All posts by AdminsXss94m

New york City Pre-k Acceptance Letters

Elizabeth Bradley:

Guardian,

We are pleased to offer your child a pre-kindergarten placement for the 2015-2016 school year at:

Digester Eggs, Newtown Creek, Brooklyn

To accept this placement, please gather proofs of identification and immunization and proceed to the corner of Greenpoint and Humboldt Streets. There you will be met by Anubis, jackal-headed guide of souls and Guardian of the Scales. He will weigh the heart of each student: those deemed lighter than an ostrich feather may continue on to registration at the Eggs. Those deemed heavier or in possession of non-organic cheddar bunnies will be eaten by Ammit, Devourer of the Dead, at the nearby Lake of Fire.

Uber for disembodied companionship

Remains of the day:

It’s hard to put a price on love. But Crowdsource did. It’s worth a whopping five cents. That’s how much I got paid to write each of these texts.

If I spent an hour answering texts, and took the full five minutes to write each one, I’d be making 60 cents an hour, far below the minimum wage. This is legal because all the workers on the platform are classified as independent contractors rather than employees. “Contributors have a tremendous amount of control over their decisions—for example, when to perform a task, when to complete it, and even if they want to complete it at all,” said Jeffrey H. Newhouse, an employment lawyer at Hirschler Fleischer, by email. “That means the contributor isn’t an employee and, as a result, employee protections like the minimum wage don’t apply.”

Private school education could be poor investment, research shows

Richard Adams:

A private school education may be a poor investment, according to research commissioned by a firm of stockbrokers that shows rapid growth in independent school fees outstripping the incomes of middle class professionals. The research, published by investment advisers Killik & Co, says the £236,000 paid by parents of a day pupil would, if invested, return nearly £800,000 over the child’s lifetime – enough to pay for university, put down a substantial deposit on a house and leave £500,000 for retirement.

A New Look at Apprenticeships as a Path to the Middle Class

Nelson Schwartz:

With its gleaming classrooms, sports teams and even a pep squad, the Apprentice School that serves the enormous Navy shipyard here bears little resemblance to a traditional vocational education program.

And that is exactly the point. While the cheerleaders may double as trainee pipe fitters, electricians and insulators, on weekends they’re no different from college students anywhere as they shout for the Apprentice School Builders on the sidelines.

But instead of accumulating tens of thousands of dollars in student debt, Apprentice School students are paid an annual salary of $54,000 by the final year of the four-year program, and upon graduation are guaranteed a job with Huntington Ingalls Industries, the military contractor that owns Newport News Shipbuilding.

“There’s a hunger among young people for good, well-paying jobs that don’t require an expensive four-year degree,” said Sarah Steinberg, vice president for global philanthropy at JPMorgan Chase. “The Apprentice School is the gold standard of what a high-quality apprenticeship program can be.”

Youthful Folly

The Economist:

THE REBECCA SCHOOL for autistic children occupies all five floors of a building in midtown Manhattan. Its rooftop playground has a fine view of the Empire State Building. It features colourful classrooms and lots of places for children to lie down and recover from the sensory overload often suffered by autistic people. “My body doesn’t feel safe,” says one boy curled up in a corridor, asking to be left alone.

Are small, private online courses the future of higher education in America?

James Poulous:

Just a few years ago, a huge vogue erupted among higher-ed administrators for MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses. Anant Agarwal, president of the online education company edX, at the time made a bold vow: “Online education will change the world.”

After the educational elite launched these seemingly visionary programs, however, their enthusiasm was swiftly curbed. As Stephanie Garlock observes in the new issue of Harvard Magazine, The New York Times dubbed 2012 “The Year of the MOOC,” but before 2013 was out, The Washington Post was asking if MOOCs were “already over.”

How pushy Chinese parents get their kids in the best schools

The Economist:

INSIDE the red-lacquered door of No. 39 Wenhua Lane in central Beijing is an old-style single-storey home built around a small courtyard. Its owner, an elderly man in a vest, sits on an upturned bucket near a jumble of cooking pots; a pile of old cardboard rests atop a nearby shed. Next to the man, two estate agents hover at the entrance to a room just big enough for a bed, a wardrobe and a rickety desk. They say it costs 3.9m yuan ($630,000). At 353,990 yuan per square metre, this makes it pricier than posh digs around New York’s Central Park—and it does not even have its own bathroom and kitchen. It is, however, close to the state-run Beijing No. 2 Experimental Primary School, one of the best in the city.

Education, Intelligence, and Attitude Extremity

Michael Makowsky & Stephen Miller:

Education and general intelligence both serve to inform opinions, but do they lead to greater attitude extremity? We use questions on economic policy, social issues, and environmental issues from the General Social Survey to test the impact of education and intelligence on attitude extremity, as measured by deviation from centrist or neutral positions. Using quantile regression modeling, we find that intelligence is a moderating force across the entire distribution in economic, social, and environmental policy beliefs. Completing high school strongly correlates to reduced extremity, particularly in the upper quantiles. College education increases attitude extremity in the lower tail of environmental beliefs. The relevance of the low extremity tail (lower quantiles) to potential swing-voters and the high extremity tail (upper quantiles) to a political party’s core are discussed.

Artificial Stupidity

Quentin Hardy:

But if the human race is at peril from killer robots, the problem is probably not artificial intelligence. It is more likely to be artificial stupidity. The difference between those two ideas says much about how we think about computers.

In the kind of artificial intelligence, or A.I., that most people seem to worry about, computers decide people are a bad idea, so they kill them. That is undeniably bad for the human race, but it is a potentially smart move by the computers.

But the real worry, specialists in the field say, is a computer program rapidly overdoing a single task, with no context. A machine that makes paper clips proceeds unfettered, one example goes, and becomes so proficient that overnight we are drowning in paper clips.

In other words, something really dumb happens, at a global scale. As for those “Terminator” robots you tend to see on scary news stories about an A.I. apocalypse, forget it.

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Philosophical discussions boost pupils’ maths and literacy progress, study finds

Richard Adams:

Philosophical discussions about truth, fairness or kindness appear to give a small but significant boost to the maths and literacy progress of primary school pupils, although experts remain puzzled as to why.

More than 3,000 pupils in 48 state primary schools across England took part in a year-long trial as part of a study named “philosophy for children”, and found that their maths and reading levels benefited by the equivalent of two months’ worth of teaching.

A Durham University evaluation said the results showed faster rates of progress for pupils eligible for free school meals, suggesting that the technique could “be used to reduce the attainment gap in terms of poverty in the short term”.

“the widespread denial of educational mediocrity”

Laura Waters:

What’s more troubling is that many middle-class families take this propaganda as gospel and reject efforts to maintain meaningful oversight and accountability.

The Problem Is Us
Now, New Jersey may be an extreme example. We’re die-hard local control fanatics who cherish our small towns and district identities. As such, we adhere to what Rotherham calls the “middle class politics of education” which “means leaving suburban schools alone to rise and fall as they might. This has led to widespread mediocrity and pockets of excellence…and neutering accountability systems to mask uncomfortable bad news about school performance.”

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results and the Math Forum.

Can history and geography survive the digital age?

Matthew Reisz:

William Cronon, who is Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas research professor of history, geography and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was delivering the first in a new series of British Academy lectures in geography at London’s Royal Geographical Society on 7 July.

He was interested, he told the audience, in “the bridge between the academy and its many publics”. But although history and geography ranked “among the greatest synthesizing disciplines” and could help to “make the world more meaningful, more legible, for everyone”, academics had shown themselves to be far too “old media” and ran the risk of “isolating [them]selves in a pay-wall universe”.

“History has traditionally required long-form prose,” explained Professor Cronon, and it now counted as “the only academic discipline in the United States which still generally requires a monograph for tenure”. At the same time, most students no longer “read for pleasure” and “a growing number of academic administrators come from disciplines which no longer have a use for books”.

Cost Disease: Federal Reserve Study: Federal student loans increase tuition, not enrollment

The Week:

A report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York suggests that federal student aid programs are doing more harm than good. When subsidized federal loans have the effect of “relaxing students’ funding constraints,” universities respond by raising tuition to collect the newly available cash.

The resultant tuition hikes can be substantial: The researchers found that each additional dollar of Pell Grant or subsidized student loan money translates to a tuition jump of 55 or 65 cents, respectively. Of course, the higher tuition also applies to students who don’t receive federal aid, making college less affordable across the board.

Lies, Truth & Meaning

Mark Schroeder:

Words have meaning. We use them to communicate to one another, and what we communicate depends, in part, on which words we use. What words mean varies from language to language. In many cases, we can communicate the same thing in different languages, but require different words to do so. And conversely, sometimes the very same words communicate different things in different languages. In Estonian, I am told, a zealous germophobe would enjoin us to join her in cleaning the rooms by saying ‘Koristame ruumit!’ But she should take care in expressing this enthusiasm in Finland, for in Finnish this very same sentence means ‘let’s decorate the corpses!’.

One of the most important consequences of differences in meaning, is a difference in truth. It is because ‘tall’ and ‘friendly’ mean different things, that what we say with the sentence ‘Maria is tall’ can be true even though what we say with the sentence ‘Maria is friendly’ is not, or conversely. If we know when what we say with a sentence is true, we therefore know a lot about what it means. Much of our contemporary understanding of linguistic meaning in both philosophy and linguistic semantics exploits this fact, by trying to characterize the meanings of words in terms of their contribution to what would make sentences involving them true.

– See more at: http://blog.oup.com/2015/07/lies-truth-meaning-philosophy/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=oupacademic&utm_campaign=oupblog#sthash.7XTt0UDy.dpuf

The Metric Tide

hefce:

The Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management was set up in April 2014 to investigate the current and potential future roles that quantitative indicators can play in the assessment and management of research. Its report, ‘The Metric Tide’, was published in July 2015 and is available below.

The review was chaired by James Wilsdon, professor of science and democracy at the University of Sussex, supported by an independent and multidisciplinary group of experts in scientometrics, research funding, research policy, publishing, university management and research administration. Through 15 months of consultation and evidence-gathering, the review looked in detail at the potential uses and limitations of research metrics and indicators, exploring the use of metrics within institutions and across disciplines.

Public School Educators Get Second Reminder of Ban on Tutoring

Luo Ruiyao:

(Beijing) – The government has again told teachers they are prohibited from tutoring students after class for extra cash, but experts say the latest reminder will have little effect if educators are not paid more.

On July 6, the Ministry of Education reiterated that primary and middle schools and their teachers cannot host or provide tutoring services for pay. Schools and teachers were also warned they cannot cooperate with private tutoring institutions.

Administrators and teachers at public schools could lose their jobs if they are caught violating the ban, the ministry said.

The Chinese Mother’s American Dream

Karin Fischer:

Abby Wu and her parents sat side by side on the living-room couch in their apartment. The sun had not yet risen on this chilly December morning, and they would greet one of the most consequential moments in Abby’s young life in their pajamas. Today they would find out if she had been admitted to the college of her dreams, Wellesley, in far-off Massachusetts.

It was the culmination of so much: hours of studying for the SAT, draft after discarded draft of personal essays. And the decision, a dozen years earlier, to enroll Abby in an experimental school where she would have daily English lessons, taught by Westerners.

Signs that fewer black students are taking calculus in high school

Jill Barshay:

New U.S. high school transcript data show stark and growing racial differences in which students progress to the most advanced math subject in high school: calculus. It appears from this first release of data that, among black students who started high school in 2009, a slightly smaller proportion took a calculus class than four years earlier. And even in the earlier cohort, only about 6 percent of black high school graduates took calculus.

Meanwhile, growing numbers of Asians, whites and Hispanics are taking the subject.

UK Student Research A Casuslty Of The Wassenaar Arrangement

Michael Mimoso:

U.S.-based security researchers may soon be championing the case of Grant Wilcox, a young U.K. university student whose work is one of the few publicly reported casualties of the Wassenaar Arrangement.

Wilcox last week published his university dissertation, presented earlier this spring for an ethical hacking degree at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle, England. The work expands on existing bypasses for Microsoft’s Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET), free software that includes a dozen mitigations against memory-based exploits. Microsoft has on more than one occasion recommended use of EMET as a temporary stopgap against publicly available zero-day exploits.

A Return To Social Promotion

NY Daily News:

Which will mean thousands of struggling young people will have long interruptions in their educations — and are that much less likely to make up ground.

This year, the city recommended that just 19,400 third- through eighth-grade students take summer classes — 6.2% of all eligible kids, down from 7.4% last year and 10% the year before that.

And if last year — when just 1.2% of students were held back at the end of summer, half the rate of 2013 — is any indication, that will result in far fewer kids repeating a grade.

The evidence strongly suggests a return to social promotion in the public schools.

Why Many Computer Science Programs Are Stagnating

Hacker Rank:

If you think about it, computer science (CS) has had–at best–a rocky relationship with education.

Let’s rewind for a minute. Born at the merging of algorithm theory, math logic and the invention of the stored-program electronic computer in the 1940s, it wasn’t truly a standalone academic discipline in universities until at least 20 years later.

Initially, most people thought the study of computers was a purely technical job for select industries, like the department of defense or aerospace, rather than a widespread academic science. The proliferation of computers in the 1990s pushed universities to create a standard computer science department to teach students the fundamentals of computing, like algorithms and computational thinking.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The Coming Era of Pension Poverty

Charles Hugh Smith:

The core problem with pension plans is that the promises were issued without regard for the revenues needed to pay the promises. Lulled by 60 years of global growth since 1945, those in charge of entitlements and publicly funded pensions assumed that “growth”–of GDP, tax revenues, employment and everything else–would always rise faster than the costs of the promised pensions and entitlements.

But due to demographics and a structurally stagnant economy, entitlements and pension costs are rising at a much faster rate than the revenues needed to pay the promised benefits. Two charts (courtesy of Market Daily Briefing) tell the demographic story:

The Trouble With Kids Company

Miles Goslett:

In 2006, when David Cameron was leader of the opposition, he made an infamous speech that is remembered as an exhortation to hug a hoodie. Feral youth, he said, should be helped rather than demonised. He was reaching towards what he hoped would be a new, ‘compassionate’ conservatism inspired in part by the charismatic social activist Camila Batmanghelidjh.

She was the perfect lodestar for the young Tory leader. She began her drop-in centre — the Kids Company — in 1996 and within a few years, was helping thousands of disadvantaged inner-city children. She’s colourful, powerful but also a former Sherborne girl with whom Cameron and other members of the establishment felt at ease. Cameron told his shadow ministers that Camila embodied the Big Society. He suggested they study her work and design policies that reflected it.

Iowa’s K-12 Tax & Spending Increase Battle

Michael DaSilva:

The fight for funding started with House Republicans refusing to budge from a 1.25 percent increase. Democrats wanted a 6 percent increase, but eventually dropped to 2.62 percent trying to reach a deal. The break-through came when both sides agreed to the 1.25 percent increase, along with an additional $56 million in funding. As of Thursday night, we know those lengthy negotiations were a waste of time.

Governor Branstad vetoed the bi-partisan deal, eliminating the $56 million in funding.

We must offer a great education to all, not just the privileged or connected, to secure city’s future

Walter Kimbrough:

I had a conversation with Rev. Eugene Rivers of Boston a few years ago after he did an opening convocation at my previous institution. We talked about living in the communities we serve, and what that means for the schooling options for your children. He said, “Get your kids into the best schools you can afford. Don’t feel guilty about that.”

Recently on a visit home to speak for my high school alumni association, my closest classmate met me for dinner. She spoke about having her seventh-grader attending a $25,000 a year school, with the youngest about to start kindergarten, probably going to the same school. She spoke of many of our classmates, public high school graduates, in the Atlanta suburbs doing likewise.

They are paying college tuition for 12 years — to get their children ready for college.

STEM & Girls

Kate Russell:

It is a sad fact of life today that while women make up around 46% of the UK workforce, they are extremely poorly represented in the STEM professions – in other words science, technology, engineering and mathematics. According to recent Government figures, if you exclude medical professions just 15.5% of UK STEM jobs are filled by women, and that figure drops to 8% when you look at engineering jobs.

Despite the gender imbalance being a mainstream topic of debate the situation doesn’t seem to be improving. According to 2014 e-skills, the number of women working in the tech sector has fallen from 17% to 16% again this year – and that is a figure that’s been falling year on year for over a decade now. When you consider that UK businesses face an ever growing skills gap when it comes to recruiting digitally skilled workers, it seems a no brainer that we should try to boost the number of girls enterting the field.

Rare Book School

Andy Wright:

When summer rolls around, thoughts turn to how to spend the limpid months: Umbrella drinks by the pool? Backpacking through pristine wilderness? A digital detox?
But if you’re a certain kind of person, your dream destination might be Rare Book School in Charlottesville for a week of courses that include “Book Illustration Processes to 1900” or “The Handwriting & Culture of Early Modern English Manuscripts.” Rare book fanatics study not only the words on the page but also the way books were made in order to unlock a deeper cultural understanding of text. And while there are similar programs around the world, Rare Book School offers something they do not: A permanent space and a teaching collection of 80,000 items from books bound in supple goat leather to old Macintosh computers.

Why Taiwan is right to ban iPads for kids

Jake Wallis Simons:

Parents who fail to comply with the new “Child and Youth Welfare Protection Act” — or rather, fail to enforce it upon their children — may be fined 50,000 Taiwan dollars ($1,576).

Now, as much as I dislike the excesses of bloated, interfering governments, I couldn’t help but emit a yelp of joy when I read of these developments in Taiwan (which follow similar measures in China and South Korea).

Of course, there are obvious difficulties with the legislation. For a start, it fails to define a “reasonable” length of time, leaving its application open to interpretation and abuse.

A Dutch city is giving money away to test the “basic income” theory

Maria Sanchez Diez:

Some people in the Dutch city of Utrecht might soon get a windfall of extra cash, as part of a daring new experiment with the idea of “basic income.”

Basic income is an unconditional and regular payment meant to provide enough money to cover a person’s basic living cost. In January of 2016, the fourth largest city in the Netherlands and its partner, the University of Utrecht, will create several different regimes for its welfare recipients and test them.

A place for humanities in the global economy

Walt Gardner:

Faced with the demands of the new global economy, Japan and the United States have reached the conclusion that the humanities have little value in higher education. That’s a mistake they will regret in the years ahead.

The humanities have never been intended as training for a specific vocation. Instead, the study of languages, literature, the arts, history, philosophy and religion exists to provide students with the critical thinking skills needed for personal growth and participation in a democratic society.

Ha, Ha, Ha: Education is sorted out by Hutton, Heffer and Hartley Brewer

Martin Robinson:

Newspaper columnists are like buses you wait for ages for one to write about education and then suddenly three columns turn up at once. Hutton, Heffer and Hartley-Brewer responded in today’s Sundays to the sad, early death of Chris Woodhead, the former Chief Inspector of Schools.

Will Hutton wants everyone to get on his bus. His piece begins in tears and ends in hopelessness. Hutton brought his kids up in Oxford and thought the local comprehensive schools were good enough for his children despite the opinions of those middle class parents who sent their kids to the local private schools. Hutton argues that when Chris Woodhead became head of Ofsted the view of those middle class parents were echoed, he said that there were 15,000 teachers who should be sacked: “…his excoriation of soft teaching methods and praise of his insistence that kids needed to acquire both skills and knowledge for knowledge’s sake.” Hutton says this was echoed by Gove: “…that we need yet more of that [Woodhead’s] energy now to mount the ongoing fight against the liberal/left blob still defending the indefensible.” Then comes an odd bit of logic:

Coloring books are suddenly catching on with adults

Somali Kohli:

There are Facebook pages devoted to adult colorers. There are coloring clubs. People who motivate themselves to pay off debt by coloring. Game of Thrones is making a coloring book.

What this means: Coloring is now a normal adult activity.

Thanks largely to a recent wave of publicity over the release of illustrator Johanna Basford’s second coloring book, coloring books as a whole have been enjoying their 15 minutes of fame.

Introducing the Music Data Canvas: 25 Years of Music History

Predictive Pop:

We cleaned and analyzed this data and combined it with YouTube to create a visual interface for exploring the past 25 years of music history and their respective music videos.

The data canvas because wanted to find a more interesting way to display our data than the ways music charts are usually displayed. In this case we were interested in the relationship between the songs beyond just what was on the charts at the same times. The data canvas allows users to visually explore these relationships in ways that are powerful and memorable.

Growing Pains for Deep Learning

Chris Edwards:

Advances in theory and computer hardware have allowed neural networks to become a core part of online services such as Microsoft’s Bing, driving their image-search and speech-recognition systems. The companies offering such capabilities are looking to the technology to drive more advanced services in the future, as they scale up the neural networks to deal with more sophisticated problems.

It has taken time for neural networks, initially conceived 50 years ago, to become accepted parts of information technology applications. After a flurry of interest in the 1990s, supported in part by the development of highly specialized integrated circuits designed to overcome their poor performance on conventional computers, neural networks were outperformed by other algorithms, such as support vector machines in image processing and Gaussian models in speech recognition.

Older simple neural networks use only up to three layers, split into an input layer, a middle ‘hidden’ layer, and an output layer. The neurons are highly interconnected across layers. Each neuron feeds its output to each of the neurons in the following layer. The networks are trained by iteratively adjusting the weights that each neuron applies to its input data to try to minimize the error between the output of the entire network and the desired result.

Although neuroscience suggested the human brain has a deeper architecture involving a number of hidden layers, the results from early experiments on these types of systems were worse than for shallow networks. In 2006, work on deep architectures received a significant boost from work by Geoffrey Hinton and Ruslan Salakhutdinov at the University of Toronto. They developed training techniques that were more effective for training networks with multiple hidden layers. One of the techniques was ‘pre-training’ to adjust the output of each layer independently before moving on to trying to optimize the network’s output as a whole. The approach made it possible for the upper layers to extract high-level features that could be used more efficiently to classify data by the lower, hidden layers.

On Humanities Data

Miriam Posner:

I just want to say at the outset that there are people who specialize in humanities data curation, and I am not one of those people. A number of talented people, including Trevor Muñoz at the University of Maryland and Katie Rawson at the University of Pennsylvania, have started to take a very programmatic look at the data-curation needs of digital humanists. And I encourage you to check out their important work. But you don’t have Trevor or Katie; you have me! So what I can do is share my own perspective and experience on what it means to work with data as a humanist, and where libraries can help.

I’ll start with an anecdote, and I think that anyone who consults on digital humanities projects will be familiar with this scenario. Humanities scholars will sometimes describe elaborate visualizations to me, involving charts and graphs and change over time. “Great,” I respond. “Let’s see your data.” “Data?” they say. “Oh, I don’t have any data.”

Louisiana State’s Firing of Salty Professor Renews Worries About Faculty Rights

Peter Schmidt

Louisiana State University has fired a tenured professor on its Baton Rouge campus against the advice of a faculty panel, raising new questions about the administration’s respect for shared governance and faculty rights.

The Louisiana State University system’s Board of Supervisors voted last week to uphold the firing of Teresa Buchanan, an associate professor of curriculum and instruction, based on accusations she had engaged in sexual harassment and violated the Americans With Disabilities Act.

F. King Alexander, the system’s president, had called for Ms. Buchanan’s dismissal even though a faculty panel that he had appointed to hear her case concluded that the ADA charges against her were unsubstantiated and that she did not deserve to lose her job over the sexual-harassment charges. The latter allegations stemmed mainly from complaints that she had used obscene language in front of students and had spoken disparagingly to them about the sex lives of married people at a time when she was going through a divorce.

Civics: Why We Encrypt

Bruce Schneier:

Encryption protects our data. It protects our data when it’s sitting on our computers and in data centers, and it protects it when it’s being transmitted around the Internet. It protects our conversations, whether video, voice, or text. It protects our privacy. It protects our anonymity. And sometimes, it protects our lives.

This protection is important for everyone. It’s easy to see how encryption protects journalists, human rights defenders, and political activists in authoritarian countries. But encryption protects the rest of us as well. It protects our data from criminals. It protects it from competitors, neighbors, and family members. It protects it from malicious attackers, and it protects it from accidents.

Encryption works best if it’s ubiquitous and automatic. The two forms of encryption you use most often — https URLs on your browser, and the handset-to-tower link for your cell phone calls — work so well because you don’t even know they’re there.

Graduating From….. Nursery School

Margaret Wente:

The other day a proud father showed me a photo of his son’s graduation. There was the beaming scholar, diploma in hand, tasselled mortarboard on head, ready to take on the world.

“Congratulations,” I said. But something puzzled me. The kid is only three feet tall. He’s graduating from nursery school.

“Since when do nursery schools have graduation ceremonies?” I asked.

“Oh, they have graduation ceremonies for everything these days,” he said. “It was a big deal. All the parents came. Grandparents too. And of course the nannies.”

Higher Ed and “No Ordinary Disruption”

Joshua Kim:


This review is an argument for postsecondary leaders and emerging leaders to put No Ordinary Disruption on your summer reading list.

The consultants from the McKinsey Global Institute who wrote this fine book don’t have all that much to say about higher education. That is good, as postsecondary education is not their speciality. You will need to read this book and apply the ideas back your campus and our industry.

The big idea of No Ordinary Disruption will be a familiar one. Winter is coming. Change is occurring in every industry. The shift to a global information economy is 10 times as fast and 300 times the scale as the last major shift, that from an agricultural to an industrial economy.

The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era

Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, Philippe Mongeon:

The consolidation of the scientific publishing industry has been the topic of much debate within and outside the scientific community, especially in relation to major publishers’ high profit margins. However, the share of scientific output published in the journals of these major publishers, as well as its evolution over time and across various disciplines, has not yet been analyzed. This paper provides such analysis, based on 45 million documents indexed in the Web of Science over the period 1973-2013. It shows that in both natural and medical sciences (NMS) and social sciences and humanities (SSH), Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis increased their share of the published output, especially since the advent of the digital era (mid-1990s). Combined, the top five most prolific publishers account for more than 50% of all papers published in 2013. Disciplines of the social sciences have the highest level of concentration (70% of papers from the top five publishers), while the humanities have remained relatively independent (20% from top five publishers). NMS disciplines are in between, mainly because of the strength of their scientific societies, such as the ACS in chemistry or APS in physics. The paper also examines the migration of journals between small and big publishing houses and explores the effect of publisher change on citation impact. It concludes with a discussion on the economics of scholarly publishing.

No Child Left Unmined

Farai Chideya:

On Facebook, it’s the season where parents are posting pictures of K-12 graduations, including moppets in tiny mortarboards. But unlike a generation ago, today’s smallest graduates are amassing a big data trail. Just as medical and government files have been digitized — some to be anonymized and sold; all susceptible to breaches — student data has entered the realm of the valuable and the vulnerable. Parents are paying attention. A recent study by the company The Learning Curve found that while 71 percent of parents believe technology has improved their child’s education, 79 percent were concerned about the privacy and security of their child’s data, and 75 percent worried about advertiser access to that data.

Request to econ and math people: solve the Delhi University admission problem

Jyotirmoy Bhattacharya:

Admissions to undergraduate programs in the colleges of Delhi University happen through the so-called ‘cut-off’ system: colleges rank students based on marks in the school-leaving examination and for each program announce a “cut-off” mark. Every student whose score is above the cut-off is eligible to join the program. Since there is a common pool of students applying to different colleges and programs, not all students who are offered admissions in a program join. So the process has to be run in multiple rounds. In each round colleges guess the proportion of those offered admissions who would join. And at the end of each round they must reduce the cut-offs to fill the seats unfilled in the last round. As the cut-offs fall students who get offers from their more preferred programs leave the colleges they had joined in the earlier rounds, creating new vacancies.

Krakauer On Tenure

Marc Eisen:

There is passion in his voice when Krakauer says this. To his thinking, the tenure system is flawed. It’s not fair to junior faculty (tenure review is a form of hazing, he says bluntly) or to women and minorities. Nor is it important to researchers like himself in the natural or computational sciences. They function as academic entrepreneurs raising grants and moving from university to university for a better position. (That’s the new norm, he argues.) Tenure is much more important for the humanities, which can tackle controversial issues that don’t bring in big research grants.

“I wish we could have this conversation,” Krakauer says.

App Academy’s (Real) Tuition Model

Sheba Goldberg:

App Academy is one of many coding bootcamps that have sprung up in the past few years. For those unfamiliar with the concept, imagine an introduction to development on steroids. Walk in the class a beginner, walk out a few months later with enough knowledge to start working in tech.

App Academy’s shtick is that they don’t charge up front for tuition. Says their homepage: “You only pay us if you find a job as a developer after the program.” Their Program and FAQ pages go into more detail: the fee is 18% of your first year salary, payable over the first 6 months after you start working, and a refundable deposit of $5,000 (or lower in exchange for a higher percentage).

British Academy urges UK government to address numeracy crisis

British Academy:

Count Us In graphicA dramatic improvement in the UK population’s mastery of basic numeracy and statistics needs to happen if the country is to take advantage of the data revolution now sweeping the globe.

That’s the verdict of a major British Academy report Count Us In: Quantitative skills for a new generation.

The UK risks falling behind in the race to tap the potential of “big data”, while the countries’ middling record in numeracy is creating skills deficits for employers and means many citizens and consumers lack the skills to make informed choices.

These are among the warnings of the report, which calls for a transformation in our approach to building numeracy, statistics and data analysis skills to ensure that, within a generation, the UK rises to the challenge of becoming a fully data-literate nation.

Related: Connected Math.

Crippling Student Debt is Forcing Students to Drop Out

Debbie Sharnal:

The average student who borrowed money for their bachelor’s degree has just over $35,000 in debt. What is perhaps most alarming about this number is how much and how quickly this number is rising. Just from 2014, the number rose almost $2,000 and from ten years ago, the number is roughly $15,000 higher.
The rising cost of colleges, and thus loans, has been decried as a national outrage. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has been so far unsuccessfully working on a bill to lower interest rates on federal student loans, declared the student debt problem “an economic emergency…Forty million people are dealing with $1.2 trillion in outstanding student debt. It’s stopping young people from buying homes, from buying cars and from starting small businesses.”

Here’s How Americans Spend Their Working, Relaxing and Parenting Time

Leah Libresco:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday released the 2014 results from the American Time Use Survey. The survey offers the most detailed, up-to-date portrait of how people in the United States spend their time. Here are five of the most striking results, nearly all of which have persisted at near identical rates for the past five years:

Americans still spend more time watching TV than all other leisure activities combined:

The Rise and Fall of Federal College Ratings

Robert Kelchen:

On a historical note, the 2013-2015 effort to rate colleges failed to live up to efforts a century ago, in which ratings were actually created but President Taft blocked their release. As Libby Nelson at Vox noted last summer, President Wilson created a ratings committee in 1914, which then came to the conclusion that publishing ratings was not desirable at the time. 101 years later, some things still haven’t changed. College ratings are likely dead for decades at the federal level, but performance-based funding or “risk-sharing” ideas enjoy some bipartisan support and are the next big accountability policy discussion.

I’d love to be able to write more at this time about the path forward for federal higher education accountability policy, but I’ve got to get back to putting together the annual Washington Monthly college rankings (look for them in late August). Hopefully, future versions of the rankings will be able to include some of the new information that has been promised in this new consumer information system.

Multiplicative reasoning professional development programme

Gov.uk:

This report looks at a project to develop the ability of teachers to teach topics involving multiplicative reasoning to key stage 3 pupils. It evaluates the effect professional development of teachers in this area had on pupil attainment, and includes teacher and pupil views on the project.
Multiplicative reasoning refers to the use of mathematical understanding to solve problems arising from proportional situations, often involving fractions.

Commentary On Running And Serving On The Madison School Board…

Chris Rickert:

Because members are elected during low-turnout spring elections, special interest groups have a proportionally bigger voice in who wins. In Madison, it’s nearly impossible to win without union support unless you have tons of money.

But under a system of geographically assigned seats, there might be enough grassroots support in, say, a south Madison School Board district to mitigate the union’s influence.

Madison voters have the state Legislature to thank for the school district’s current, inane way of electing board members.

Until 1985, there were no numbered seats, and the top vote-getters for however many seats were up for election were declared the winners.

But in the late 1970s, there was a movement to force board members into one-on-one contests as a way to target specific members amid a broader debate on the board over plans to close some central-city schools.

A binding referendum to move to the current election system failed in 1978, but a bill to do the same was passed a few years later.

Today, School Board president James Howard tells me: “The board’s election process is not on our radar at this time.”

And I suppose it is easier just to hike pay.

Board members definitely work for their money — if not for a more democratic School Board.

Ideally, District academic achievement challengesand its $15k plus per student spending (double the national average) would always be transparent and easy to understand from year to year…

No One Can Figure Out 1917 Multiplication Wheel

NPR:

Math teacher Sherry Read’s classroom is a total mess. The students are gone for the summer, and light fixtures dangle from the ceiling. The floor has a layer of dust. Down the hallway, workers make a racket while they renovate the school, which dates back to the 1890s. They’re working in what has become an archaeological site.

A construction crew at the Oklahoma City school made a startling discovery earlier this month. They found old chalkboards with class lessons that were written almost a century ago, and chalk drawings still in remarkably good condition. So Read doesn’t mind the mess. In fact, she’s amazed.

Related: Math Forum and Connected Math.

On Being Nice

Olga Khazan:

Research labs, like most workplaces, come in two broad varieties: The cut-throat kind, where researchers are always throwing elbows in a quest for prestige, and the collaborative kind, where they work together for the good of the team. And when David Rand first established his Human Cooperation Lab at Yale University, he was clear about the kind of culture he wanted to promote.

Rand’s post-docs help each other and share their expertise willingly, he says. Rand spends some of the lab’s money on social events and happy hours. “Not in a lame, cheesy way, but in a way that’s fun for people,” he told me recently. “It creates bonds among people and makes them not want to cut each other down.”

Can genes predict foreign language learning skills?

Anne Merritt:

Every frustrated language learner has, at some point, proclaimed that they just “don’t have the gift” of picking up foreign languages.

It’s easy to imagine that the aptitude for learning a new tongue exists somewhere beyond our control, perhaps in our blood or brain chemistry, or in the drinking water that flows through Northern Europe and feeds the frustratingly fluent English-speaking Scandinavians from Oslo to Helsinki.

Language teachers will explain to students that anyone can learn a foreign language, and that the skill comes from nurture and not nature. But does biology play any role at all? Is there any part of our DNA that can predict whether or not we can be successful polyglots?

American Civil War Then & Now

Guardian:

The women who dug the graves, the kids who watched the largest battle in US history – and the slaves forced to help fighters at the front. 150 years after the last shots were fired, Guardian photographer David Levene travelled across the US photographing the sites scarred by the American civil war

First crop of £9,000 tuition fee-paying UK graduates ‘more focused on pay’

Richard Adams:

The first students to graduate since the imposition of £9,000 annual tuition fees are more focused on securing a well-paid job than their predecessors to pay off their higher levels of debt, according to a major survey of post-university employment.

The survey of 18,000 final year students at 30 universities reported a record proportion had started researching career paths as early as their first year of studies, and more of them undertook work experience to improve their chances of getting a good job after graduation.

More states grade public colleges on performance

John Schoen:

rom Maine to Hawaii, some 36 states are allocating money for higher education based, in part, on performance measures designed to reward schools that raise graduation rates, award more high-tech degrees and better prepare students for the job market.
Proponents of the idea say that, as state budget cuts have forced lawmakers to make tough choices, it only makes sense to reward public colleges and universities that get the most bang for every taxpayer buck. But critics of these schemes say they don’t work, and can even produce unintended consequences that end up hurting students in the long run.

Harvard Admissions Needs ‘Moneyball for Life

Michael Lewis:

To: Harvard Management Company

From: Harvard Admissions

It’s been several painful weeks since Steve Schwarzman revealed that we denied him admission to the Harvard Class of 1969. As we now all know, the private equity billionaire (net worth: $13 billion and climbing) appeared on the Bloomberg channel and said that the dean of admissions at Harvard wrote to him a few years ago and said, “I guess we got that one wrong.” He also announced his $150 million gift to Yale, to erect a monument to our idiocy.

We in admissions have finished your requested review of the circumstances that led to our catastrophic error. We conclude a) we must improve our attempts at self-abasement and b) Harvard’s admissions process must be overhauled. It has proved imperfectly designed to identify and smile upon those children most likely to become extremely rich.

Pomp and Construction: Colleges Go on a Building Tear

Constance Mitchell Ford:

Last week, Cornell University officially kicked off construction of Cornell Tech, a $2 billion science, research and technology campus rising on Roosevelt Island in New York City.

When the first phase of the campus is completed in 2017, it will include three buildings, one of which will be dedicated to business and innovation. When fully completed in 2043, the campus will have 2 million square feet of space on 12 acres serving more than 2,500 graduate students, faculty and staff.

In a city filled with large construction projects—from the $20 billion Hudson Yards development on the far West Side of Manhattan to the $15 billion-plus rebuilding of the World Trade Center—Cornell Tech isn’t one of the biggest deals in New York. But the campus is symbolic of a broader national trend: the rapid expansion of college and university campuses.

Spending More & Delivering Less: Why are American schools slowing down so many bright children?

Jay Matthews:

Vicki Schulkin, a Northern Virginia parent, knew her son Matt was bright but did not think this was a problem until some of his teachers began to bristle at the erratic working habits that sometimes accompany intellectual gifts.

“In fourth grade, his English teacher told me early in the semester that he didn’t belong in her high-level class because he wasn’t completing all of his homework,” Schulkin said. That teacher changed her mind after he showed great creativity in a poetry assignment, but other instructors were less understanding.

Related: English 10 and long term, disastrous reading results.

Texas Governor Signs Law To Stop Jailing Kids For Skipping School

Alex Campbell & Kendall Taggert:

Texas will no longer jail kids for skipping school.

Gov. Greg Abbott has signed a bill into law that makes truancy a civil offense rather than a crime. The law goes into effect on Sept. 1.

“Criminalizing unauthorized absences at school unnecessarily jeopardizes the futures of our students,” Abbott said in a statement Friday.

In April, a BuzzFeed News investigation found that more than a thousand teenagers were sent to adult jail on charges stemming from missing school in the past three years. Some students were locked up because of unpaid fines issued by a truancy court and ordered to pay it off by earning “jail credit.”

Students age 17 and above get locked up with adults, sometimes inmates charged with assault, robbery, and other violent crimes. While some students said their jail stint startled them into recognizing the value of school, others said they witnessed adult inmates beating each other and soliciting sex. The overwhelming majority of students charged are poor, and most are black or Hispanic.

BuzzFeed News’ reporting was cited on the state Senate floor during debates over whether and how to change the law. The truancy reform measures were supported by a coalition of Democrats and Republicans, and the law passed with large majorities in both houses.

Advocates for the bill celebrated the news Friday. “We are of course delighted,” said Deborah Fowler, executive director of the advocacy group Texas Appleseed, which pushed for the changes.

Derek Cohen, senior policy analyst for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, known for its conservative Right On Crime campaign, said he was “heartened” by the governor’s decision. “It’s just good common sense policy, and I think the governor realizes that.”

Texas was one of the only states that handled truancy in adult criminal court. In addition to decriminalizing truancy, the new law will require school districts to take more steps to keep students in school before referring them to truancy court, and it will reduce the fines that can be imposed.

Looking The Part

Lauren Paul:

I still remember the first time someone questioned if I was my dad’s daughter. I was 7 years old, and my family had just begun our summer vacation at Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire. My dad and I went into town to get some hamburgers, buns, and charcoal while my mom and brother unpacked. We quickly raided a small local shop, and at the checkout I felt I deserved a package of Twizzlers for a job well done, and dropped them on conveyor belt. If it had been Mom, the package would have been swiftly returned to the shelf, but Dad never said no. I shimmied toward the exit in quiet victory, waiting for the transaction to be over so I could burst into the sunshine with Twizzlers in hand. As I waited, I heard the cashier comment on my prize.

“Someone’s got a sweet tooth,” she teased good-naturedly.

College-educated men take their time becoming dads

Gretchen Livingston:

For More Educated Men, Fatherhood Starts LaterAmong dads ages 22 to 44, 70% of those with less than a high school diploma say they fathered their first child before the age of 25. By comparison, less than half (45%) of fathers with some college experience became dads by that age. The likelihood of becoming a young father plummets for those with a bachelor’s degree or more: Just 14% had their first child prior to age 25.

On the flip side, among dads with less than a high school diploma, just 9% entered fatherhood between ages 30 and 44, but among men with a bachelor’s degree or more, a plurality (44%) became a dad between ages 30 and 44.

War, what is it good for?

Martin van Creveld:

Morris, a professor of classics and of history at Stanford University, thinks he can distinguish between two kinds of war. The first kind, which he calls “counterproductive war,” is waged by non-state entities against each other and also against what more developed communities exist.

It is the oldest form of war by far, consisting of skirmishes and raids and leading to little but death and destruction. It prevalence was responsible for the fact that, among the simplest known societies such as the Yanomamo of Brazil, as many as 10-20% of all people used to come to a violent end. It goes without saying that a population consisting of tribes, all constantly fighting each other for honor and for resources such as water, cattle and women cannot produce much by way of a civilization. As Morris, quoting Thomas Hobbes, says, its members’ lives are almost certain to be nasty, brutish and short.

Individuals with social phobia have too much serotonin — not too little

Uppsala University:

Previous studies have led researchers to believe that individuals with social anxiety disorder or social phobia have too low levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin. A new study, however, shows that the situation is exactly the opposite. Individuals with social phobia make too much serotonin. The more serotonin they produce, the more anxious they are in social situations.

You Draw It: How FamilyIncome Predicts Children’sCollege Chances

The Upshot:

How likely is it that children who grow up in very poor families go to college? How about children who grow up in very rich families?

We’d like you to draw your guess for every income level on the chart below.

If you think the chances of enrolling in college (or vocational school) are about the same for everyone, you should draw something like this: . If you think the odds are especially harsh for children from the poorest families, but higher for middle- and higher-income children, your drawing would instead look like this: . Or here is one for a situation in which chances level off after a certain income threshold: .

‘More Oxbridge graduates teaching in state schools than independent sector’

Richard Adams:

The number of Oxbridge graduates teaching in state schools has overtaken those in independent schools, according to analysis by the Sutton Trust, suggesting that high-profile efforts to attract graduates into teaching have paid off.

Using data from a survey of 700 state secondary school teachers, the Sutton Trust study extrapolated that there are 11,000 with degrees from Oxford or Cambridge on staff in England – more than double the number found by a similar survey in 2003.

Moms, Let Dad Be Dad

Sue Shellenbarger:

When Kathryn Kerns asked 30 teens and preteens to come to her laboratory and talk about their parents, many of their dads scored low on a standard yardstick her research team was using to evaluate the parent-child bond.

The children described rich, warm relationships with their fathers, however, says Dr. Kerns, a professor of psychological sciences at Kent State University in Ohio. They said things like, “My dad gives me encouragement to do things,” or, “My dad tells me he thinks I can do well.”

UC teaching faculty members not to criticize race-based affirmative action, call America ‘melting pot,’ and more

Eugene Volokh:

One of the latest things in universities, including at University of California (where I teach) is condemning “microaggressions,” supposed “brief, subtle verbal or non-verbal exchanges that send denigrating messages to the recipient because of his or her group membership (such as race, gender, age or socio-economic status).” Such microaggressions, the argument goes, can lead to a “hostile learning environment,” which UC — and the federal government — views as legally actionable. This is stuff you could get disciplined or fired for, especially if you aren’t a tenured faculty member.

N.J. Charter Schools Receive Less Money From Private Sources Than N.J.’s Traditional Schools

Laura Waters:

Researchers at the University of Arkansas studied 15 states, including New Jersey, and found that traditional public schools receive more than $2,700 more per student than charters, even with non-public dollars included. The data analyzed is from the 2010-11 school year, the most recent available at the time the study began.

New Jersey was one of only three states in the study where charter schools received less in non-public revenue per pupil than traditional public schools. Traditional public schools received 1.3 percent of funding from private sources, while charters got 1 percent from non-public sources.

The Decline Annoying Real Things About Real Places

Charles King:

In October 2013, the U.S. Department of State eliminated its funding program for advanced language and cultural training on Russia and the former Soviet Union. Created in 1983 as a special appropriation by Congress, the so-called Title VIII Program had supported generations of specialists working in academia, think tanks, and the U.S. government itself. But as a State Department official told the Russian news service RIA Novosti at the time, “In this fiscal climate, it just didn’t make it.” The program’s shuttering came just a month before the start of a now well-known chain of events: Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the descent of U.S.-Russian relations to their lowest level since the Cold War. The timing was, to say the least, unfortunate.

Academic publishers reap huge profits as libraries go broke

CBC:

Think it’s hard to make money in publishing in the digital age? Well, huge profits are still to be had – if you’re a publisher of academic research journals.

While traditional book and magazine publishers struggle to stay afloat, research publishing houses have typical profit margins of nearly 40 per cent, says Vincent Larivière, a researcher at the University of Montreal’s School of Library and Information Science.

Massive endowments, massive tuition, massive debt: Our colleges are out of control and crushing students

Paul Campos:

Prostitution comes in many forms. Consider the story of a New York University student, who finds that her school — the most expensive in the country — has raised prices yet again, and that she needs $2,000 she doesn’t have to remain enrolled. She visits the financial aid office, where an administrator literally laughs in her face. “He couldn’t believe,” she says, “that anyone would have trouble raising such a small amo

Cheating found to be rife in British schools and universities

Richard Adams:

British education is experiencing an epidemic of trickery and cheating, ranging from primary school teachers rigging key assessments through to 40,000 university undergraduates disciplined for plagiarism over the past four years.

An investigation by Channel 4 Dispatches, to be screened on Monday night, describes how shady practices and in some cases outright fraud are woven into the fabric of UK education as the use of exam results, league tables and performance indicators increases the pressure on students, teachers and institutions to succeed.

We Have Entered In Age Of Willful Ignorance

Lee McIntyre:

o see how we treat the concept of truth these days, one might think we just don’t care anymore. Politicians pronounce that global warming is a hoax. An alarming number of middle-class parents have stopped giving their children routine vaccinations, on the basis of discredited research. Meanwhile many commentators in the media — and even some in our universities — have all but abandoned their responsibility to set the record straight. (It doesn’t help when scientists occasionally have to retract their own work.)

Best classes money can buy

Liu Xin:

While most seniors in high schools are nervously awaiting the results for the national college entrance exams they wrote on June 7, Gao Ge, a graduate of Shanghai Datong High School, can relax. He has already received offers from many universities, including Carnegie Mellon and Tufts.

Gao is one of the first graduates of the Vermont International Academy program in the school, which offers American-style high-school education to Chinese students.

Gao will also be one of the last graduates of the program.

Beijing and Guangzhou have announced that they will no longer approve international programs like Gao’s in public high schools. Shanghai has reportedly made the same decision.

 “Skip the content in school. We’ll teach it to you at Goldman Sachs.”

Alyssa Abkowitz:

Goldman Sachs Group Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein Wednesday gave business students at Tsinghua University a piece of advice that would make most teachers cringe: “Skip the content in school. We’ll teach it to you at Goldman Sachs.”

Mr. Blankfein, an advisory member of Tsinghua’s School of Economics and Management, told the audience that it was more important to first become an interesting person. “You have to know the content of your field, but you also have to be a complete person, the kind of person that other people want to deal with,” he said.

His conversation with Tsinghua School of Economics and Management dean Qian Yingyi came on the heels of the gaokao, China’s notoriously difficult college-entrance exam, and SAT testing weekends, when millions of high school students sat for exams in hopes of getting good scores to boost their university applications. There have been cheating concerns surrounding some college exams, particularly at schools abroad, as competitiveness among foreign applicants heightens.

Universities are the new multinational corporations

Jason Lane:

A growing number of colleges and universities are emerging as multinational organizations—creating start-up versions of themselves in foreign countries.

Those vacationing in western France may drive past a campus of Georgia Institute of Technology. Similarly, those visiting Italy may come across a Johns Hopkins nestled in Bologna; or if you are a visitor to Rwanda, you may come across a Carnegie Mellon University campus.
According to the Cross-Border Education Research Team (C-BERT) at SUNY-Albany, 51 US universities now operate 83 branch campuses outside of the United States. Arkansas State has recently announced it will build a campus in Mexico. Qatar is already home to campuses from six American universities.

How Adulthood Happens

David Brooks:

Every society has its rites of passage, marking the transition from youth to adulthood. Most of these rites of passage are ritualized and structured, with adult supervision and celebration. But the major rite of passage in our society is unritualized, unstructured and unnamed. Most of the people in the middle of it don’t even know it is going on. It happens between ages 22 and 30.

The people who endure this rite of passage have often attended colleges where they were not taught how to work hard. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa write in their book “Aspiring Adults Adrift,” the average student at a four-year college studies alone just over one hour per day. That is roughly half of how much students were compelled to study just a generation ago.

Credentialism: Nearly 30 Percent of Workers in the U.S. Need a License to Perform Their Job: It Is Time to Examine Occupational Licensing Practices

Melissa S. Kearney, Brad Hershbein and David Boddy:

With such large potential consequences for worker opportunities and consumer prices, balancing the pros and cons of licensing would seem to be critical, but remarkably the status quo seldom takes such a careful approach.

Thoughtful reform of state occupational licensing practices should garner support from across the political spectrum. A call for evaluating the benefits and costs of widespread occupational licensing should appeal to those interested in expanding the employment prospects of low- and middle-income workers and keeping prices more affordable to low- and middle-income consumers. Simultaneously, the issue should draw interest from those committed to expanding economic opportunities by promoting entrepreneurship, the creation of small businesses, and giving individuals the ability to pursue their vocational interests.

Related: from Janet Mertz (2009).

Recent rhetoric.

11-Year-Old Boy Played in His Yard. CPS Took Him, Felony Charge for Parents.An interview with two parents who lost their kids… over nothing.

Lenore Skenazy:

They were put in handcuffs, strip searched, fingerprinted, and held overnight in jail.

It would be a month before their sons—the 11-year-old and his 4-year-old brother—were allowed home again. Only after the eldest spoke up and begged a judge to give him back to his parents did the situation improve.

I spoke with Cindy about her family’s horrible ordeal.

“My older one was the so-called ‘victim,'” she said during a phone interview. But since she and her husband were charged with felony neglect, the younger boy had to be removed from the home, too.

I Taught Math on Capitol Hill. Here’s How it Went

aeva Mskowitz:

A few weeks ago, I traveled down to Washington, D.C., with five other Success Academy educators and ten fifth graders to deliver a math lesson on Capitol Hill. Actually, it was more than just a math lesson — it was a demonstration of just how effective great teaching can be.

We wanted to peel back the curtain to show exactly how Success Academy teachers get outstanding achievement results for an inner-city student body made up predominantly of low-income minority children. Last year, 94% of our students passed New York’s proficiency exams, compared with 36% of students across the state.

Why can Palo Alto grade schoolers read Mandarin better than students in AP Chinese classes?

Joyce Gemperlin:

Two studies led by Amado Padilla show that young immersion program students achieve proficiency in Mandarin without falling behind in other subjects.

Stanford Graduate School of Education researchers found that 4th and 5th graders in a Palo Alto, Calif., Mandarin immersion program attained a level of linguistic competency comparable with that of nearby high schoolers completing the 4th and 5th level Advanced Placement Mandarin courses.

Some of those Ohlone Elementary School immersion students even outperformed the teenagers in reading. Perhaps most startling, there was little difference in achievement between the heritage learners at Ohlone and their classmates who had no previous exposure to Mandarin.

China’s Robot Revolution 

Martin Ford:

OVER the last decade, China has become, in the eyes of much of the world, a job-eating monster, consuming entire industries with its seemingly limitless supply of low-wage workers. But the reality is that China is now shifting its appetite to robots, a transition that will have significant consequences for China’s economy — and the world’s.

In 2014, Chinese factories accounted for about a quarter of the global ranks of industrial robots — a 54 percent increase over 2013. According to the International Federation of Robotics, it will have more installed manufacturing robots than any other country by 2017.

Midea, a leading manufacturer of home appliances in the heavily industrialized province of Guangdong, plans to replace 6,000 workers in its residential air-conditioning division, about a fifth of the work force, with automation by the end of the year. Foxconn, which makes consumer electronics for Apple and other companies, plans to automate about 70 percent of factory work within three years, and already has a fully robotic factory in Chengdu.

College for all, the Europeans, and path dependency

Jane the actuary:

Remember when Bernie Sanders proposed his College for All Act? I had initially thought of it as so unserious as to not even merit any attention, but it seems relevant in light of the “I defaulted and I’m proud” op-ed from last weekend.

First, the Sanders plan: given that public colleges are financed and governed at the state level, and private colleges, well, privately, his attempt to fund and govern colleges at the federal level is a bit convoluted. Here are the key bits:

1) beginning in 2016, the federal government is to provide grants, with the state matching at a 67%/33% rate, equivalent to the amount that (including the states’ required portion) covers tuition and required fees at that state’s public universities for that year. (The fiscal years are a bit off, or else the phrasing, presumably due to poor drafting — are the grants meant to equal the amount that the universities charged the prior year, or amounts that the universities determine that they would have charged, absent this bill?)

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Fed Policy May Have Widened America’s Wealth Inequality, Philadelphia Fed Paper Says

Pedro Nicolaci Di Costa:

Federal Reserve policies launched in a historic economic slump may have exacerbated wealth disparities in the U.S., according to new research from the Philadelphia Fed.

“Monetary policy currently implemented by the Federal Reserve and other major central banks is not intended to benefit one segment of the population at the expense of another by redistributing income and wealth,” writes economist Makoto Nakajima in the second quarter edition of the regional central bank’s Business Review.

“However, it is probably impossible to avoid the redistributive consequences of monetary policy,” the paper says.

Meanwhile, local property taxes continue to grow.

Much more on recent tax and spending growth, here.

Lifelong Math Tax: Rental America: Why the poor pay $4,150 for a $1,500 sofa

Chico Harlan:

At Buddy’s, a used 32-gigabyte, early model iPad costs $1,439.28, paid over 72 weeks. An Acer laptop: $1,943.28, in 72 weekly installments. A Maytag washer and dryer: $1,999 over 100 weeks.

Abbott wanted a love seat-sofa combo, and she knew it might rip her budget. But this, she figured, was the cost of being out of options. “You don’t get something like that just to put more burden on yourself,” Abbott said.

Five years into a national economic recovery that has further strained the poor working class, an entire industry has grown around handing them a lifeline to the material rewards of middle-class life. Retailers in the post-Great Recession years have become even more likely to work with customers who don’t have the money upfront, instead offering a widening spectrum of payment plans that ultimately cost far more and add to the burdens of life on the economy’s fringes.

Related Math Forum and Connected Math.

The SAT: A New Core Subject in Schools

James Murphy:

Last week, two major education companies unveiled a set of resources that they’ve pledged will help all kids—rich or poor—succeed on the SAT. After decades of denying the value of test prep, the College Board, which administers the SAT, is now promoting interactive, high-quality training materials, including drills keyed to students’ abilities and instructional videos. The materials were developed by Khan Academy, the free, online education company used by more than 15 million students globally; all the content was written or approved by the College Board itself. And they are, like Khan Academy, completely free.

The unveiling occasioned the expected cheers and doubts, but to evaluate the Khan Academy’s “Official SAT Practice” resources one must understand that they are part of a much bigger plan. It’s a plan that may help get thousands of poor students on track to success. But it will also give the College Board an even larger role in America’s high schools and the lives of students.

Why College Professors Are Afraid to Teach Millennials

Edward Morrisey:

Hungry for love and it’s feeding time, Alice Cooper wrote in his 1991 classic song, “Feed My Frankenstein.” Academia has created its own Frankenstein with its speech codes, groupthink enforcement, and discouraging of dissent. This Frankenstein isn’t hungry for love – it’s hungry for power. And academics themselves have belatedly discovered that they’re on the menu.

The most recent to find himself not the last up against the wall in this anti-free speech revolution is “Edward Schlosser,” a professor writing under a pseudonym at Vox, for reasons that become apparent almost immediately. Schlosser admits that he lives in fear of students who share his political point of view, and has to change his curriculum continuously to keep from running afoul of their potential for hurt feelings.

The Logic Of Stupid Poor People

Tressiemc:

My family is a classic black American migration family. We have rural Southern roots, moved north and almost all have returned. I grew up watching my great-grandmother, and later my grandmother and mother, use our minimal resources to help other people make ends meet. We were those good poors, the kind who live mostly within our means. We had a little luck when a male relative got extra military pay when they came home a paraplegic or used the VA to buy a Jim Walter house (pdf). If you were really blessed when a relative died with a paid up insurance policy you might be gifted a lump sum to buy the land that Jim Walters used as collateral to secure your home lease. That’s how generational wealth happens where I’m from: lose a leg, a part of your spine, die right and maybe you can lease-to-own a modular home.

Children from poorer families perceived by teachers as less able, says study

Richard Adams:

Children from disadvantaged backgrounds or with special needs may be marked down in critical primary school assessments because of unconscious bias affecting their teachers, according to research published on Tuesday.

The research also suggests familiar gender stereotypes – that boys are good at maths and girls are better at reading – may create a vicious cycle, and that this may “continue to play a part in creating and perpetuating inequalities”.

The work by University College London’s Institute of Education compared results from standardised tests by nearly 5,000 primary school pupils in England with assessments of their ability by their teachers. It found significant differences in how the pupils performed compared with their teachers’ judgment.

Related. Tyranny of low expectations.

Poverty & Education Forum (2005):

Rafael Gomez organized an excellent Forum Wednesday evening on Poverty and Education. Participants include:

Tom Kaplan: Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Poverty kaplan at ssc.wisc.edu

Ray Allen, Former Madison Board of Education Member, Publisher – Madison Times

Maria Covarrubias: A Teacher at Chavez Elementary mcovarrubias at madison.k12.wi.us

Mary Kay Baum: Executive Director; Madison-Area Urban Ministry mkb at emum.org

Bob Howard: Madison School District rhoward at madison.k12.wi.us