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On Campus: Enrollment dips at UW System schools

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 […]

Why Textbook Prices Keep Climbing

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.

Reading Test Developers Call Knowledge a Source of Bias

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 […]

Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

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

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 […]

Teacher Union Money Talks: NEA and AFT together spend roughly $700 million per year

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, […]

Study contends voucher programs save money, benefit public schools

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 […]

On Math Education: JFK, the Beatles and Getting Back in the Swing of Things

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 […]

Parenting as a Gen Xer: We’re the first generation of parents in the age of iEverything

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 […]

College Enrollment Declines for Second Year in a Row, Census Bureau Reports

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 […]

Pub school teachers earn 21% more than pvt school teachers, on average. Both earn less than other comparable workers

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 […]

Howard Fuller memoir recounts ‘warrior’s life’

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 […]

Read Slowly to Benefit Your Brain and Cut Stress

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 […]

Books That Have Stayed With Us

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 […]

The Economic Price of Colleges’ Failures

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 […]

Math Reading Suggestions

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, […]

Core Deception

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 […]

The key differences between Indian and Chinese students studying in the US

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 […]

Reading and Curricular Suggestions & Links as the school year begins

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 […]

My advice for kids: The 1,000-hour rule

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 […]

Medicine’s Uncomfortable Relationship With Math Calculating Positive Predictive Value

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 […]

1 in 3 Black Students Chronically Absent from Madison Schools

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 […]

4 new Milwaukee schools are showing the grit it takes to succeed

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 […]

American Horror, Ivy League Edition

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, […]

Residency program tries to solve problem of teacher burnout

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 […]

Justice for Jocks

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 […]

The minds that are first in their Fields

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 […]

Apple’s iPhone Is at the Center of Another Major Revolution to address disabilities

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 […]

Teacher Tenure: N.Y. Teachers in Limbo Get Buyout Packages

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 […]

America’s Math Crisis

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, […]

Madison teachers head back to school to new evaluations, student discipline code

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 […]

The New American University: Massive, Online, And Corporate-Backed

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 […]

The Battle for Adjunct Faculty Rights

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 […]

Princeton committee recommends end of grade deflation era

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 […]

Estimates of the Continuously Publishing Core in the Scientific Workforce

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 […]

Wall Street as cause and beneficiary of skyrocketing university tuition

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 […]

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Washington’s Next Big Bailout

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 […]

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The Latest Public-Sector Pension Scandal The state-pension-industrial complex corrupts politics on multiple levels

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 […]

That Big Study About How the Student Debt Nightmare Is in Your Head? It’s Garbage

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 […]

Teacher, Tutor Online Reading Course

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 […]

The Common Core Commotion

“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 […]

Politics, Wisconsin & the Common Core

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 […]

Year after Rocketship’s scrutinized Milwaukee launch, signs point to progress; Status Quo in Madison

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 […]

What Some Faculty Really Think About Nonacademic Careers

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 […]

Unspoiled Children, No Rod Needed

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 […]

“Value-added measures are the Mark of the Devil”

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 […]

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: America’s Public Sector Union Dilemma

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 […]

Get with the program with coding for kids

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. […]

July 2, 2014 Is an MBA worth it?

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, […]

Conversations on the Rifle Range 2: Negative Numbers, Back-to-School Night, a Tattooed Man and a Mysterious Stranger

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 […]

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, […]

Harris v. Quinn ruling: Unions hit, but not fatally

Stephanie Simon:

A startling waste of precious classroom time

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 […]

Nearly 40% of Fairfax County, VA Requires additional English Instruction

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 […]

The Miseducation of America: The movie ‘Ivory Tower’ and the rhetoric of crisis and collapse

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 […]

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

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 […]

Anatomy of a Swim Meet

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 […]

Silicon Valley and the Edtech Revolution

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 […]

Teachers’ Job Security More Important than Kids’ Futures?

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, […]

The Reality of Student Debt Is Different From the Clichés

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, […]

Trial Balloon on Raising Madison’s Property Taxes via another School Referendum? Homeowners compare communities…..

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 […]

The EdTech Failings of Silicon Valley

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, […]

UW-Madison’s Julie Underwood says controversial teacher education rankings “don’t mean much”

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 […]

Why Boarding Schools Produce Bad Leaders

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. […]

College radio is dying — and we need to save it

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 […]

Greased palms and dried fruit

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 […]

South Korea’s Millionaire Tutors: The vast sums spent on preparing children for tests are causing unease

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 […]

Teaching our kids government dependency

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 […]

Commentary on Madison’s Achievement Gap

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 […]

Reading: The Struggle

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 […]

Bloomberg @ Harvard

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 […]

Productivity And The Education Delusion

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 […]

Math & History

[I asked her about some of her experiences with math and history. Will Fitzhugh] Jessica Li (Class of 2015) High School Junior, Summit, New Jersey 24 May 2014 [6,592-word Sophomore paper on Kang Youwei… Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize 2014] My interest and involvement in mathematics was inspired by my family and my own exploration. My […]

Mining Student Results & Metadata: “massive increase in the demand for proficiency-based adaptive learning”

David Liu: Recently, we celebrated Knewton’s sixth birthday. It seems that each year brings more progress and change than all the previous years combined, and this past year was no different. We’re using our latest round of funding ($51 million) to continue to extend our technological leadership and support rapid growth globally, including a new […]

Most Madison teachers will get a good raise

Wisconsin State Journal The president of the Madison teachers union just lamented an “embarrassingly low” wage increase for his members of 0.25 percent. But that doesn’t include automatic pay raises most teachers will receive for their years of experience. A large majority of Madison school teachers (in past years it has ranged from two-thirds to […]

Parents fight student data mining (do they use google & Facebook?)

Stephanie Simon: Moms and dads from across the political spectrum have mobilized into an unexpected political force in recent months to fight the data mining of their children. In a frenzy of activity, they’ve catapulted student privacy — an issue that was barely on anyone’s radar last spring — to prominence in statehouses from New […]

When No One Is Safe From Measles

Lisa Beyer: Chalk up another demerit for the antivaccine movement: So far, 2014 is shaping up as the worst year for confirmed cases of the measles since it was declared eliminated as an endemic disease in 2000 in the U.S. Most of the news and media coverage of the outbreak has focused on the fact […]

Trafficked Teachers: Neoliberalism’s Latest Labor Source

George Joseph: Between 2007 and 2009, 350 Filipino teachers arrived in Louisiana, excited for the opportunity to teach math and science in public schools throughout the state. They’d been recruited through a company called Universal Placement International Inc., which professes on its website to “successfully place teachers in different schools thru out [sic] the United […]

How BASIC Opened Up Computers to All of Us

Dan Rockmore: Fifty years ago, at 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall at Dartmouth College, the world of computing changed forever. Professor John Kemeny, then the chairman of the mathematics department at Dartmouth and later its president, and Mike Busch, a Dartmouth sophomore, typed “RUN” on a pair of […]

Family, Edgewood High School at odds over alleged racial harassment

Jessica Arp: – A local family is fighting with officials at Edgewood High School over allegedly failing to stop racial harassment. The family is asking for tuition money back, while school officials said they handled things appropriately. Blake Broadnax spent two and a half years as a student at Edgewood High School, played on the […]

Five myths about Brown v. Board of Education

Imani Perry In the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education opinion, the Supreme Court declared that state laws requiring segregation in public schools were unconstitutional. But change didn’t come easily, nor are schools all that integrated today. Sixty years after Brown, let’s examine some myths about the landmark court decision. 1. Brown v. Board of […]

Student Debtors Slide Deeper into Peonage

Malcolm Harris: On May 7, the federal government conducted its regularly scheduled auction of new Treasury bills, a monthly ritual in which investors compete to lend the state money. This, however, was no ordinary auction. Last year, after much debate, Congress tied federal student loan interest rates to the 10-year Treasury note’s each year’s pre-June […]

University of California Bait and Switch Part Two

Bob Samuels: In my last post, I discussed how UC was fulfilling its obligation to accept every eligible Californian student by admitting them to Merced instead of Berkeley and UCLA. I also pointed out that some campuses are cashing in on the new policy that allows schools to keep all of the tuition dollars they […]

Race, Disability and the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Julianne Hing: Editor’s note: Our series “Life Cycles of Inequity” explores the ways in which inequity impacts the lives of black men. Each month, we focus on a life stage or event in which that impact has been shown to be particularly profound. This article is part of a package focused on implicit bias in […]

Why can’t we solve poverty, or solve it through schools?

Jake Seliger: I’m not that old, and I’ve already seen a lot of proposals for solving “poverty” come and go. Many—think Head Start—are tied up in education. The current debate around education tends to run in two directions: one group wants to improve parenting, or ameliorate poverty, or something along those lines, having seen innumerable […]

A Mississippi School Striving for Excellence

Deborah Fallows: One warm and misty May morning in Columbus, Mississippi, the lobby of the classroom building at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science (MSMS) (more) was full of teen-agers milling about, waiting for morning classes to begin. In one corner of the glassy space was a grandfather clock, probably about 8 feet tall, […]

What ‘Hard Work U’ Can Teach Elite Schools

Stephen Moore: Looking for the biggest bargain in higher education? I think I found it in this rural Missouri town, 40 miles south of Springfield, nestled in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. The school is College of the Ozarks, and it operates on an education model that could overturn the perverse method of financing […]

What’s Your Major? 4 Decades Of College Degrees, In 1 Graph

Quictrung Bui: In honor of college graduation season, we made a graph. It answers a few questions we had: What is the mix of bachelor’s degrees awarded today, and how has the mix changed over the past several decades? A few notes: The persistence of business. Business majors, which include accounting, marketing, operations and real […]

Thousands of Toddlers Are Medicated for A.D.H.D., Report Finds, Raising Worries

Alan Schwarz: ATLANTA — More than 10,000 American toddlers 2 or 3 years old are being medicated for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder outside established pediatric guidelines, according to data presented on Friday by an official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The report, which found that toddlers covered by Medicaid are particularly prone […]

Bonfire of the Humanities Christine Lagarde is the latest ritualistic burning of a college-commencement heretic

Daniel Henninger: It’s been a long time coming, but America’s colleges and universities have finally descended into lunacy. Last month, Brandeis University banned Somali-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali as its commencement speaker, purporting that “Ms. Hirsi Ali’s record of anti-Islam statements” violates Brandeis’s “core values.” This week higher education’s ritualistic burning of college-commencement heretics spread […]

Lectures Aren’t Just Boring, They’re Ineffective, Too, Study Finds

Aleszu Bajak: Are your lectures droning on? Change it up every 10 minutes with more active teaching techniques and more students will succeed, researchers say. A new study finds that undergraduate students in classes with traditional stand-and-deliver lectures are 1.5 times more likely to fail than students in classes that use more stimulating, so-called active […]

Frustrated Parents Turn to Picky-Eater Coaches

Bonnie Rochman: Mention you’ve got a picky eater to a fellow parent, and the choruses of “me too!” come quick. Some fed-up parents—embarrassed, at their wits’ end or worried about their children’s nutrition—are hiring picky-eater coaches to expand their kids’ palates. Leslie Springer was tired of acting like a short-order cook for her twin girls […]

Elite Colleges Don’t Buy Happiness for Graduates

Douglas Belkin: A word to high-school seniors rejected by their first choice: A degree from that shiny, elite college on the hill may not matter nearly as much as you think. A new Gallup survey of 30,000 college graduates of all ages in all 50 states has found that highly selective schools don’t produce better […]

Illinois: Different standards for different students

Diane Rado: Under a dramatic new approach to rating public schools, Illinois students of different backgrounds no longer will be held to the same standards — with Latinos and blacks, low-income children and other groups having lower targets than whites for passing state exams, the Tribune has found. In reading, for example, 85 percent of […]

School outside school: No English spoken here

Gayle Worland: Monday through Friday, Maya Reinfeldt is an eighth-grader at Savanna Oaks Middle School in Fitchburg. But on Saturdays, while her classmates are at soccer practice or gymnastics lessons, the 13-year-old is back at a desk studying literature in her mother’s native Russian. Maya is one of more than 50 students enrolled at the […]

Proposed changes to storied IB program roil Denver high school

Alan Gottlieb & Kate Schimel: When the Saturday morning meeting about proposed changes to George Washington High School’s International Baccalaureate program got off to a raucous, even unruly start in the school library, a mixed group of IB and non-IB students decided to take matters into their own hands. As angry parents who had expected […]

Young Minds in Critical Condition

Michael Roth: It happens every semester. A student triumphantly points out that Jean-Jacques Rousseau is undermining himself when he claims “the man who reflects is a depraved animal,” or that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call for self-reliance is in effect a call for reliance on Emerson himself. Trying not to sound too weary, I ask the […]

Poll: Prestigious Colleges Won’t Make You Happier In Life Or Work

Anya Kamnetz: There’s plenty of anxiety in the U.S. over getting into a top college. But a new Gallup poll suggests that, later in life, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as we think. In fact, when you ask college graduates whether they’re “engaged” with their work or “thriving” in all aspects of their lives, […]

Get a College-Level Computer Science Education with These Free Courses

Melanie Pinola: We’re lucky to have access to so many excellent free online courses for just about anything you want to study, including computer science. Here’s a curriculum list that strings various free computing courses into the equivalent of a college bachelor’s degree. aGupieWare, an independent app developer, surveyed the curricular requirements for computer science […]

A new study reveals the secret to Asian academic success—hard work!

Will Fitzhugh: Abstract The superior academic achievement of Asian Americans is a well-documented phenomenon that lacks a widely accepted explanation. Asian Americans’ advantage in this respect has been attributed to three groups of factors: (i) socio-demographic characteristics, (ii) cognitive ability, and (iii) academic effort as measured by characteristics such as attentiveness and work ethic. We […]