Cuts to public spending drove universities to […]
The Wall Street Journal: Labor unions like to promote their generous defined-benefit pensions. Yet when these benefits prove unsustainable, workers can lose their jobs and retirement savings. The kicker is that taxpayers may soon be tapped to perpetuate this double fraud. That’s the main take-away from a new report by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation […]
Ira Stoll: “By the end of approximately 2007, Villalobos had made, and I had accepted, bribes totaling approximately $200,000 in cash, all of which was delivered directly to me in the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Sacramento across from the Capitol. Villalobos delivered the first two payments of approximately $50,000 each in a paper bag, while […]
Choire Sicha: Do you see where that says “based on households with people between 20 to 40 years old with at least some education debt”? That’s actually quite a bit of a fudge! What’s the deal with these numbers? GLAD YOU ASKED. It’s not what it sounds like! Those aren’t households with people between 20 […]
Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email: Teachers, tutors, or anyone who is responsible for teaching children to read will be interested in an excellent and free online self-study course from Reading Rockets. It was funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, and The […]
“Decisions about what content is to be taught,’ they insist, ‘are made at the state and local levels.’ At the same time, we read that Common Core’s “educational standards are the learning goals for what students should know.” Is what students should know different from content?” [That is the question. WHF] Andrew Ferguson: The logic […]
Erin Richards & Patrick Marley: Gov. Scott Walker’s call to drop the Common Core State Standards in Wisconsin threw a new dart at the beleaguered academic expectations this week. But his plan to have lawmakers pass a bill in January that repeals and replaces the standards might be easier said than done, especially because the […]
Erin Richards: What were the highlights of Rocketship’s first year here? Strong growth. Rocketship set a goal of having 65% of its Milwaukee students meet the national average for reading and math growth over the course of the year. In fact, 72% of the school’s students, almost all of whom are low-income and Hispanic or […]
Stacey Patton: 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 […]
Veronica Dagher: You want to give your children everything. But sometimes you can go too far and create a spoiled, entitled brat. The consequences can be severe: In addition to acting like whiny complainers now, spoiled children are more likely to grow into financially dependent, irresponsible adults plagued by overspending and debt. “Some parents want […]
Caitlin Emma: 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 […]
Lee Ohanian: 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 […]
Sarah Mishkin: Preparing young children for the future by enrolling in Mandarin classes is very last year. The thing to do now is teach them to code. Thanks to a host of new apps, websites, and even a popular board game featuring turtles, the least technical of parents or teachers can introduce kids to programming. […]
Kyle Van Pelt: 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, […]
Barry Garelick: Barry Garelick, who wrote various letters under the name Huck Finn and which were published here is at work writing what will become “Conversations on the Rifle Range”. This will be a documentation of his experiences teaching math as a long-term substitute. OILF proudly presents episode number two: My back-to-school night was held […]
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, […]
Stephanie Simon:
Jay Matthews: Lucia and Ignacia Barajas are sisters who attend Compton High School in southern Los Angeles County. They want an education, but their school seems unable to give them enough time to get one. During the 2011-2012 school year, Lucia’s biology teacher went on maternity leave. For two months there were nothing but short-term […]
at Rees Shapiro 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 […]
William Deresiewicz While I was watching Ivory Tower, a documentary about the state of college in America that appears in select theaters this month (the movie also airs on CNN this fall), it occurred to me that of the many problems with higher education these days, not the least concerns the way we talk about […]
Harriet Alexander: 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 […]
Juliana Miner: 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 […]
Geoff Ralston: Silicon Valley holds a certain mystique among entrepreneurs and investors. More cool technology was born here, more wealth created, and more technology revolutions begun, than anywhere else on the planet. The Valley’s formula for success has been the subject of debate and business school cases for decades. It certainly helps to have excellent […]
Nat Hentoff: 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, […]
David Leonhardt: 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, […]
Molly Beck 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 […]
Christopher Nyren: 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, […]
Pat Schneider: “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 […]
Nick Duffell: 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. […]
Garrett Martin: WRAS 88.5 FM in Atlanta was the first radio station to play Outkast. It was one of the first few stations in the country to play R.E.M., Deerhunter and the Indigo Girls. It’s been a crucial, student-run force in independent music both locally and nationally for decades. But later this month, a backdoor […]
The Economist: 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 […]
Simon Mundy: Kim Ki-hoon has risen to stardom of a sort that exists in few places outside South Korea. As the country’s highest-earning celebrity English teacher, he estimates he made about $4m last year from his online language lessons – and then there is the income from his educational publishing company, which turned over about […]
Christian Schneider: If asked to identify the most urgent problem with Milwaukee Public Schools, few people would likely say “too much parental involvement.” In fact, over the years, public schools have been forced to take on more of the duties normally reserved for pupils’ parents. For this, MPS deserves some sympathy — as more children […]
The Capital Times: The statistics on African-American achievement have been so grim throughout the years that in 2010, Kaleem Caire, at the time the CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, put forth a proposal for a charter school designed to help African-American students surmount the achievement gap. It was ultimately rejected by the […]
Tim Parks: The conditions in which we read today are not those of fifty or even thirty years ago, and the big question is how contemporary fiction will adapt to these changes, because in the end adapt it will. No art form exists independently of the conditions in which it is enjoyed. What I’m talking […]
There is an idea floating around college campuses—including here at Harvard—that scholars should be funded only if their work conforms to a particular view of justice. There’s a word for that idea: censorship. And it is just a modern day form of McCarthyism. Dennis Saffran, via Will Fitzhugh: I wasn’t looking forward to Michael Bloomberg’s […]
Danny Crichton: There is a constant tension about education in labor economics these days. On one hand, education is strongly correlated with income and employability. Workers with college degrees, or even just some university-level courses, are significantly more likely to have a job and to be paid better, as well. This is borne out by […]