schoolinfosystem.org
Blackjack: Let me give you some backstory. I went to a fun high school but it was really easy and fun and I was a pretty big slacker. Around sophomore spring I decided I wanted to leave Florida, and the best way to do that was to get a scholarship to a good school. I […]
For 20 years, 14 of those in England, I’ve been giving lectures about the social power afforded to dictionaries, exhorting my students to discard the belief that dictionaries are infallible authorities. The students laugh at my stories about nuns who told me that ain’t couldn’t be a word because it wasn’t in the (school) dictionary […]
Jonathan Knee: Watching the $200 million iceberg (Mr. Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation was contingent on raising a matching amount) slowly melt into an ocean of recrimination over the course of 256 brisk pages can be a sometimes painful exercise. The union boss, Joe Del Grosso, demanded a ransom of $31 million to compensate for what […]
Wall Street Journal The plan—dubbed the “New College Compact” and estimated to cost $350 billion over 10 years—would fundamentally reshape the federal government’s role in higher education by offering new federal money, but with strings attached. States would have to increase their own spending on higher education, and universities would be required to control spending, […]
John Steele Gordon: Mathematicians often deal in abstractions that are quite beyond the ken of non-mathematicians. For instance, in 1637, the Frenchman Pierre de Fermat conjectured that there is no whole-number solution for the equation An + Bn = Cn where N is greater than two. He famously wrote in the margin of a book […]
aCorey Robin: Wilson’s piece is long and well worth reading, but lest readers overlook three astonishing quotes that Wilson has uncovered, which together comprise a rough definition of what academic freedom at UIUC might mean, I thought I’d highlight them here. First, education professor Nicholas Burbules, a real piece of work as far as I […]
Dan Dempsey, via a kind email: Washington State should replace its current one-size fits all diploma with three diplomas, similar to New York State’s Local, Regents, and Advanced Regents diplomas. It is my belief that Washington State needs three different diplomas to radically improve the current system for all students. The current requirements for a […]
Guardian: A star is born. Geography, for so long a Cinderella subject, the easy option for students who found physics or chemistry too daunting, is soaring in popularity. According to the Royal Geographical Society, 13% more took the subject at A-level this year than last, up to 37,100 – the biggest jump of any of […]
Daniel Allington: In a powerful essay cheekily posted on the website of what may be the UK’s most obsessively corporate university (check menu on the right “Get Rid of Academic Leadership”), Suman Gupta bluntly asserts that ‘[t]here is no place for leaders in academia.’ (2015, parag. 1) As he observes, once academics-turned-administrators begin ‘imposing some […]
Marilyn Achiron: The book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal wrote of reading Tyler Cowen’s 2013 book, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation, “with a deepening sense of dread”. The Economist understatedly called the book “bracing”. What does Cowen, a professor at George Mason University and daily blogger on […]
Dian Schaffhauser: Few institutions of higher education perform academic advising online or have specially trained or equipped counselors ready to help distance learning students with their advising needs. Those are some of the findings in an extensive report from Primary Research Group, which recently published the “Survey of Best Practices in Academic Advising.” Across a […]
Peter Diamandis: How do you raise kids today during these exponential times? Should they learn a second language… in a world of instant translation? Should they ever memorize any fact… in a world of ubiquitous Google? Will college even exist in 10 years’ time? Which is more important? Learning to code or learning sports? As […]
Will Fitzhugh: When it comes to Words, our High School English Departments are the Rulers. They dominate reading and writing, partly because the other departments—including the History and other Social Studies departments—don’t want to assign book reports or term papers and they certainly don’t want to read and grade them. The English Word Experts are […]
Vivian Wang: Laying down a new marker in the competition for school enrollment in Milwaukee, the School Board has approved a high-profile young educator’s proposal for a new charter school, after he promised to ramp up efforts to reverse the flow of students leaving the district for voucher schools and other options. Maurice Thomas’ planned […]
Mikhail: Schools that that teach low-income students a notoriously demanding curriculum are almost twice as likely to see those students enroll in college, a new report shows. This news comes on the heels of growing research suggesting that challenging assessments, which are a staple of the International Baccalaureate program featured in the report, help students […]
Kate Taylor: Former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has been out of office for a year and a half, but his influence over New York schools is practically as strong as ever. A group devoted to continuing his education agenda and founded in part by his longtime schools chancellor, has become one of the most powerful […]
Rui Wang, Gabriella Harari†, Peilin Hao, Xia Zhou, and Andrew T. Campbell: Many cognitive, behavioral, and environmental factors im- pact student learning during college. The SmartGPA study uses passive sensing data and self-reports from students’ smartphones to understand individual behavioral differences between high and low performers during a single 10-week term. We propose new methods […]
Harriet Alexander: Venezuela’s embattled government has taken the drastic step of forcing food producers to sell their produce to the state, in a bid to counter the ever-worsening shortages. Farmers and manufacturers who produce milk, pasta, oil, rice, sugar and flour have been told to supply between 30 per cent and 100 per cent of […]
Elizabeth Harrington, via Will Fitzhugh: The federal government has invested nearly $100,000 to bring Shakespeare to the stage—only without the legendary playwright’s words. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and its state agency the Virginia Commission for the Arts has funded numerous shows from the Crystal City-based Synetic Theater, including a production of Hamlet […]
Karen Herzog: “While our share of the overall UW System budget cut was eventually reduced, the nearly $5 million cut that we are left with is the largest in our history,” the chancellor, who has been in the job since December, said Tuesday. “The challenge we face is not new, but it is now acute. […]
Jonathan Chait: In 2010, Diane Ravitch, an activist for the most militantly anti-reform wing of the teachers-union movement, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed proposing that Republicans use their newfound control of the House of Representatives to roll back the Obama administration’s education reforms. Since then, the union backlash against the Obama administration’s agenda has […]
Karen Herzog: An outspoken University Wisconsin-Madison professor has tweeted herself into a world of controversy. Sara Goldrick-Rab is under fire for finding future Badgers on Twitter and essentially encouraging them to take their money elsewhere — as well as for comparing Gov. Scott Walker to Adolf Hitler. College Republicans blasted her on Wednesday, and on […]
Bo Peng: 1. Tuition Tuition is easily the largest incurred expense. The costs varies across programs, schools, and location in Canada. The average undergraduate tuition increases by about 3% each year for domestic students and 6% for international students. View undergrad tuition costs spreadsheet here: https://goo.gl/aKML14 I’ve compiled a spreadsheet of undergraduate tuition costs (thanks […]
Ramesh Ponnuru In particular, progressives want to use increased federal funding as leverage to get schools to act the way federal policymakers want them to. Thus President Barack Obama’s proposal to spend $60 billion to eliminate tuition at community colleges that “adopt promising and evidence-based institutional reforms to improve student outcomes.” A related idea is […]
Andy Thomason: A literature course including four graphic novels that one student found offensive won’t get a disclaimer after all. The Redland Daily Facts reports that the professor at Crafton Hills College has decided not to add a warning to the syllabus about the graphic novels’ content. Complaints from a student and her parents last […]
Wheeler Report (PDF): For this reason, many of us were initially encouraged when you indicated that you would defund Wisconsin’s participation in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) via your proposed 2015-2017 biennial budget. We hoped for substantive movement, at long last, on an issue that affects most children, parents, and teachers in Wisconsin. However, […]
Gerald Graff COMPLAINTS THAT American high school and college graduates can’t write have been pervasive for so long that they almost go without saying. Last year, when the Society for Human Resource Management asked managers about the skills of recent college graduates, 49 percent of them rated those graduates deficient in “the knowledge and basic […]
Molly Beck: The motion also adds a proposal allowing teachers or school administrators who have licenses from other states and have taught or worked for at least one year in that state to receive Wisconsin licenses. Administrators must have been offered a job in Wisconsin before they can apply for a license, the proposal says. […]
Meagan Batdorff, Albert Cheng, Larry Maloney, Jay F. May & Patrick J. Wolf: Public education funding relies on revenues from a variety of sources, from local taxpayers to federal programs targeting students with specific needs. The vast sum of funding collected—in excess of $600 billion annually— often masks which entities fund the education of our […]
Meg Anderson: Over half of CPS teachers surveyed for a small-scale study by an education policy group said they do not regularly use strategies learned in professional development provided by the district. In addition, nine out of 10 said have rarely or never used the district’s online professional development tool, Learning Hub. The study of […]
Alan Borsuk: But others differ on what research shows. Without attracting much attention, SAGE is undergoing a remodeling that is likely to de-emphasize class-size reduction in favor of other efforts that supporters think will have more impact. Unlike some other major education changes, the new SAGE didn’t emerge from behind closed doors in the middle […]
Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, Philippe Mongeon: The consolidation of the scientific publishing industry has been the topic of much debate within and outside the scientific community, especially in relation to major publishers’ high profit margins. However, the share of scientific output published in the journals of these major publishers, as well as its evolution over […]
Jeff Kaufman: Have you been accepted to a top college, one that promises to meet 100% of demonstrated financial need? (see list)? If you’re planning on anything near the $60k/year sticker price you are dramatically overpaying. What if I told you that you could attend one of these top schools for free? They all figure […]
Robert Kelchen: On a historical note, the 2013-2015 effort to rate colleges failed to live up to efforts a century ago, in which ratings were actually created but President Taft blocked their release. As Libby Nelson at Vox noted last summer, President Wilson created a ratings committee in 1914, which then came to the conclusion […]
Martin van Creveld: Morris, a professor of classics and of history at Stanford University, thinks he can distinguish between two kinds of war. The first kind, which he calls “counterproductive war,” is waged by non-state entities against each other and also against what more developed communities exist. It is the oldest form of war by […]
Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein & Philippe Mongeon The consolidation of the scientific publishing industry has been the topic of much debate within and outside the scientific community, especially in relation to major publishers’ high profit margins. However, the share of scientific output published in the journals of these major publishers, as well as its evolution […]
Terrance Ross: Examinations, tests, assessments—whatever the nomenclature, it’s hard to imagine schooling without them. Testing is the most popular method of quantifying individuals’ knowledge, often with the intention of objectively measuring aptitude and ability. Test-taking is a dreaded experience that the country’s kids and young adults share with their counterparts across the globe. The ritual […]
Yevgeny Feyman, via a kind reader: Last year, as part of a contract deal with the teachers’ union, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that he and the city’s unions had agreed to cut $3.4 billion in worker health-care costs over four years. Even with these “savings,” though, Gotham’s health-insurance spending is projected to grow 6 […]
Possible de-regulation of Wisconsin charter school authorizations has lead to a bit of rhetoric on the state of Madison’s schools, their ability to compete and whether the District’s long term, disastrous reading results are being addressed. We begin with Chris Rickert: Madison school officials not eager to cede control of ‘progress’: Still, Department of Public […]
Rebecca Schuman: Last week, Lower Saxony made itself the final state in Germany to do away with any public university tuition whatsoever. You read that right. As of now, all state-run universities in the Federal Republic—legendary institutions that put the Bildung in Bildungsroman, like the Universität Heidelberg, the Universität München, or the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin—cost […]
Madison Teachers, Inc. The Joint MTI/MMSD Safety Committee is charged with evaluating the “implementation of and compliance with the District’s Behavior Education Plan(s) (BEP)” and periodically reporting to the Superintendent and MTI Board of Directors. Over the course of the 2014-15 school year, the Committee met multiple times and designed, conducted and analyzed a Survey […]
Molly Beck Overall, roughly $4.5 billion annually is devoted to general school funding in the proposed state budget. The cost for new students in the program over the next two years is projected to be about $37 million. In the last state budget, about $384 million was appropriated for the state’s three voucher systems. Rep. […]
Vanessa Romo: LA Unified’s ability to pay for a new teacher contract that gives the union’s 35,000 members a 10.4 percent raise — their first in eight years — relies on two factors: One, a stronger than expected boost in tax revenues from the state. And two, a solution to the systemic problem of declining […]
Erin Richards: The proposal comes amid continuing discussion over the rigor and selectivity of university teacher education programs. Jon Bales, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators, said there are issues in Wisconsin around the recruitment of would-be teachers and the quality of their preparation. But he said the provision championed by […]
Kaitlyn Schallhorn: Feminists at Oberlin College, upset that a student group would bring Christina Hoff Sommers to campus, hung posters that individually declared Republican and Libertarian students as “perpetuating rape culture.” A photo of the posters was sent by an anonymous student to Reason. The publication did not name the student because the student feared […]
Gülden Özcan and Ersin Vedat Elgür Gülden Özcan & Ersin Vedat Elgür (GÖ&EVE): Before getting into the details of your work, we would like to discuss with you the university as an institution and the current positions of academics in relation to politics. At the very beginning of your book Imagining the State you mention […]
Christian Sandvig: Today in Science, members of the Facebook data science team released a provocative study about adult Facebook users in the US “who volunteer their ideological affiliation in their profile.” The study “quantified the extent to which individuals encounter comparatively more or less diverse” hard news “while interacting via Facebook’s algorithmically ranked News Feed.”* […]
Gabriel Heller Sahlgren: Why did Finland’s pupils do so well? Popular explanations include the country’s focus on equity, the high standard of teacher training, a comparatively low workload, and the lack of market reforms and school accountability. But research does not support any of these conclusions. In fact, Finland’s rise began well before most of […]
Nina Zito: It’s 10 at night and my husband, Ilya, is breathlessly asking me if he can wake the kids to show them the online chess game he just finished. He’s joking. Mostly. Since it is a scene I witness often in daylight hours, I sense that if I weren’t scowling, he’d romp in and […]
Vipal Monga: Five years ago, 80 clerks and salespeople at Pilot Travel Centers LLC spent a combined 3,200 hours a week tracking and paying for orders for thousands of goods, ranging from candy bars to diesel fuel. They typed the orders into an accounts-payable database, and printed out thousands of checks to pay suppliers. After […]
Nations Report Card: Nationally, eighth graders’ average scores on the NAEP U.S. history, geography, and civics assessments showed no significant change in 2014, compared to 2010—the last assessment year. However, several student groups have made gains. In 2014, eighteen percent of eighth-graders performed at or above the Proficient level in U.S. history, 27 percent performed […]
Molly Knefel: When he was young, Cadeem Gibbs was really into school. Bright, curious, and naturally rebellious, he enjoyed arguing the opposing point of view in a classroom discussion just to see how well he could do it. “I was always academically inclined,” says the Harlem native, now 24. “I always wanted to learn.” But […]
Moises Naim: Do you understand money? Let’s see how well you do with the following questions. 1. Suppose you had $100 in a savings account and the interest rate was 2 percent per year. After five years, how much do you think you would have in the account if you left the money to grow? […]
Notes and charts from the Districts’ most recent 2015-2016 budget document (5MB PDF): Our 25,364 students are served by 4,076 Teachers & Staff (6.22 students per District employee). Salaries and Wages For 2015-16, MMSD has collective bargaining agreements in place with its represented employee groups, including teachers, aides, clerical, and custodial staff. The teachers’ collective […]
Christopher Mims: Racing across the U.S. in your taco truck, you must fight off animals mutated by fallout from a nuclear war, and you must also turn them into delicious filling for the tacos you sell inside fortified towns. Your mission: Make it to the Canadian city of Winnipeg. You are “Gunman Taco Truck.” “It’s […]
USA Today: Two Sundays ago, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv of Montgomery County, Md., got a call from Child Protective Services. Police had taken their two children, ages 10 and 6, into custody three hours earlier and were holding them at the crisis center. Had the children been abused? No. Were they lost? No. So what […]
Elizabeth Olson: Jonathan Wang has not practiced law since he graduated from Columbia Law School in 2010, but he did not plan it that way. When he entered law school, the economy was flourishing, and he had every reason to think that with a prestigious degree he was headed for a secure well-paying career. He […]
Richard Berg: The Young, Gifted and Truant crowd really “jumped the shark” when they blocked all traffic on East Washington Avenue recently. But let’s not forget who helped to enable this crowd of malcontents. The Madison Police Department has bent over backward to accommodate this sort of action. And Madison School Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham helped […]
Ama Mazama: Homeschooling, common among white Americans, is showing an increase among African-Americans kids, as well. African Americans now make up about 10 percent of all homeschooled children in this fastest-growing form of education. However, the reasons for black kids to be homeschooled may not be the same as for white kids. My research shows […]
Jay Bullock: I know that this problem is not unique to Milwaukee, and it’s probably not exclusively the fault of our marketplace, as much as I like to blame it. Comparable urban districts have high mobility rates even without a lot of school vouchers – a quick googling turns up annual figures like 30 percent […]
Alexandra Gibbs: In 2012, Latitude Research published a study about children’s interaction with robots, which demonstrated that 64 percent of those interviewed, said that robots felt like “natural, human-like companions.” Many app companies have capitalized on this concept, and made apps that educate young children about robots.
Ilya Somin: Montgomery County, Maryland police and Child Protective Services officials recently detained 10 year old Rafi Meitiv and his 6 year old sister Dvora, for hours merely because they were seen walking home from a local park alone (including a lengthy period when they were not allowed to contact their parents). They were picked […]
Donna St. George & Brigid Schulte: A D.C-based law firm will file suit and pursue “all legal remedies” to protect the rights of the Maryland parents whose two young children were taken into custody for more than five hours Sunday after someone reported them as they made their way home unsupervised from a Silver Spring […]
Josh Mandel & Fineas Baxandall: An open government is one in which citizens are empowered to hold their elected officials accountable. Even in today’s atmosphere of hyper-partisanship, leaders from across the political spectrum can agree that advancing the cause of transparency is integral for enabling taxpayers to follow the money. In 2010, the U.S. Public […]
George Gao: On Facebook, Parents Are Friends with Their TeensBut that doesn’t mean parents aren’t monitoring their teenagers’ behaviors in other ways. With so much of a teenager’s social activities now happening online, parents have had to adapt. Today, 60% of parents say they’ve checked their teenagers’ profile on a social networking site, including roughly […]
Karen Herzog: The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents finalized tuition increases for nine campuses on Friday, and pushed back against a key lawmaker who blasted UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank for proposing a 35% tuition increase over four years for nonresident undergraduates. UW-Madison will boost tuition for nonresident undergraduates 11.75% next year. Wisconsin resident […]
Daniela Hernandez: Lee and her husband, who was getting his doctorate in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, discovered their son’s condition was serious enough that they wouldn’t be able to go back to the life they had as game developers in South Korea. The family decided to stay in the U.S. Lee […]
Miriam Jordan: For several months last year, between her classes at the University of California campus here, Sierra Henderson stopped in at a tiny basement room to pick up free canned vegetables, pasta and cereal. “If the pantry wasn’t here I might have had to consider taking time off school to work full-time,” said the […]
Caren Chesler: To illustrate his point, the Newark-born governor turned to Camden, still the nation’s poorest large city. “There is no better example of what we can achieve if we put aside party and pettiness than the results we are seeing in Camden,” Christie said. He described a new, enlarged county police force that cut […]
Tom Lindsay: But there could be better news on the horizon. The Texas Legislature is currently considering a bill—the “I CAN” Bill (“Incentivizing College Affordability Now”)—that would take statewide a new initiative called the Texas Affordable Baccalaureate Program (TABP), which offers targeted college degrees for far less than what Texas public university students currently pay. […]
Mimi Evans: The Admissions Committee has carefully considered your application and we regret to inform you that we will not be able to offer you admission in the entering class of 2015, or a position on one of our alternate lists. The applicant pool this year was particularly strong, and by that I mean the […]
Paul Campos: In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times […]
Laura Waters: Last week, the Paterson Charter School of Science and Technology held its annual enrollment lottery. There were 1,437 applicants for 99 openings, and so each student had less than a 10 percent chance of selection. Edwin Rodriguez, whose seven-year-old daughter, Natalie, and five-year-old son, Juelz, attend School 6, one of the worst-performing schools […]
Tap to view a larger version of these images. Martin F. Lueken, Ph.D., Rick Esenberg & CJ Szafir, via a kind reader (PDF): Robustness checks: Lastly, to check if the estimates from our main analysis behave differently when we modify our models, we conduct a series of robustness checks in our analysis. We estimate models […]
Kirk Carapezza: “I love it here. I really like the city. I love the culture,” she says. “Cologne is a very open city, a very friendly city. I definitely get the vibe that Germans appreciate a foreign presence in the city.” Smith is one of almost 100 Americans studying at the University of Cologne. And, […]
Molly Beck: If approved, the referendum would raise property taxes about $62 on the average $237,678 Madison home for 10 years. The district is still paying off $30 million in referendum debt for the construction of Olson and Chavez elementary schools in the late 2000s, according to the district. The final payment, for the Olson […]
Brigid Schulte: Do parents, especially mothers, spend enough time with their children? Though American parents are with their children more than any parents in the world, many feel guilty because they don’t believe it’s enough. That’s because there’s a widespread cultural assumption that the time parents, particularly mothers, spend with children is key to ensuring […]
Neil Irwin: In their simulation, they assume that 10 percent of non-college-educated men of prime working age suddenly obtained a college degree or higher, which would be an unprecedented rise in the proportion of the work force with advanced education. They assume that these more educated men go from their current pay levels to pay […]
Melonie Fullick: In my last post I took a look at some of the history and context of Canadian universities’ hiring of contract faculty. While I was digging around for information, I couldn’t help noticing the relevance of some of the material to another ongoing debate in higher education: that of the “overproduction” of PhDs. […]
Gorman Lee, via Will Fitzhugh: The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education’s decision to indefinitely suspend the History and Social Science MCAS in 2009 has placed social studies education in a high risk of marginalization in K-12 public school districts across the Commonwealth. The problem has only exacerbated with increased emphases of English language […]
American Academy of Arts & Sciences (PDF), via a kind Richard Askey email: The Academy is also working with the university community to identify steps that could be taken on campuses across America to advance the recommendations from Restoring the Foundation. Com- mittee member Venkatesh Narayanamurti (Harvard University) presented the report at the November 2014 […]
Maggie Ginsberg interviews Brandi Grayson: Can you give an example of what you’ve described as “intent versus impact?” The Behavior Education Plan that the [Madison Metropolitan] school district came up with. The impact is effed up, in so many words, and that’s because the voices that are most affected weren’t considered. It’s like standing outside […]
Jennifer Senior: Newsletter The Latest Insights Into Human Behavior, Delivered Daily A Rabbi and an Atheist Talk Good and Evil The Strange Case of the Woman Haunted by Dragons parenthood March 13, 2015 8:00 a.m. We Live in an Age of Irrational Parenting By Jennifer Senior 10.9k Shares Share 10.3k Tweet 538 Share 17 Share […]
Jennifer Breheny Wallace: Today’s demands for measurable childhood success—from the Common Core to college placement—have chased household chores from the to-do lists of many young people. In a survey of 1,001 U.S. adults released last fall by Braun Research, 82% reported having regular chores growing up, but only 28% said that they require their own […]
Kaleem Caire, via a kind email: We had a great time at our campaign kick-off event for One City Early Learning Centers at the CUNA Mutual Conference Center on March 6! More than 350 friends and champions for children joined us on a Friday night to learn about our plans to raise $1.4 million to […]
Curt Guyette: Emergency management has neither fixed the finances of Detroit Public Schools nor provided even an adequate education to most Detroit students. The state’s takeover of the district, and the appointment of four different managers during those six years, has been like shuffling captains on the Titanic after the iceberg has been hit. Unless […]
Douglas Belkin: The Wall Street Journal invited three people to join in an email discussion of the issue. They are: Levi Bisonn, a senior at Olympia High School in Washington state who has applied to 13 schools, including Johns Hopkins University and the University of Washington; Patty Pogemiller, the director of talent acquisition at Deloitte; […]
Fréderike Geerdinke: 1. Seems like there’s a lot of confusion even about the question of whether these schools are open or not. Right? Right. Three schools for education in Kurdish were opened this Monday, on the first day of the new school year in Turkey: one in Yüksekova (the Dayîka Uveyş Primary School, named after […]
Hannah Rosin: In December, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv had let their 10-year-old son Rafi and his 6-year-old sister Dvorah walk one mile home through Silver Spring alone. The kids got picked up by the police, who then turned the case over to child protective services. The Meitivs, as it happens, are “free-range parents” who have […]
Stephanie Yang: students in U.S. colleges outpaces that of any other country, the journey to get into an elite American university has only gotten more cutthroat and students are rising to the challenge in strange ways. Think: Scalping tickets for tests, making up exotic adventures, and getting tutored at 1:00 am. China is already known […]
Beth McMurtrie: Mr. Gu is like many other Silicon Valley hopefuls, except in one respect. He is a Thiel fellow, one of a select few who were given $100,000 each to leave college to pursue their start-up dreams. “It has sort of good and bad associated with it,” Mr. Gu says of how people react […]
Joel Warner and Aaron Clauset: While elite universities, with their deep resources and demanding coursework, surely produce great professors, the data suggest that faculty hiring isn’t a simple meritocracy. The top schools generate far more professors than even just slightly less prestigious schools. For example, in history, the top 10 schools produce three times as […]
Jane Slaughter: Disappointed tourists saw their flights canceled on January 10. “In previous actions, they’d taken the highways leading to the Oaxaca airport,” said teacher-trainer Maria Elena Ramírez Avendaño, “but this time they took the runways for the first time.” The actions are part of a year-and-a-half-long fight against constitutional amendments that require teachers to […]
Beth Akers: Late last year, researchers at the University of South Carolina and the University of California, Los Angeles, published a report[1] on the relationship between student loan debt and psychological well-being. This study comes in the midst of a plethora of new research attempting to quantify causal relationships between student loan debt and personal […]
Jim Schutze: When Hall was early on the board, the university revealed to regents there were problems with a large private endowment used to provide off-the-books six-figure “forgivable loans” to certain faculty members, out of sight of the university’s formal compensation system. Hall wanted to know how big the forgivable loans were and who decided […]
priceonomics: “The act of the last session of Congress concerning the commercial intercourse between the United States and Great Britain and France and their dependencies having invited in a new form a termination of their edicts against our neutral commerce, copies of the act were immediately forwarded to our ministers at London and Paris, with […]
Colleen Flaherty: By now, the secret is out in some disciplines: if you want to land a tenure-line faculty job, you’d better attend a highly ranked graduate program — not necessarily because they’re better but because the market favors prestige. But a new study suggests that “social inequality” might be worse than previously thought, across […]
Erin Richards: Wisconsin’s 16 technical colleges could establish independent charter high schools staffed by college instructors, under a proposal being circulated by two Republican lawmakers that aims to better prepare students for the workforce. Rep. Tom Weatherston (R-Racine) says charter high schools focused on occupational education or technology could attract students who would not otherwise […]
Molly Beck: Madison school officials are weighing property tax increases, significant program cuts and requiring employees to pay a portion of health insurance premiums to help close a huge budget deficit. About $6 million could be saved by making aggressive changes to employees’ health care costs, including requiring staff to contribute toward health insurance premiums, […]
The Economist: Some of the toughest decisions Mr Emanuel had to make in his first term concerned schools. He demanded merit pay for teachers and a longer school day (Chicago’s was only 5 hours 45 minutes) and earmarked for closure 50 half-empty schools in poor districts. Teachers went on strike for the first time in […]