This brief describes (1) what parents look for when they choose a school and (2) how these preferences affect the sorting of students into schools under different school-choice policies. The findings are based on lists of preferred schools submitted by over 20,000 applicants to a citywide lottery for more than 100 traditional and charter public schools in Washington, DC. The results confirm previous findings that commuting distance, school demographics, and academics play important roles in school choice. However, we also found considerable variation in parents’ preferences.
uselessness of our fascination with achievement gaps better illustrated than in two lists from an admirable paper by Stanford University researchers, which that university’s Center for Education Policy Analysis published in April.
“The Geography of Racial/Ethnic Test Score Gaps” was written by Sean F. Reardon, Demetra Kalogrides and Ken Shores. It identifies the 20 U.S. school districts with the smallest white-black and white-Hispanic achievement gaps in 2009 to 2012, based on standardized reading and math tests in elementary and middle schools.
A few days into the eighth grade my son Corey taught himself the Pythagorean theorem. It’s not typically taught until ninth grade, but he loves baroque language and was drawn to the unit when it popped up on the self-paced math curriculum on his computer. He began by taking the quiz at the end of the lesson and reverse-engineered his way through the parts he didn’t understand.
Corey is 14 and has a voracious thirst for knowledge. His favorite author is H.G. Wells. He loves Japanese calligraphy. Last year he produced a documentary about William Higinbotham, a member of the team that produced the first nuclear bomb and the inventor of the first computer game.
Years of cuts in state funding for public colleges and universities have driven up tuition and harmed students’ educational experiences by forcing faculty reductions, fewer course offerings, and campus closings. These choices have made college less affordable and less accessible for students who need degrees to succeed in today’s economy.
Years of cuts have made college less affordable and less accessible for students.Though some states have begun to restore some of the deep cuts in financial support for public two- and four-year colleges since the recession hit, their support remains far below previous levels. In total, after adjusting for inflation, of the states that have enacted full higher education budgets for the current school year, funding for public two- and four-year colleges is $8.7 billion below what it was just prior to the recession.
VEDANTAM: Exactly. So the genius needed help from someone else. Now, a third group of students was told how scientists had to struggle not just with the science but with various personal obstacles. So Marie Curie, whom you mentioned, the famous physicist, was excluded from colleges because she was a woman. Michael Faraday was not part of the old boys’ club in England. These people were outsiders. They had to fight just to get heard.
study (shared by Alexander Russo on Twitter) has found that taking just one International Baccalaureate can have a powerful impact on a student’s future.
Here’s an excerpt from a Washington Monthly article about the research:
What do Argentina, Costa Rica and Brazil have in common?
They all outranked the United States in a comparison of election standards and procedures conducted by the Electoral Integrity Project. The United States ranked 47th worldwide, out of 139 countries.
The survey is a measure of dozens of factors, including voter registration, campaign financing rules, election laws, the voting process and vote count.
Overall, one in six elections around the world were considered electoral failures. But in general, countries in the Americas and central and eastern Europe, as well as in Asia, were considered to be on the winning side in terms of electoral integrity, with Scandinavian and Western European nations topping the lists.
At three o’clock in the morning on April 8, 2011, Emirati blogger and activist Ahmed Mansoor was awoken by three police officers at his front door. The men said they wanted to question him about his car and asked Mansoor to come with them.
Mansoor refused — and for good reason. A vocal proponent of an elected parliament, he had repeatedly called for more transparent governance and the curbing of censorship in the United Arab Emirates.
He was afraid he was going to be kidnapped, or that the men would use the opportunity to plant incriminating evidence. Eventually, the police left.
The three of us had recently learned about the 1968 Antiuniversity of East London through a Hackney Museum research project and wanted to explore the potential relevance of the historical movement to the current state of higher education.
In 1968 young people across the world protested against a stagnant and violent political system and a conservative education system which reproduced out-of-date knowledge with no critical reflection, ignoring the real concerns of young people. From the Black Panthers and the Anti Vietnam War movement in the US to students and workers occupations in France, from Mexico to Prague, a generation was fighting against racism, sexism, colonialism and state violence. A new world order called for a new academic order.
Very much a product of its time, the original Antiuniversity was set up in February ‘68 in Shoreditch, then a working class neighbourhood and now a fully gentrified part of London. It was led by American academic Joseph Berke who, Inspired by the Dialectics of Liberation conference held the previous year at the Roundhouse in Camden, gathered a group of academics, writers and artists to establish a new type of institution.
Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace. When I began writing science fiction in the middle ’60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months. (Of course, this could just be me losing my imagination as I get old, but I see the effect in others too.) Like the shock in a compressible flow, the Singularity moves closer as we accelerate through the critical speed.
And what of the arrival of the Singularity itself? What can be said of its actual appearance? Since it involves an intellectual runaway, it will probably occur faster than any technical revolution seen so far. The precipitating event will likely be unexpected — perhaps even to the researchers involved. (“But all our previous models were catatonic! We were just tweaking some parameters….”) If networking is widespread enough (into ubiquitous embedded systems), it may seem as if our artifacts as a whole had suddenly wakened.
Even if our state and city find a way to move forward and equitably fund education, inequities would still exist between states. This fractured way of funding public education will only lead to more inequity. Of course, the most comprehensive, equitable solution is also the most far-fetched and would take a constitutional amendment—the U.S. should make public education funding universal. Countries like Finland, South Korea, and Singapore all rank higher education-wise than the U.S., and all have equity in educational funding.
Since such change is not likely to occur anytime soon, change at Illinois must begin at the state level. As our state lawmakers continue into their special session, they must act against the status quo of inequitable funding. Regardless of what happens in Springfield, Chicago needs to invest in our public schools as urgently as we invest in tourism. Our students are performing at high levels despite being fiscally abandoned at every level of government. If these cuts in CPS do happen, it will show the failure of our American local, state, and national government to support high quality, public education to our most vulnerable group of children.
We must rethink our goals as a nation and choose education for our children as a priority instead of poorly investing in our nation’s future. It’s time that we give Chicago students and poor students across our nation equal opportunities through equitable funding.
every email I’ve received that included an apology for “poor English,” I’d be within shouting distance of a comfortable retirement. But there’s no apology necessary, and that needs to be said rather loudly. I want to see more bad English on mailing lists!
First of all, no one should feel the slightest shame or embarrassment about making a good faith effort to have a productive conversation with someone else. There may be room for improvement, and people should be admired for making a continual effort to learn new languages or improve their language skills.
Second, people who are embarrassed with their ability to communicate are likely to speak up less. To hold back questions for fear that they’re not going to be understood. To hold back expressing ideas because they might not get the point across as well the first time. One of the great things about the time I spent with Novell was that I had the opportunity to meet and speak with many people around the world who love free and open source software, and being part of the larger community.
Unfortunately, far too many of the people I met where embarrassed by their proficiency with English. Several contributors I’ve spoken to have admitted reluctance to participate in discussions because they were embarrassed by their skill level with English, or because they feared they wouldn’t be understood.
Nationally, 1 in 68 school-age children are identified as having autism spectrum disorder, the CDC reported in March. That is unchanged from 2014 but up from 1 in 88 two years earlier and 1 in 110 two years before that.
The national rate is based on surveys in parts of 11 states — including Wisconsin, where Dane County and nine other southern counties take part.
In the most recent report, Wisconsin’s rate is 1 in 92, which is lower than the national rate. But the state’s rate is up from two years ago, when it was 1 in 102.
Cheng Nan has spent years trying to ensure that her 16-year-old daughter gets into a college near their home in Nanjing, an affluent city in eastern China. She wakes her at 5:30 a.m. to study math and Chinese poetry and packs her schedule so tightly that she has only 20 days of summer vacation.
So when officials announced a plan to admit more students from impoverished regions and fewer from Nanjing to local universities, Ms. Cheng was furious. She joined more than 1,000 parents to protest outside government offices, chanting slogans like “Fairness in education!” and demanding a meeting with the provincial governor.
“Why should they eat from our bowls?” Ms. Cheng, 46, an art editor at a newspaper, said in an interview. “We are just as hard-working as other families.”
Today the New York Times published a startling (if you haven’t been inside a CUNY campus lately) exposé on the shameful financial state of the City University of New York. Reporter David Chen describes an institution with a “proud legacy” in severe decline. Thanks to state budget cuts, tuition has risen 33% since 2008 and campuses are falling apart. Writing about City College, Chen tells of “leaking ceilings [that] have turned hallways into obstacle courses of buckets. The bathrooms sometimes run out of toilet paper.”
I am familiar with such conditions. As an adjunct at Hunter College, I and dozens of other part-time teachers toiled in dirty, overcrowded offices with mice droppings scattered around.
Crumbling buildings are not the only sign of a university on the brink. The NYT also reported that courses have been cancelled due to lack of funds. One campus library received a book budget of only $13,000 for the entire year, down from $60,000 ten years before.
While reports about what austerity has wrought at CUNY are usually welcome, the NYT piece promotes a mythology about higher education that requires some correction.
Student debt is a convenient target in a presidential election year, but it obscures the true crisis: high dropout rates from low-quality postsecondary institutions and the unmanageable debt borne by students of those institutions. And despite rising student debt, monthly loan payments as a share of income have remained steady, added earnings having more than offset the cost of debt for most borrowers, and Income-Based Repayment (IBR) plans offer borrowers protection from ballooning monthly payments.
Nor do new data just released show any evidence of an upturn in births. National Center for Health Statistics data for 2015 show the lowest general fertility rate on record and only 3,978,000 births last year. There were 338,000 (8 percent) fewer births in 2015 than in 2007, just before the Recession began to influence fertility. This decline in births is entirely due to reduced fertility rates. The number of women in their prime childbearing years (20 to 39) actually increased by 2.5 million (6 percent) between 2007 and 2015. With more women of child-bearing age, the expectation would be for more babies. Yet the larger cohort of childbearing age women in 2015 produced fewer births than the smaller 2007 cohort did. If the fertility rates of 2007 had been sustained through 2015, the larger cohort of women of childbearing age would have been expected to produce nearly 600,000 more children in 2015 than were actually born.
a new way of training teachers. Rather than spending their time musing on the meaning of education, he and his peers have been drilled in the craft of the classroom. Their dozens of honed techniques cover everything from discipline to making sure all children are thinking hard. Not a second is wasted. North Star teachers may seem naturals. They are anything but.
FORGET smart uniforms and small classes. The secret to stellar grades and thriving students is teachers. One American study found that in a single year’s teaching the top 10% of teachers impart three times as much learning to their pupils as the worst 10% do. Another suggests that, if black pupils were taught by the best quarter of teachers, the gap between their achievement and that of white pupils would disappear.
But efforts to ensure that every teacher can teach are hobbled by the tenacious myth that good teachers are born, not made. Classroom heroes like Robin Williams in “Dead Poets Society” or Michelle Pfeiffer in “Dangerous Minds” are endowed with exceptional, innate inspirational powers. Government policies, which often start from the same assumption, seek to raise teaching standards by attracting high-flying graduates to join the profession and prodding bad teachers to leave. Teachers’ unions, meanwhile, insist that if only their members were set free from central diktat, excellence would follow.
near one night last month, the chief meteorologist of Birmingham’s ABC-affiliate began to get worked up. Balding and characteristically attired in suspenders, James Spann is one of the most recognizable and respected local TV meteorologists in the country. But he had a familiar problem. The day had been pleasant in Alabama, and more of the same temperate spring weather lay ahead—so what the heck was he going to talk about?
“I’ve got 2 minutes and 30 seconds to fill,” Spann explained. “Everyone in my audience is going to know what the weather is going to do. Except maybe my mom. She’s 85 years old. But most everybody has looked on their phone or some other device already. So what am I going to do? Am I just going to rehash everything they already know?”
Many people are ending the school year to the music of “Pomp and Circumstance.” Congratulations to all the graduates and their families on reaching these important, good milestones.
But I’m ending the school year with a movement from Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” playing in my head.
Somewhat inevitably, the focus in these columns (and in much of the news) is on problems, difficulties and “bad news.” This week, I offer nothing about low test scores, budgets, fighting over enrollment “market share” or even what will emerge from the Opportunity Schools/Milwaukee County Executive furor.
I offer instead snapshots of good news and good things I’ve seen and heard this year when it comes to local education.
As the American mother of a 4-year-old girl, with a French husband, I’ve gotten a chance to see playtime from both sides of the pond. Over the years, I’ve also gained a new set of both French and American “mommy friends,” who often pepper me with questions about whether the French truly parent better, as Pamela Druckerman argues in her book “Bringing Up Bebe.” While I’m hesitant to take part in such a “who’s better than whom” parenting war, there’s one place where French parents have it right: that is, in their attitudes and rules about children’s play.
The annual operating budget that University of Wisconsin System officials refused to release publicly until 90 minutes before the Board of Regents approved it was actually finalized last week, contrary to what a system spokesman implied while explaining the delay to reporters, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has learned.
The time stamp of the final modification to the budget document is contained in its meta data, which summarizes basic information about the document’s creation. The document was last modified June 3 at 2:07:58 p.m., and was released to the public six days later, at 1:58 p.m. on Thursday.
Within an hour of its public release, while the regents were actively discussing the budget in their meeting at UW-Milwaukee, an individual concerned about the way it was being handled opened a PDF of the document and traced the final modification through its meta data. That employee shared the information with Eric Sandgren, a professor in the UW-Madison Veterinary School.
Sandgren independently confirmed it, and so did the Journal Sentinel.
“I understand partisanship, I understand disagreement, and I understand PR and public persuasion, but I cannot accept when folks lie,” Sandgren told the newspaper. “This whole UW System support story has brought out the worst in a lot of people. I wish I could win the Lotto and give the system half a billion.”
The decision to withhold details of the $6.23 billion operating budget prior to the regents discussing and voting on it was delivered to reporters shortly before 1 p.m. Wednesday.
UW System spokesman Alex Hummel notified the news media that the budget document, which includes details of student fee increases and drawdown of fund balances, would not be released as previously promised, and consistent with past practice.
The U.S. Treasury took in a record of approximately $2,139,254,000,000 in tax revenues in the first eight months of fiscal 2016 (Oct. 1, 2015 through May 31, 2016), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.
That is up about $15,347,130,000–in constant 2016 dollars—from the approximately $2,123,906,870,000 in constant 2016 dollars the Treasury collected in the first eight months of fiscal 2015.
When Eric Broyles was nine years old, recklessly riding a bike through his Hamilton, Ohio, neighborhood, he had a tense encounter with a police officer: he fell off his bike, sending it rolling into the street, nearly hitting a passing police car. In response, the officer chastised him, using a racial slur.
Broyles, now an attorney, wrote about the incident — one of two unpleasant police encounters that he details — in his new book, “Encounters With Police: A Black Man’s Guide to Survival.” “I was stunned,” he wrote. “I was so terrified because I did realize that I could have been run over and then I was mortified by the police officer’s racial slur.”
Those experiences, as well as the recent spate of high-profile police shootings, inspired Broyles — who co-authored the book with his friend, Adrian Jackson, a 25-year veteran of an Ohio police department — to provide African-American men a guide for handling their own interactions with police. Below, he reflects on recent shootings, the reasons why police encounters escalate, and why his book’s message, “comply now and contest later,” couldn’t be more relevant.
Consider venerable State Street, a 224-year-old custody bank that predates the steam locomotive and caters to institutional investors such as pensions and mutual funds. In February, State Street executives told analysts that after spending five years upgrading technology systems, they realized how much more could be done. “We have 20,000 manual interventions on trades every day,” said Michael Rogers, president of the Boston bank. “There’s a huge opportunity to digitize that and move it forward electronically.”
But one person’s opportunity is another person’s exit package. State Street had 32,356 people on the payroll last year. About one of every five will be automated out of a job by 2020, according to Rogers. What the bank is doing presages broader changes about to sweep across the industry. A report in March by Citigroup, the fourth-biggest U.S. bank, said that more than 1.8 million U.S. and European bank workers could lose their jobs within 10 years.
Elizabeth is one of several million people — so many of them teenagers — who have become obsessed with the Broadway show “Hamilton.” It is funny, if you think about it. Kids all over America are smitten by a show about a previously minor Founding Father who probably would have gotten chucked off the $10 bill had it not been for the genius of Lin-Manuel Miranda. When I was Elizabeth’s age, we all wore Rush and Black Sabbath T-shirts and sang about how Mommy’s alright and Daddy’s alright, they just seem a little weird.
A school district is allowed to discipline a sixth-grader for bullying because he made disparaging remarks about a classmate’s vegetarianism.
In a case that climbed up the legal ladder, the state Commissioner of Education’s office has ruled that the Montgomery school district can give detention to the student who told the other sixth-grader that “vegetarians are idiots.”
The case rose to the commissioner’s office because the student’s parent contested the district’s finding that the remarks about vegetarianism constituted bullying, a finding that was later backed by a state administrative law judge.
The case began on Oct. 30, 2014, when the two 11-year-old sixth-graders were having lunch in the cafeteria of Montgomery’s Lower Middle School. One of the students, identified in court papers as C.C., made the comments to another student, K.S., about his decision not to eat meat.
The investigation by the school’s anti-bullying specialist, guidance counselor Lesley Haas, found that C.C. told K.S. that “it’s not good to not eat meat” and that “he should eat meat because he’d be smarter and have bigger brains,” according to court papers.
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble, or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances.
After writing an article critical of Donald Trump a few months ago, the political theorist Danielle Allen received dozens of racist tweets and emails from his supporters, one with a picture of a noose. But it hasn’t stopped her from being heartened by one aspect of this election cycle: the increased voter turnout that helped Mr. Trump become the presumptive Republican nominee for president. She has long argued for more civic participation and engagement in the political system—and not just for people who share her own political views.
Dr. Allen responded to some of her critics directly and to others in open letters published online. She advised them to read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, and to think about issues like the character of public officials and the principles of constitutionalism. If Americans were better equipped to reflect on their laws and the promises of politicians, she believes, they would elect more thoughtful and less divisive leaders.
Dr. Allen, 44, a government professor at Harvard University and director of its Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, is a big proponent of political equality—the idea that every American should play an active role in the workings of our democracy.
information that is… more deserving of Fourth Amendment protection,” Haggerty said. “By obtaining the prescription records for individuals like John Does 2 and 4, a person would know that they have used testosterone in particular quantities and by extension, that they have gender identity disorder and are treating it through hormone therapy.
“Although there is not an absolute right to privacy in prescription information… it is more than reasonable for patients to believe that law enforcement agencies will not have unfettered access to their records,” he added.
The Obama administration disagrees, and argues that since the records have already been submitted to a third party (Oregon’s PDMP) that patients no longer enjoy an expectation of privacy.
In an affidavit, one of the plaintiffs said he already faces difficulty obtaining the injectible testosterone he’s required to take and that “increased scrutiny by law enforcement, including the DEA, erects another obstacle to obtaining treatment.”
“I would be fearful of being investigated or harassed without reason,” he testified. “I would feel like I was constantly looking over my shoulder.”
Last year, after the charges against Marlon Jones were dropped, a Utah senator introduced a bill that would require police to obtain a warrant to search the database.
Today, most of the ferment on campus comes not from academic departments—even the most politically charged ones—but from diversity centers and the faculty and administrators who staff them. At Yale, for instance, the Afro-American Cultural Center hosts a “Black Solidarity” conference each year. Its Social Justice programming includes a Black Lives Matter series. The emphasis of these centers is not just academic study but social action.
Another such diversity outfit at Yale is the Intercultural Affairs Council, which sparked a controversy last October with an email to students warning them not to wear racially or culturally insensitive Halloween costumes. One contrarian lecturer made the mistake of disagreeing. Protests ensued. By the time the fuss was over, the university had committed $50 million for diversity training and recruiting.
This visualization shows the Medium projection by theInternational Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).The researchers who created this projection describe it astheir “middle of the road scenario that can also be seen as themost likely path”.
For the first 27 years of his life, the mathematician Ken Ono was a screw-up, a disappointment and a failure. At least, that’s how he saw himself. The youngest son of first-generation Japanese immigrants to the United States, Ono grew up under relentless pressure to achieve academically. His parents set an unusually high bar. Ono’s father, an eminent mathematician who accepted an invitation from J. Robert Oppenheimer to join the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., expected his son to follow in his footsteps. Ono’s mother, meanwhile, was a quintessential “tiger parent,” discouraging any interests unrelated to the steady accumulation of scholarly credentials.
This intellectual crucible produced the desired results—Ono studied mathematics and launched a promising academic career—but at great emotional cost. As a teenager, Ono became so desperate to escape his parents’ expectations that he dropped out of high school. He later earned admission to the University of Chicago but had an apathetic attitude toward his studies, preferring to party with his fraternity brothers. He eventually discovered a genuine enthusiasm for mathematics, became a professor, and started a family, but fear of failure still weighed so heavily on Ono that he attempted suicide while attending an academic conference. Only after he joined the Institute for Advanced Study himself did Ono begin to make peace with his upbringing.
I grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, on the wrong side of the river that divided white from black, opportunity from struggle, and started my education in a low-income school that my mother says was distressingly chaotic. I don’t recall it being bad, but I do remember just one white child in my first-grade class, though there may have been more. That summer, my mom and dad enrolled my older sister and me in the school district’s voluntary desegregation program, which allowed some black kids to leave their neighborhood schools for whiter, more well off ones on the west side of town. This was 1982, nearly three decades after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate schools for black and white children were unconstitutional, and near the height of desegregation in this country. My parents chose one of the whitest, richest schools, thinking it would provide the best opportunities for us. Starting in second grade, I rode the bus an hour each morning across town to the “best” public school my town had to offer, Kingsley Elementary, where I was among the tiny number of working-class children and the even tinier number of black children. We did not walk to school or get dropped off by our parents on their way to work. We showed up in a yellow bus, visitors in someone else’s neighborhood, and were whisked back across the bridge each day as soon as the bell rang.
As a freelancer who makes her own hours, I’ve learned a few things about personal momentum. I’m a morning person, and my peak productive time is before 10:00 AM. If I start my day by sitting at the desk at, say, 5:00 AM, and digging in on actual work, I’ll keep going all day. If I start the day by, say, cleaning the kitchen or folding laundry or phaffing about on the interwebs, I’m in trouble. And if, God forbid, I sit on the couch and flip on The Today Show, all bets are off; I’m not moving until bedtime. I think of it as Newton’s Law of Personal Momentum, for I am an object that will either stay at rest or stay in motion, based on where I am at 5:30 AM.
Hunters helping Nigerian soldiers battle Boko Haram found one of the 276 schoolgirls kidnapped from the town of Chibok, activists and the military said, the first of the captives to escape the Islamist insurgency in nearly two years.
The 19-year-old, identified as Amina Ali Nkeki, was found wandering near a mostly abandoned village early Wednesday morning by the hunters in the Sambisa forest, said officials and members of the #BringBackOurGirls activist group. Ms. Nkeki was breastfeeding her baby daughter; the military said she was with a man officials took to be her husband from a forced marriage.
The teenager was initially driven to her hometown of Chibok in a procession of pickup trucks and briefly reunited with her mother.
“She was not in a good condition,” said Elijah Dauda, the chairman of a local vigilante group. “Immediately she came in asking for bread.”
The Pulitzer prize-winning editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press has called for the murder of Michigan lawmakers with whom he disagrees.
The reason? The lawmakers voted for legislation that would give parents more choices to avoid Michigan’s failing public schools. Detroit’s public schools are failing academically and nearly insolvent, the New York Times wrote in January. The Detroit News wrote in March that “the statewide opinion of K-12 education is downright ugly.” That poll showed residents didn’t think throwing money at public-union-controlled schools was the answer, with 63 percent saying it takes more than money to improve education.
While teacher unions and the politicians whom they support fight many changes to the educational system that give parents more leverage, charter schools have been making a difference in educational outcomes. A Stanford study last year showed they make a meaningful difference for underserved kids in urban areas. These results carried across multiple subgroups, including black, Hispanic and Asian students, as well as students from poor families and students with special educational needs. In the 41 cities studied, students educated at charter schools learned significantly more than their peers in traditional public schools in math and reading. See “13 Things To Know About Charter Schools.”
What’s going on when a public university feels entitled to ask potential faculty members questions clearly aimed at ferreting out their political and social commitments? Such questions, reminiscent of loyalty oaths and the demands of totalitarian regimes would seem to have no place in an educational institution in modern-day America. But for some years now, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as at many other universities, the administration has allowed and actively encouraged precisely such interrogations.
In fact, the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity at UMass thoughtfully provides Supplemental Search Instructions, including suggestions for typical questions to be asked during interviews. These invite search committees to fill in the blank with the name of the “protected group” of their choice.
That was 75 years ago, but this type of racist housing policy helped create two divergent Americas.
These policies are typically called redlining, in that they drew a bright red line between the areas where black families could and couldn’t get loans.
Redlining poisoned the mortgage market for black people. It meant that black families were systematically forced to live in separate neighborhoods.
Our efforts to combat poverty are often based on a misconception: that the poor must pull themselves up out of the mire. But a revolutionary new theory looks at the cognitive effects of living in poverty. What does the relentless struggle to make ends meet do to people?
On November 13, 1997, a new casino opened its doors just south of North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains. Despite the dismal weather, a long line had formed at the entrance, and as people continued to arrive by the hundreds, the casino boss began advising folks to stay at home.
The widespread interest was hardly surprising. Harrah’s Cherokee was and still is a massive luxury casino owned and operated by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and its opening marked the end of a ten-year-long political tug of war. One tribal leader had even predicted that “gambling would be the Cherokee’s damnation,” and North Carolina’s governor had tried to block the project at every turn.
It wasn’t until my second year at the university (fall of 2015) that I began reading computer science / programming books. At the time, I was taking a course on computer networking, and the course book was Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach (Kurose & Ross). I felt the lectures weren’t in-depth enough, so I picked up the book. Before that, I had gotten decent grades by mostly attending the lectures, labs, and not buying any books, other than books required for mandatory task work.
The founder of X, Alphabet Inc.’s research and development facility, is bringing his online education company to Germany to help the likes of Volkswagen AG and BMW AG gear up for technological changes such as the self-driving car.
Udacity Inc., which offers so-called nanodegrees online and has developed courses with Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., is expanding to Germany because its banks, energy companies and carmakers are struggling to equip staff and find enough workers with the right skills as their industries are disrupted by technology, said founder and President Sebastian Thrun, who worked on Google’s self-driving car project.
It’s no secret that the New York City public schools are deeply segregated. Throughout the five boroughs, most black and Latino students attend schools where they are the overwhelming majority, according to both a much-cited 2014 UCLA study and more current city data. Beyond the social implications of racial and ethnic segregation, there is inequity: most of the predominantly black and Latino schools have high concentrations of low-income students, fewer highly qualified teachers and lower test scores.
We do not want to learn what we can get used to. I’m sure once the historical commission had delayed the bridge for many months, there was an attitude of “What’s another couple?” In a broader sense, the Anderson Memorial Bridge tale tees up a bigger question. Where is the outrage? Why didn’t the governor or the mayors of Boston and Cambridge act? What about the great free press? We seem to be caught in a dismal cycle of low expectations, poor results and shared cynicism.
More than questions of personality or even those of high policy, the question of how to escape this trap should be a central issue in this election year.
More than four-fifths of America’s metropolitan areas have seen household incomes decline this century, according to new research that exposes the politically charged reality of middle-class decline at the heart of this year’s presidential election.
The research on urban centres that are home to three-quarters of the US population shows that median household incomes, adjusted for the cost of living in the area, grew in just 39 out of 229 metro areas between 1999 and 2014.
The figures, prepared by the non-partisan Pew Research Center and shared with the Financial Times, cast light on the drivers of the economic discontent that have fuelled the rise of Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee, and Bernie Sanders, the challenger to Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
Both men’s campaigns have tapped into deep-seated concerns among middle class voters on the right and the left. Pew’s research illuminates one source of that anxiety and raises questions about even some of America’s most celebrated economic success stories.
Eastern Washington University’s English Language Institute is in crisis mode.
The intensive language training program for foreign students in Cheney, Wash., saw enrollment plummet by more than half in recent months, to 41 students for the spring quarter. It cut its part-time teaching staff to two from eight, and eliminated some student-worker positions.
Seemingly overnight, its core market—Saudi Arabian students funded by government scholarships—nosedived.
“We knew this wouldn’t last forever, but I wasn’t expecting as sharp a drop-off,” said Neil Heyen, the institute’s director.
Using a sample of all academics that pass through top 50 economics and finance departments between 1996 and 2014, we study whether the granting of tenure leads faculty to pursue riskier ideas. We use the extreme tails of ex-post citations as our measure of risk and find that both the number of publications and the portion that are “home runs” peak at tenure and fall steadily for a decade thereafter. Similar patterns holds for elite (top 10) institutions, for faculty with longer tenure cycles, and for promotion to Full Professorship. We find the opposite pattern among poorly-cited publications: their numbers steadily rise after tenure. The decline in both the quantity and quality of publications points to tenure incentivizing less effort in publishing rather than more risk-taking.
I’m not sure this is quite the mea culpa the Times thinks it is. Gates certainly isn’t abandoning the Common Core. The foundation will focus on providing high-quality Core-aligned learning materials and helping teachers choose from what’s available.
“If the knock on the hidebound education system is that it doesn’t change fast enough isn’t the knock on Gates that they change too fast?” responds Eduwonk. “Their small schools investments were not the disaster everyone thinks they were but they pivoted before the evaluations came in. . . . They soft peddled the results of their own evaluations of measures of teacher effectiveness. And while the rollout of Common Core has certainly been a political disaster and the assessment scene is something of a garbage fire, the standards themselves are pretty embedded.”
first, a general overview of language Persian is: Persian is an easy language cloaked in an air of seeming difficulty. It’s not easy to learn for two reasons: 1) it uses the Arabic alphabet; 2) it’s just not as easy to find places to use it as with languages like Spanish, French, German, and so on.
The language itself is quite easy to learn though, and because of reason 1) above I would recommend that anybody seriously learning or teaching the language over a long period of time (say over a 4-year period in university) should spend the first six months or so without learning the alphabet. It’s much easier to get an idea of what the language is like when you don’t have to up and learn a whole new alphabet at the same time.
The night after it happened, he said he didn’t know my name, said he wouldn’t be able to identify my face in a lineup, didn’t mention any dialogue between us, no words, only dancing and kissing. Dancing is a cute term; was it snapping fingers and twirling dancing, or just bodies grinding up against each other in a crowded room? I wonder if kissing was just faces sloppily pressed up against each other? When the detective asked if he had planned on taking me back to his dorm, he said no. When the detective asked how we ended up behind the dumpster, he said he didn’t know. He admitted to kissing other girls at that party, one of whom was my own sister who pushed him away. He admitted to wanting to hook up with someone. I was the wounded antelope of the herd, completely alone and vulnerable, physically unable to fend for myself, and he chose me. Sometimes I think, if I hadn’t gone, then this never would’ve happened. But then I realized, it would have happened, just to somebody else. You were about to enter four years of access to drunk girls and parties, and if this is the foot you started off on, then it is right you did not continue. The night after it happened, he said he thought I liked it because I rubbed his back. A back rub.
After months of trying to get school administrators to deal with the racially charged climate at Westosha Central High School in Salem, Niccole Simmons took her concerns to the elected School Board.
Simmons told the Journal Sentinel she intended to plead for resources that would help Principal Lisa Albrecht address the issues at the high school.
But less than a minute into her comments, Simmons was cut off by Superintendent Scott Pierce, who deemed her remarks a “personal attack” on the principal.
There are supposed to be 27 children in Harold Boyd IV’s second-grade classroom, but how many of them will be there on a given day is anyone’s guess.
Since school began in September, five new students have arrived and eight children have left. Two transferred out in November. One who started in January was gone in April. A boy showed up for a single day in March, and then never came back. Even now, in the twilight of the school year, new students are still arriving, one as recently as mid-May.
At Public School 188, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, students churn relentlessly in and out. Administrators estimate that nearly half the students enrolled at the school do not last the full year. And how could it be otherwise?
What made Mozart great? Or Bobby Fischer? Or Serena Williams?
The answer sits somewhere on the scales of human achievement. On one side: natural talent. On the other: hard work. Many would argue that success hangs in some delicate balance between them. But not Anders Ericsson.
Ericsson has spent decades studying the power of practice, and in his new book, Peak: Secrets From The New Science Of Expertise, co-authored with Robert Pool, he argues that “talent” is often a story we tell ourselves to justify our own failure or to protect children from the possibility of failure. He writes:
The corner gets crowded from 3pm until late at night as pupils from schools in Diepkloof share the space to do their schoolwork.
Thabiso Sebola, a part-time first-year project management student at Wits University often spends time on the corner.
“I do a lot of my studying here. I download subject content and review what my lecturer said in class with the assistance of information I get from various internet sites. I come here at least four times a week and spend between three and four hours here – even when it is cold,” said Sebola.
The government financed a large share of these educations through grants, low-interest loans and loan guarantees. Total outstanding student debt—almost all guaranteed or made directly by the federal government—has quadrupled since 2000 to $1.2 trillion today. The government also spent tens of billions of dollars in grants and tax credits for students. New research shows a significant chunk of that investment backfired, with millions of students worse off for having gone to school. Many never learned new skills because they dropped out—and now carry debt they are unwilling or unable to repay.
Just to get home from school, they climb 800 meters (more than 2,500 feet) toward the sky—on a ladder made of bamboo and secured to a sheer cliff face.
After pictures surfaced of the challenging trek faced by schoolchildren in a poor corner of China’s mountainous west, their village may be getting some assistance by way of a safer, more modern piece of infrastructure: a solid set of steel stairs.
The hardship faced by residents in the village of Atuleer in Sichuan province underscores the vast gap in development between China’s prosperous, modern east and parts of the remote inland west that remain mired in poverty.
The bamboo ladder is the only means of access to the village for the 15 children, between the ages of 6 and 15, who return every two weeks from the school where they board. The 72 families who live there are members of the Yi minority group and subsist mainly by farming potatoes, walnuts and chili peppers.
OF all the students preparing to go to college this fall, perhaps none have faced a more hazardous journey than a young woman named Sultana. One measure of the hazard is that I’m not disclosing her last name or hometown for fear that she might be shot.
Sultana lives in the Taliban heartland of southern Afghanistan, and when she was in the fifth grade a delegation visited her home to warn her father to pull her out of school, or else she would have acid flung in her face. Ever since, she has been largely confined to her high-walled family compound — in which she has secretly, and perilously, educated herself.
Everyone in this room would agree that we are moving into something called “the computer future,” a future in which everything will be different because of the presence of computers and other new technologies. In some departments of life, the computer presence is already visible. Coming here from my home, I passed through an airport and bought airplane tickets. The computer terminal has become an integral part of that transaction — you buy airplane tickets by dealing with somebody at a computer. In some of our airports in the United States, you don’t even need the person. You can deal directly with the computer: put in your credit card, and out comes the ticket.
These manifestations of the computer are perhaps superficial. They have not changed our lives very much. It even takes the same amount of time to get your airplane ticket. But there are other departments of life in which no one would say that the use of the computer is superficial. No one who owes his or her life to CAT scans in medicine would think that the role of the computer in transforming medical practice is a superficial matter. We are meeting here this week to talk about the computer in a department that, up to now, has been touched only superficially: learning, education, and the lives of children. The presence of the computer in this area will have a very deep impact, not only upon the nature of schools themselves, but upon the whole of human society. The way that the computer enters into learning will play a determining role in the way that both technology and the larger culture evolve in the coming generation.
So we are entering this computer future; but what will it be like? What sort of a world will it be? There is no shortage of experts, futurists, and prophets who are ready to tell us, but they don’t agree. The Utopians promise us a new millennium, a wonderful world in which the computer will solve all our problems. The computer critics warn us of the dehumanizing effect of too much exposure to machinery, and of disruption of employment in the workplace and the economy.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, a German philosopher, once stated that there was a universal tendency to see success as the result of innate talent, rather than effort. Today it is still common to think of the straight-A pupil as having a “gift” for learning, or of the sports star as miraculously skilful. Angela Duckworth, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, believes that talent is overrated. More important, she suggests, is a blend of persistence and passion—or “grit”. “Our potential is one thing,” she writes. “What we do with it is quite another.”
That character matters is not a new idea. But “Grit”, Ms Duckworth’s first book, is part of a broader trend which is influencing organisations from sports teams to schools.
Hidden truths permeate our world; they’re inaccessible to our senses, but math allows us to go beyond our intuition to uncover their mysteries. In this survey of mathematical breakthroughs, Fields Medal winner Cédric Villani speaks to the thrill of discovery and details the sometimes perplexing life of a mathematician. “Beautiful mathematical explanations are not only for our pleasure,” he says. “They change our vision of the world.”
IN JULY 2012 a man calling himself Sam Bacile posted a short video on YouTube. It showed the Prophet Muhammad bedding various women, taking part in gory battles and declaring: “Every non-Muslim is an infidel. Their lands, their women, their children are our spoils.”
The film was, as Salman Rushdie, a British author, later put it, “crap”. “The Innocence of Muslims” could have remained forever obscure, had someone not dubbed it into Arabic and reposted it in September that year. An Egyptian chat-show host denounced it and before long, this short, crap film was sparking riots across the Muslim world—and beyond. A group linked to al-Qaeda murdered America’s ambassador in Libya. Protests erupted in Afghanistan, Australia, Britain, France and India. Pakistan’s railways minister offered a $100,000 bounty to whoever killed the film-maker—and was not sacked. By the end of the month at least 50 people had died.
In this paper a mathematical model of card shuffling is constructed, and used to determine how much shuffling is necessary to randomize a deck of cards. The crucial aspect of this model is rising sequences of permutations, or equivalently descents in their inverses. The probability of an arrangement of cards occuring under shuffling is a function only of the number of rising sequences in the permutation. This fact makes computation of variation distance, a measure of randomness, feasible; for in an n card deck there are at most n rising sequences but n! possible arrangements. This computation is done exactly for n = 52, and other approximation methods are considered.
Our lawmakers have spent the last year locked in a staggering budget impasse, with no end in sight. The state is deep in debt, with mountains of unpaid bills, while the Democratic-led Legislature and the Republican governor fight a war of attrition. Another deadline just blew by this week: May 31 was the last official day of the legislative session. Still no budget. Any proposal now needs a three-fifths majority to pass, an even higher bar. Meanwhile, the collateral damage is swirling like sand in a windstorm.
The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organisations, from art history to zoology. But what does “excellence” mean? Does it in fact mean anything at all? And is the pervasive narrative of excellence and competition a good thing? Drawing on a range of sources we interrogate “excellence” as a concept and find that it has no intrinsic meaning as used in the academy. Rather it functions as a linguistic interchange mechanism or boundary object. To investigate whether linguistic function is useful we examine how excellence rhetoric combines with narratives of scarcity and competition and show that hypercompetition that arises leads to a performance of “excellence” that is completely at odds with the qualities of good research. We trace the roots of issues in reproducibility, fraud, as well as diversity to the stories we tell ourselves as researchers and offer an alternative rhetoric based on soundness. “Excellence” is not excellent, it is a pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship.
Ohio State University, a Chinese student took tests for Chinese classmates for cash last year, guaranteeing an A.
At the University of California, Irvine, some international students used a lost-ID-card ruse to let impersonators take exams in place of others.
At the University of Arizona, a professor told of Chinese students handing in multiple copies of the same incorrect test answers.
A flood of foreign undergraduates on America’s campuses is improving the financial health of universities. It also sometimes clashes with a fundamental value of U.S. scholarship: academic integrity.
It’s graduation season at high schools and colleges around the country, the time of year when students are honored for their accomplishments from the classrooms to the athletic fields.
Teachers and counselors have long encouraged students to be “well-rounded.” But the problem with well-rounded students is that they usually don’t focus on any one thing for a prolonged period of time. Too often they seem to participate in activities just to check off a series of boxes, instead of showing the deep and sustained involvement, passion, and dedication that employers seek. Their résumés are filled with what some recruiters refer to as “sign-up clubs.”
Nyerere was the first leader of the United Tanzanian Republic from 1960 (when it was still Tanganyika) to 1985. Ujamaa means “extended family” or “brotherhood” — it was the word Nyerere used to describe his vision of economic and social development. “Every citizen is an integral part of the Nation and has a right to take an equal part in Government at local, regional and national level,” he wrote in his Arusha Declaration. His writing was succinct and inspiring, but ultimately, Ujamaa policies did little to prevent devastating economic decline. Today, Tanzania’s hunger level is rated “serious” by the Global Hunger Index, with an estimated 32.1% of the population undernourished.
Nyerere wrote a treatise in 1967 entitled Education for Self-Reliance, in which he called for free compulsory public schooling that would contradict colonial “attitudes of inequality, intellectual arrogance and intense individualism.” He thought Tanzania’s education should focus on agriculture and productivity. His influence is obvious when I’m standing outside the classrooms. The simple rectangular school buildings are built from concrete and arranged symmetrically around a well-maintained courtyard. Late in the afternoon, I spot the students singing together while they tend to the grounds, trimming the grass and pruning the shrubs. Their end-of-day contributions would likely please the former president if he were still alive. He envisioned egalitarian “school farms,” where “students will relate work to comfort. They will learn the meaning of living together and working together for the good of all.”
When people learn that I want to replace the welfare state with a universal basic income, or UBI, the response I almost always get goes something like this: “But people will just use it to live off the rest of us!” “People will waste their lives!” Or, as they would have put it in a bygone age, a guaranteed income will foster idleness and vice. I see it differently. I think that a UBI is our only hope to deal with a coming labor market unlike any in human history and that it represents our best hope to revitalize American civil society.
The great free-market economist Milton Friedman originated the idea of a guaranteed income just after World War II. An experiment using a bastardized version of his “negative income tax” was tried in the 1970s, with disappointing results. But as transfer payments continued to soar while the poverty rate remained stuck at more than 10% of the population, the appeal of a guaranteed income persisted: If you want to end poverty, just give people money. As of 2016, the UBI has become a live policy option. Finland is planning a pilot project for a UBI next year, and Switzerland is voting this weekend on a referendum to install a UBI.
When we were out there, they tasted amazing,” said Sergeant Brown, who went to the gym twice a day when he was overseas to make sure he did not put on too much weight from the dining hall and its honey buns and muffins.
While some American military personnel, in particular Special Operations forces and a number of Marine and conventional Army units, operated out of small, spartan outposts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bulk of Army troops lived on bases that had running water, electricity and housing units. Some larger bases even had wireless internet, televisions, gyms and coffee shops. Civilian contractors guarded the bases, cooked meals and transported ammunition, food and fuel.
IN A sense, this is a golden age for free speech. Your smartphone can call up newspapers from the other side of world in seconds. More than a billion tweets, Facebook posts and blog updates are published every single day. Anyone with access to the internet can be a publisher, and anyone who can reach Wikipedia enters a digital haven where America’s First Amendment reigns.
However, watchdogs report that speaking out is becoming more dangerous—and they are right. As our report shows, curbs on free speech have grown tighter. Without the contest of ideas, the world is timid and ignorant.
Seven years ago 120 girls bedecked in purple polo shirts and plaid skirts walked into an experiment — a Baltimore public school modeled on those originally designed for affluent white girls whose families could afford to send them to “finishing school.”
On Friday, half of those girls, all but one of them African-American and most from working-class families, will don white robes to make history as the first graduating class of the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, the city’s first all-female, public middle-high school.
Three months ago, I spent a morning at Auer Avenue School, a Milwaukee Public Schools grade school that is gaining new drive and focus as a “community school.” I liked what I saw.
But one of the things that sticks in my mind is something I said, not something they told me. At the end of the morning, I met with about 10 people involved in the school. One of them asked what I thought of the new law that allows Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele to take control of some MPS schools.
In nineteenth-century Germany, scholars in the humanities often enjoyed a fame that few of their colleagues elsewhere could dream of. It was with wonder that Mark Twain, who toured the country in the 1890s, observed tram conductors excitedly pointing out a historian whom they had spotted on the street. Yet even there, those in the humanities felt a sense of crisis. This sense was rooted in developments that contemporary discussions of the humanities have obscured. It’s often said that the German university system was founded on the ideal of Wissenschaft, or systematic knowledge and scholarship. American universities, by contrast, were founded on a dual inheritance: on the one side, the British collegiate tradition of building character and on the other, the mission of specialized research, adopted from the German model in the late nineteenth century.
But this is a misrepresentation, because character formation had also been essential to the thinking behind the emergence of the German research university around 1800. In fact, our present-day understanding of what the humanities can do for students is much closer to that thinking than it is to the notion of moral education institutionalized at the religious colleges and universities of antebellum America.
Humboldt’s formula achieved nearaxiomatic status during the nineteenth century. But a few decades after the founding of the University of Berlin in 1810, the link between Wissenschaft and Bildung came under serious pressure. As the Prussian state grew in power and size, technological and scientific advances began to play a greater role in the economy. The Prussian state pressed universities for more immediately “usable” research and knowledge. Key figures in Prussian society and the Prussian government developed a nineteenth-century version of the contemporary STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) obsession; and the state awarded research support accordingly. To compete in this funding environment and ensure their own prestige, some in the humanities tried to match the scale and aspirations of research in the natural sciences, as some digital humanities researchers do today, devising data collection projects of unprecedented size – the “heavy industry of scholarship”, as one practitioner put it. Others, like the Basel historian Jacob Burckhardt, wondered whether these outsized undertakings had left any room for real thinking.
September, The Atlantic published a disquieting cover story about the current generation of college students. According to the article, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, young people raised by overindulgent parents increasingly come to colleges and universities demanding protection from ideas that might challenge them. Instead of learning to think critically, students police the air for “microaggressions”—offhand comments that may reinforce stereotypes—and insist that “trigger warnings” be placed on potentially disturbing texts, including classic works of literature such as The Great Gatsby. Entitled, hypersensitive, quick to take offense: This is the new normal among undergraduates, the article warned, fostering a vindictive atmosphere of political correctness “in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.”
A few years after I graduated from college, when I was short on cash, short on space, and short on hope that some significant portion of my days might ever again be spent in reading and writing and thinking about something beyond my immediate material circumstances and familial duties, I made a decision that I have wished many times to take back: I sold almost all of my textbooks. Not just the overpriced and (for me, anyhow) under-studied behemoth from Intro to Econ, nor my well-used but no longer useful grammar and exercise book from French I and II – those weren’t the only texts I culled from my little library.
descriptive word the founder and CEO of the Education Trust used several times during a school funding session at the Mackinac Policy Conference. The trust is a nonpartisan research and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C.
“Kids in Michigan are in a free fall relative to kids in other states,” said Haycock, citing the trust’s education data analysis released in a report last month. “We were 28th in the United States in 2003 in reading and 41st in 2015.”
She added 1 in 3 white fourth-graders are reading at grade level, coming in at 49th in the country, according to the analysis.
What do you think the unemployment rate is for 25-to-34-year-olds who graduated from a four-year college? (Hint: for those with only a high school degree, it’s 7.4 percent.)
“It’s important that we keep local tax dollars in local districts as much as possible, while still ensuring that all students have access to quality public schools,” Straus said.
Straus is the first statewide leader to call for action following the state Supreme Court’s unanimous decision nearly three weeks ago that upheld the state’s public school funding system as constitutional, while also urging state lawmakers to implement “transformational, top-to-bottom reforms that amount to more than Band-Aid on top of Band-Aid.”
He already has ordered the House to study the Cost of Education Index, one component of the school finance system, along with the debt load and facility needs of fast-growing school districts.
“Combined with those studies, the newly issued charges will allow the House to take a thorough look at school finance when the Legislature convenes in January 2017,” according to the news release.
Straus’ move drew praise from at least one Democratic lawmaker and school and progressive groups that worried lawmakers would not address school finance absent a judicial mandate.
Broad demographic shifts in marital status, educational attainment and employment have transformed the way young adults in the U.S. are living, and a new Pew Research Center analysis of census data highlights the implications of these changes for the most basic element of their lives – where they call home. In 2014, for the first time in more than 130 years, adults ages 18 to 34 were slightly more likely to be living in their parents’ home than they were to be living with a spouse or partner in their own household. 1
This turn of events is fueled primarily by the dramatic drop in the share of young Americans who are choosing to settle down romantically before age 35. Dating back to 1880, the most common living arrangement among young adults has been living with a romantic partner, whether a spouse or a significant other. This type of arrangement peaked around 1960, when 62% of the nation’s 18- to 34-year-olds were living with a spouse or partner in their own household, and only one-in-five were living with their parents
You could be forgiven for thinking that Britain has largely solved the problem of getting ethnic minority students into university. “All ethnic minority groups in England are now, on average, more likely to go to university than their white British peers,” reported a study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies at the end of last year.
his high school career, and taxpayers could pay the price for years to come.
According to a study released Thursday by the University of California-Los Angeles, the suspensions of 10th-graders across the United States in the 2001-02 school year prompted an estimated 68,000 students to eventually drop out of school. Those dropouts, researchers say, cost Americans some $11 billion in lost tax revenue and $35.6 billion in broader social costs—such as health care costs, job loss, and potential earnings—over the course of a lifetime.
Lynch went from starter to backup at Penn State last season as freshman Saquon Barkley emerged as one of the best running backs in the country.
Facing the prospect of spending most of his final season of college eligibility on the sideline, Lynch decided to take advantage of an NCAA rule that allows graduates to transfer and be immediately eligible to play.
2016
The University System of New Hampshire is launching a yearlong open education initiative to promote affordable textbooks, collaboration and open-access publishing. The system, which consists of Granite State College, Keene State College, Plymouth State University and the University of New Hampshire, is this week hosting faculty members from across its member institutions at a conference to discuss the concept of open education and how it applies to course materials, collaboration between students and faculty members, and scholarly publishing. An early pilot with open educational resources that ran last year at UNH saved students nearly $150,000 on textbook costs, the university system said in the announcement.
have ordered fourteen students who scored top marks on their final exams in India’s Bihar state to be retested amid concerns of cheating.
The decision to retest the students was made after one of the students told a local media outlet that political science was about cooking. Another student, who scored high marks on her science examination, said the most reactive element in the periodic table was aluminum.
IN RECENT YEARS, debate about the state of graduate education in the humanities has flourished. This seemingly arcane subject has gained currency since the recession of 2008, amid the burgeoning national discussion of student debt and adjunct instructors’ intensifying efforts to unionize. A new genre of online prose, “quit lit,” articulates graduate students’ anger at the dearth of academic jobs. Perhaps in response to these widely read tales of talented PhDs unable to find long-term employment in the academy, modest proposals from the professoriat have promoted the idea of a “Malleable PhD” at professional conferences and in the pages of scholarly journals. These calls for reform seek to redefine the humanities PhD as a gateway to jobs beyond the academy. They announce plans to funnel unemployed PhDs into “alt-ac” careers, a vaguely defined category that encompasses everything from posts within the university administration to research-focused jobs at nonprofits to positions with commercial firms.
scientists, entrepreneurs and policy leaders held an invitation-only, closed-door meeting at Harvard University to discuss an ambitious plan to create synthetic human genomes. Now, after a flurry of criticism over the secrecy of the effort, the participants have published their idea, declaring that they’re launching a project to radically reduce the cost of synthesizing genomes — a potentially revolutionary development in biotechnology that could enable technicians to grow human organs for transplantation.
The announcement, published Thursday in the journal Science, is the latest sign that biotechnology is going through a rapidly advancing but ethically fraught period. Scientists have been honing their techniques for manipulating the complex molecules that serve as the code for all life on the planet, and this same issue of the journal Science reports a breakthrough in editing RNA, a molecule that is the close cousin of DNA.
nonprofit called iMentor provided a mentor who helped him stay focused in high school and apply to college. Nominated by iMentor, Mendez was invited to the opening of Reach Higher, Michelle Obama’s initiative to inspire students to go to college. The summer after he flunked out, he was a Reach Higher “ambassador.” He was embarrassed to tell the truth. . . . this is not a story of how I overcame everything to reach success. This is just me telling the truth. This is me finally letting go of all the pain and weight I hold in my heart of not wanting to disappoint anybody. Mendez is now a full-time student at LaGuardia Community College while working almost 40 hours per week at a coffee shop. Mendez has plenty of grit. What he lacked was preparation for college-level academics. – See more at: http://www.joannejacobs.com/2016/06/beating-the-odds-model-was-college-dropout/#sthash.zFBWzHIr.dpuf
Higher education will be cut by 7.66 percent. The Oklahoma Health Care Authority (the state Medicaid provider) will get a 9.24 percent increase. The Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services will get a 2.18 percent increase.
Government (redistributed tax dollars) health care spending growth has long crowded out other expenditures.
Diversified knowledge required in the modern economy requires relying on experts, but imbuing these experts with political authority has disastrous consequences.
The additional power that is being granted to experts under the Obama administration is indeed striking. The administration has appointed “czars” to bring expertise to bear outside of the traditional cabinet positions. Congress has enacted sweeping legislation in health care and finance, and Democratic leaders have equally ambitious agendas that envision placing greater trust in experts to manage energy and the environment, education and human capital, and transportation and communications infrastructure.
However, equally striking is the failure of such experts. They failed to prevent the financial crisis, they failed to stimulate the economy to create jobs, they have failed in Massachusetts to hold down the cost of health care, and sometimes they have failed to prevent terrorist attacks that instead had to be thwarted by ordinary civilians.
Ironically, whenever government experts fail, their instinctive reaction is to ask for more power and more resources. Instead, we need to step back and recognize that what we are seeing is not the vindication of Keynes, but the vindication of Hayek. That is, decentralized knowledge is becoming increasingly important, and that in turn makes centralized power increasingly anomalous.
VISITING some American universities these days feels like touring the scene of an earthquake, or a small war. Though administrators insist the protests that dominoed across campuses in the past year were therapeutic, grievances seethe. Fears for jobs, and of harm—both reputational and physical—endure. “The campus is traumatised,” says Reuben Faloughi, one of the leaders of the protests which, last November, forced the University of Missouri’s president to resign.
As Mr Faloughi knows, some external observers “just think the kids got upset and had a fit”: that these disturbances conform to the old quip about academic quarrels being so vicious because the stakes are so low. That view is mistaken, and not only because of the impact on the participants. As Eshe Sherley, an activist at Yale, says, “Things that happen in the university don’t just stay there.” Rather, the people and ideas they produce ripple across the country. And just as the energy and issues involved are bound to spread beyond campus, they did not originate there either.
only watch a dragon eat its tail for so long before you feel compelled to intervene.
As I’ve watched the education community react to Robert Pondiscio’s argument that the left is driving conservatives out of education reform, I’ve been increasingly frustrated to see so many people I like and respect (from Marilyn Rhames to Justin Cohen, Chris Stewart and Jay Greene) take aim at one another. I’m also convinced that the teachers unions are all having a good laugh at us while we play this verbal game of The Dozens amongst ourselves and in public.
At the center of this conflict: A dividing line being drawn between “Markets” and “Equity” as principles driving change in our schools. These two themes are both found in the underlying conflict of Pondiscio’s piece about the contrast between market or conservative solutions like school choice as great equalizers, and the power of a movement like Black Lives Matter, with which the more progressive, social justice wing of the reform movement identifies.
I believe Pondiscio’s piece only featured Black Lives Matter and the agenda of this year’s New Schools Venture Fund Summit (which I attended) as a proxy for capturing the changing view and face of the education reform movement. But using Black Lives Matter as the focal point charged and changed the exchange — and sparked a circular firing squad as commentators staked their ground and pious bullets filled the air.
posted online in recent weeks, mathematicians have solved a problem about the pattern-matching card game Set that predates the game itself. The solution, whose simplicity has stunned mathematicians, is already leading to advances in other combinatorics problems.
Another notable finding is that 70 percent of education reporters list press releases/events/PR person as a source for stories — the most frequent response for reporters asked about the source of story ideas in the last month.
“Public relations efforts are an important part of education coverage,” notes the report introduction language.” News releases, news conferences, or public relations professionals are the top sources of story ideas for education journalists who took the survey.”
While press releases are tremendously useful, over-reliance on them could be troubling, given how infrequently stakeholders (government agencies, advocacy groups, nonprofits) voluntarily share unflattering information and the public’s reliance on journalism for an independent view.
On Monday night, one of the Boston Globe journalists featured in Spotlight encouraged reporters to focus on the news that stakeholders don’t send/want covered. And yet under 50 percent of those who responded to the survey report that their story ideas commonly come from actual students, parents, or teachers.
Some observers focused on the demographic makeup of education reporters, who are (like most classroom teachers) predominantly white and female. The EWA report compares education journalism to a 2014 study of the journalism industry as a whole, finding that edreporters are more likely to be female and minority than journalism over all.
