Americans increased their borrowing this summer, taking out more new mortgages for the first time in over a year while adding to their car, credit-card and education loans.
For the most part, consumers are taking on new loans carefully, yet late payments on one fast-growing category of debt—student loans—are worsening, new figures from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York show.
Category Archives: Lifelong Learning
Teaching civility: Two daring assignments
I remember the day I stopped humming the theme song to the television show “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” It was midway through the semester at Towson University, and I had just met with a student who was furious that I had asked her to leave class because she had been e-mailing. She couldn’t believe I would do such a thing. I was angry that she flouted my no-texting/e-mailing classroom policy and, worse, that she lacked even a whiff of contrition.
I walked into my next class, a course that explored the declining health of civility and community in American culture. As usual, everyone’s eyes were buried in their cellphones. When class started, the tension was palpable. Ever since we had started exploring the toxic state of community, students had grown defensive. They hadn’t bought my argument that they needed to break out of their hyperconnected cocoons — “ramparts” may be more accurate — and live in ever-expanding communities where face-to-face relationships breed tolerance and the rewards of individual sacrifice.
I posed a question. “I just read a study which says that 81 percent of your generation doesn’t trust most people or large institutions,” I said. “So, how can we create community if we only trust our small circle of friends and families?”
“What’s wrong with finding our own small communities?” Ashley huffed.
A wave of “Yeahs!” sounded.
Self Selection of New Jersey Public Schools
intentionally skimming,” said Anderson, “but all of these things are leading to a higher concentration of the neediest kids in fewer [district] schools.”
Charter advocates winced and went on the defensive. Charter detractors grinned and high-fived. Both reactions miss the point.
Statisticians and social scientists argue about the presence and/or impact of this unintentional bias cited by Anderson, what Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the progressive Century Foundation, calls “the self-selection problem that skims the most motivated families into charter schools.” So let’s start by agreeing that many charter schools are subject to unintentional skimming (and note the irony that Anderson’s “One Newark” universal enrollment plan, the subject of much criticism, was created specifically to avoid that bias.)
But this narrow reading of Newark’s public school enrollment template ignores the big picture. New Jersey parents have a long proud tradition of self-selection of schools. It’s as New Jersey as cranberries. Charter school skimming in Newark is just New Jersey’s school segregation problem writ small, an in situ version of a statewide pattern.
There are 21 school districts in Essex County, including Newark, which educate 124,000 students in 247 public schools. The median household income is $55,000, about $16,000 below the state’s median $71,000. The county’s racial makeup is diverse, with equal numbers of white and black residents and a growing Hispanic population. However, as Paul Tractenberg pointed out in these pages last year, Essex is the most segregated county in the state. Twelve school districts are almost entirely white and wealthy. Four, including Newark, “are urban, desperately poor, and almost entirely populated by students of color.”
Teaching civility: Two daring assignments
I remember the day I stopped humming the theme song to the television show “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” It was midway through the semester at Towson University, and I had just met with a student who was furious that I had asked her to leave class because she had been e-mailing. She couldn’t believe I would do such a thing. I was angry that she flouted my no-texting/e-mailing classroom policy and, worse, that she lacked even a whiff of contrition.
I walked into my next class, a course that explored the declining health of civility and community in American culture. As usual, everyone’s eyes were buried in their cellphones. When class started, the tension was palpable. Ever since we had started exploring the toxic state of community, students had grown defensive. They hadn’t bought my argument that they needed to break out of their hyperconnected cocoons — “ramparts” may be more accurate — and live in ever-expanding communities where face-to-face relationships breed tolerance and the rewards of individual sacrifice.
Thinking too highly of higher ed
Perhaps the least controversial thing that President Obama ever said was that “in the coming decades, a high school diploma is not going to be enough. Folks need a college degree.” This vision is commonplace, but it implies a bleak future where everyone must work harder just to stay in place, and it’s just not true. Nothing forces us to funnel students into a tournament that bankrupts the losers and turns the winners into conformists. But that’s what will happen until we start questioning whether college is our only option.
Is higher education an investment? Everyone knows that college graduates earn more than those without degrees. Maybe that earning power comes from learning valuable skills, networking with smart people or obtaining a recognized credential. Well, maybe — it’s hard to say exactly, since “college” bundles so many different things into one arbitrary package. And if all the most ambitious kids in our society go to college just because it’s the conventional thing to do, then what happens on campus might not matter, anyway. The same kids would probably enjoy a wage premium even if they spent four years in the Peace Corps instead.
Surprise: Humanities Degrees Provide Great Return On Investment
Humanities degrees have received a bad rap recently, even from President Obama. Many people, including top policy makers, routinely push policies to encourage more students to major in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Some governors have even suggested that state subsidies for public universities should be focused on STEM disciplines, with less money going to “less useful” degrees such as the humanities. Yet, in contravention to this perceived truth, the data show that humanities degrees are still worth a great deal.
As part of a recent project estimating the economic impact of my university, I had a reason to compute the predicted value of college degrees in a wide variety of fields. While it is certainly true that science, engineering, math and business degrees all produce graduates with high expected salaries, those humanities degrees still pay off rather handsomely.
Who Killed Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is the sixth most popular website in the world. It’s the quickest way to get the lowdown on the Battle of Nashville, find out exactly how old Ruth Bader Ginsburg is, or discover who invented Hot Pockets. You can find more authoritative specialized resources online—from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to IMDb— but nothing is as comprehensive. The English-language edition, the largest of Wikipedia’s 287 language editions, now includes more than 4.5 million entries, and 11 other editions have more than a million each.
Few of the tens of millions of readers who rely on Wikipedia give much thought to where its content comes from or why the site, which is crowdsourced and open (at least in theory) for anyone to edit, doesn’t degenerate into gibberish and graffiti. Like Google or running water, it is simply there. Yet its very existence is something of a miracle. Despite its ocean of content, this vital piece of informational infrastructure is the work of a surprisingly small community of volunteers. Only about 3,000 editors contribute more than 100 changes a month to the English-language Wikipedia, down from a high of more than 4,700 in early 2007. Without any central direction or outside recognition, these dedicated amateurs create, refine, and maintain millions of content pages.
Student Loan Debt per US State
This map shows average student loan debt and student loan default rates in the U.S. when your cursor hovers over a state. The table below shows a ranking of states by their average student loan debt. Explore, then see our conclusions below.
Jeb Bush speaks up for Common Core
“In my view, the rigour of the Common Core state standards must be the new minimum in classrooms,” Mr Bush said. “For those states choosing a path other than Common Core, I say this: Aim even higher. Be bolder. Raise standards and ask more of our students and the system, because I know they have the potential to deliver it.”
Mr Bush said the US government must make education reform a priority and, if that happens, it could make Common Core a 2016 election cycle issue. Last month, Rand Paul, Kentucky’s Republican senator, said that a supporter “doesn’t have much chance of winning in a Republican primary.”
Mr Bush pointed to Black and Hispanic American fourth graders reading two and a half grade levels below their white peers on average. He also cited the global rankings that place American students 21st in reading and 31st in mathematics.
“But if we buy the excuses, if we let kids struggle, if we herd them into failing schools, how can we expect young people to grasp those first rungs of opportunity?” Mr Bush asked. “That is why the challenge of fixing our schools must be among the most urgent of national priorities.”
Student Debt: A Calculator Focused on College Majors
Student debt seems on its way to becoming a significant political issue, for better or worse. When a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll asked people about a long list of domestic and foreign policy proposals, none received more support – 82 percent – than reducing the cost of student loans. When the 2016 campaign gets underway, candidates will most likely come forth with various plans to address the issue.
So it’s a good time for an interactive calculator that the Hamilton Project is releasing Thursday, meant to give more detailed information about loan burdens. The feature’s main contribution is the earnings data it gives on about 80 different majors, allowing people to look up typical debt burdens by major, over the first decade after college – which is when people tend to repay their loans.
5 ways community colleges are fixing higher education
By Emanuella Grinberg, Jamie Gumbrecht and Thom Patterson:
Enter community colleges. They provide technical programs for emerging careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics that are comparable to — if not better than — some of their four-year counterparts, at a fraction of the cost. Often, they’re the launchpad to baccalaureate programs for people without the time, money or academic skills to jump into a four-year program straight out of high school.
And as part of the American Association of Community Colleges’ 21st Century Initiative, they’re updating their missions and nimbly shifting to serve the economy of the future.
Here are some of the ways they’re facing problems that weigh down all of higher education — and succeeding.
Graduates of Elite Colleges See a Payoff
Sure, it’s nice to have a graduate degree from Yale, but a new study finds that attending an elite undergraduate institution counts for an awful lot when it comes to lifelong earnings.
A researcher at the Vanderbilt University Law School found that people with advanced degrees from elite schools and undergraduate diplomas from less-selective institutions earn less than people who attended elite schools for both their graduate and undergraduate degrees.
The results hold up across a broad swath of graduate programs, from law degrees to M.B.A.s. And those who attended less elite undergraduate institutions are unlikely to ever close the salary gap, according to the study.
Joni Hersch of Vanderbilt Law School said the survey results came as somewhat of a surprise, but suggests that it’s not really undergraduate education driving the pay disparity, but instead the social status of graduates of elite colleges.
The parents of students at elite colleges tend to be better-educated than the parents of those at less competitive schools, Hersch said; the children of educated parents tend to have more early networking opportunities and understand certain social cues.
“It’s the vacations you can talk about, the small talk you can make, what wine you order in restaurants” that could make the difference in a hiring manager’s decision, said Hersch, who earned her undergraduate degree at the University of South Florida.
Wisconsin Special Education Open Enrollment Lawsuit
Teens learn better when they’re awake
Last week the New Jersey Senate Education Committee approved a bill proposed by Sen. Dick Codey (D-Essex) that would authorize “a study on the issues, benefits, and options for instituting a later start time to the school day in middle school and high school.” Makes sense, right? After all, we know that the hormonal changes of puberty affect teenagers’ circadian rhythms which, in turn, dictate sleep schedules and alertness. If you’ve had teenagers (I’ve had four) you know that they’re late to bed and late to rise, a pattern that hardly squares with school start times of 7:30 or so. Sen. Codey’s bill logically proposes that middle and high schools students start school when they are awake enough to fully benefit from academic instruction. This shift is supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
You’d think that this would be an easy call for the State Legislature, but it’s complicated. With all the agonizing we do over the state of American education — our kids are underperforming! our kids are over-tested! it’s the race to nowhere! it’s their only chance! — we rarely focus on the fact that school schedules are shaped by an assortment of priorities that at times coexist harmoniously with the academic mission of schools and at times conflict with that mission. One of those conflicts is our tradition of designing school schedules to accommodate the needs of extracurricular activities. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Sen. Codey’s bill is that it forces us to examine that compromise.
Vape gathers linguistic steam to become Word of the Year 2014
This was the year of vaping, according to Oxford Dictionaries, which has chosen “vape” – the act of inhaling from an electronic cigarette – as its word of 2014 after use of the term more than doubled over the last year.
Vape – defined as to “inhale and exhale the vapour produced by an electronic cigarette or similar device” – beat contenders including slacktivism, bae and indyref to be chosen as Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2014. The shortlist is compiled from scanning around 150m words of English in use each month, applying software to identify new and emerging usage. Dictionary editors and lexicographers, including staff from the Oxford English Dictionary, then pinpoint a final selection and an eventual winner, which is intended to be a word judged “to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year and to have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance”.
College Applicants Sanitizing Social Media Profiles
Admissions officers at Morehouse College in Atlanta were shocked several years ago when a number of high school seniors submitted applications using email addresses containing provocative language.
Some of the addresses made sexual innuendos while others invoked gangster rap songs or drug use, said Darryl D. Isom, Morehouse’s director of admissions and recruitment.
But last year, he and his staff noticed a striking reversal: Nearly every applicant to Morehouse, an all-male historically black college, used his real name, or some variation, as his email address.
To Help Language Skills of Children, a Study Finds, Text Their Parents With Tips
With research showing language gaps between the children of affluent parents and those from low-income families emerging at an early age, educators have puzzled over how best to reach parents and guide them to do things like read to their children and talk to them regularly.
A new study shows that mobile technology may offer a cheap and effective solution. The research, released by the National Bureau of Economic Research this month, found that preschoolers whose parents received text messages with brief tips on reading to their children or helping them sound out letters and words performed better on literacy tests than children whose parents did not receive such messages.
Pediatricians are now advising parents to read daily to their children from birth. Some communities are developing academic curriculums for home visitors to share with parents of babies and toddlers, while other groups are mounting public information campaigns for parents on the importance of talking, reading and singing.
Related: Madison’s disastrous long term reading results.
Design education is “tragic”
News: Apple’s head designer Jonathan Ive says he struggles to hire young staff as schools are failing to teach them how to make products.
Speaking at London’s Design Museum last night, Ive attacked design schools for failing to teach students how to make physical products and relying too heavily on “cheap” computers.
“So many of the designers that we interview don’t know how to make stuff, because workshops in design schools are expensive and computers are cheaper,” said Ive.
“That’s just tragic, that you can spend four years of your life studying the design of three dimensional objects and not make one.”
Ive, who is Apple’s senior vice president of design, said that students were being taught to use computer programs to make renderings that could “make a dreadful design look really palatable”.
Watch Harvard Students Fail the Literacy Test Louisiana Used to Suppress the Black Vote in 1964
This summer, we revisited a literacy test from the Jim Crow South. Given predominantly to African-Americans living in Louisiana in 1964, the test consisted of 30 ambiguous questions to be answered in 10 minutes. One wrong answer, and the test-taker was denied the right to vote. It was all part of the South’s attempt to impede free and fair elections, and ensure that African-Americans had no access to politics or mechanisms of power.
How hard was the test? You can take it yourself below (see an answer key here) and find out. Just recently, the same literacy test was also administered to Harvard students — students who can, if anything, ace a standardized test — and not one passed. The questions are tricky. But even worse, if push comes to shove, the questions and answers can be interpreted in different ways by officials grading the exam. Carl Miller, a resident tutor at Harvard and a fellow at the law school, told The Daily Mail: “Louisiana’s literacy test was designed to be failed. Just like all the other literacy tests issued in the South at the time, this test was not about testing literacy at all. It was a … devious measure that the State of Louisiana used to disenfranchise people that had the wrong skin tone or belonged to the wrong social class.” (Sometimes the test was also given to poor whites.) Above, you can watch scenes from the Harvard experiment and students’ reactions.
Community Colleges Make Four-Year Degrees Pay Off
With college costs soaring and the job market for new grads sputtering, one trend is worth watching: more and more states are authorizing community colleges to grant bachelor’s degrees. Already, more than 20 states — now including California, which enrolls one out of every four of the nation’s community college students — have authorized community colleges to grant these degrees.
Turf will be an issue as this trend continues, but there is a division of labor between community colleges and universities that makes sense. Community colleges can and should be encouraged to develop bachelor’s-degree programs in career and technical areas and to avoid the liberal arts degrees that are integral to the mission and education delivered by universities. In any case, turf isn’t the bottom line in this coming shift. The bottom line is the bottom line: Do the technical and career-oriented degrees in which community colleges specialize pay off in the labor market?
OntoMathPro Ontology Page
The OntoMathPro ontology has been developed by a research group from Kazan Federal University. The ontology is geared to be the hub for math knowledge in the Web of Data. We shared the sources with the Semantic Web community to engage our colleagues from elsewhere in its further development. We are going to create an ecosystem of datasets and mashups around the ontology.
Why Blended tops my thankful list
Each November our family has a tradition of listing things we’re grateful for on 100 colorful construction-paper leaves and taping them all over the windows by the kitchen table. The recent publication of Blended of course tops my list!
Admittedly that’s in part because of the relief of a finished project, but the more lasting joy is from knowing that Michael Horn and I helped preserve stories that I think need to be told about children and school and the profound effect of adults’ choices on children’s lives. The book begins with a story about Jack, a fifth grader at Santa Rita Elementary School who started the 2010-11 school year at the bottom of his math class. He struggled to keep up and considered himself one of those kids who would just never quite “get it.” In a typical school, he would have been tracked and placed in the bottom math group. That would have meant that he would not have taken algebra until high school, which would have limited his college options.
London schools: the central role of ethnicity
Urban areas are often associated with poor educational attainment. But London is different. Recent analysis suggests that the attainment and progress of pupils in London is the highest in the country. A leading education policy commentator argues that: “Perhaps the biggest question in education policy over the past few years is why the outcomes for London schools have been improving so much faster than in the rest of the country”. Some have argued that this is the result of policies and practices adopted by London schools. If so, identifying the key policies is a great prize, with the hope that they can be implemented more broadly. Another recent report emphasises more the importance of primary schools.
In this research I have set out the evidence that a big part, almost all in fact, of the answer lies in the ethnic composition of London’s pupils. More broadly, my interpretation of this leads to a focus on pupil aspiration, ambition and engagement. There is nothing inherently different in the educational performance of pupils from different ethnic backgrounds, but the children of relatively recent immigrants typically have greater hopes and expectations of education, and are, on average, more likely to be engaged with their school work. This is not by chance of course; a key part of the London effect is its attraction to migrants and those aspiring to a better life.
Scientists have unlocked a state of child-like fast learning in the adult brain
When we’re young, our brains are able to form new neural connections extremely quickly – an ability known as “plasticity” that allows us to learn how to walk, talk and play all in the space of a few years. But, as we get older, this ability fades and, sadly, it takes us longer to learn new things.
Now scientists from Stanford University in the US have managed to unlock child-like plasticity in the adult brains of mice by interfering with a protein known as PirB (or LilrB2 in humans).
The breakthrough is pretty exciting as it could not only lead to new mind-enhancing drugs, but could also help us work out how to make the brain more malleable and better able to recover from damage.
Fearful Parenting Is Contagious
On Immunity: An Inoculation
Eula Biss
Graywolf Press, $24 (cloth)After my daughter was born, whenever I heard about parents who refused vaccines, I’d feel a flare of hostility. Not because I couldn’t relate to them—as an easily spooked new mom, I could relate all too well. No mother is thrilled to see a needle jabbed into her child. It hardly helps to know that the needle contains a substance derived from a disease-causing agent. Even leaving aside the debunked autism claims, the visceral reality of vaccination runs counter to every parental instinct.
But I had decided to trust the experts and not think about it too much. My daughter’s blue immunization book was fully up to date. Hearing about parents who opted out reminded me of my unease. Their existence was also an implicit rebuke; thinking of them put me on the defensive. They would, I imagined, deem me a bad mother, negligent and misinformed. I all but wanted to shout, “I know you are but what am I” at my hypothetical anti-vaxxer adversaries.
In On Immunity, Eula Biss’s quietly impassioned new book, the author evinces no such hostility (and considerably more maturity). She does attribute one pitch-perfect line to her father, a doctor who serves as the wry voice of reason in the book. Biss is groping for words to explain the phenomenon of chicken pox parties as alternatives to vaccinations. “I say, ‘Some people want their children to get chicken pox because,’ and pause to think of the best reason to give a doctor. ‘They’re idiots,’ my father supplies.”
This backpack designed for poor kids does so much more than carry books
South Africans Thato Kgatlhanye and Rea Ngwane are co-founders of the business Rethaka. Their brand of Repurposed Schoolbags are made from recycled and reinforced plastic shopping bags. Many of the recipients come from poor families.
But it’s so much more than a bag. Because the kids often live in shacks and remote areas with no electricity, Repurposed Schoolbags are built with some other smart features. On the outside of the flap is a pocket for a solar panel, which charges on the long walk to and from school. That screws onto a Consol glass jar that the kids use as a lamp at home when doing homework in the evenings. The bag is also reflective because many of these kids wake up at the crack of dawn and walk in the dark to get to school on time.
The Fine Art of Tough Love
What does it take to achieve excellence? I’ve spent much of my career chronicling top executives as a business journalist. But I’ve spent much of the last year on a very different pursuit, coauthoring a book about education, focusing on a tough but ultimately revered public-school music teacher.
And here’s what I learned: When it comes to creating a culture of excellence, the CEO has an awful lot to learn from the schoolteacher.
The teacher at the heart of the book Strings Attached is on the face of it an unlikely corporate role model. My childhood music teacher Jerry Kupchynsky, who we called “Mr. K,” was strictly old school: A ferocious Ukrainian immigrant and World War II refugee, he was a tyrannical school orchestra conductor in suburban New Jersey. He would yell and stomp and scream when we screwed up, bellowing “Who eez DEAF in first violins?” His highest praise was “not bad.” He rehearsed us until our fingers were raw.
The Rise of Extreme Daycare
In the garden of Dee’s Tots Childcare, amid the sunflowers, cornstalks, and plastic cars, a three-year-old girl with beads in her braids and a two-year-old blond boy are shimmying. These are Deloris Hogan’s 6:45 p.m. pick-ups. Nearby, also dancing, are four kids who won’t be picked up until late at night, as well as two “overnight babies,” as Deloris calls them. Dee’s Tots stays open 24 hours a day, seven days a week; the children’s parents work unconventional hours, producing an unexpected cycle of drop-offs and reunions. One afternoon in August, the kids bounce on the center’s inflatable castles, rustle around at the sand tables, and eat a watermelon snack. Then it gets dark.
Well-paid professionals who work evenings may be able to afford one or two nannies, or they may have partners who stay at home. But parents like the ones who rely on Dee’s can’t afford such luxuries.
Wisconsin superintendent seeks an Increase in Redistributed State Tax Dollars to $12,800,000,000
Erin Richards & Kelly Meyerhoffer:
State Superintendent Tony Evers wants to boost funding for Wisconsin’s K-12 schools by $613 million in the next biennial budget, combined with increases to the amount of money schools can raise in local taxes, and a new way of funding the Milwaukee voucher program.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s 2015-’17 budget request released Monday kicks off the conversation about the future of public school funding, ahead of Gov. Scott Walker and the Legislature putting together the biennial state budget in early 2015.
But the newly elected Legislature is even more conservative than the previous two Legislatures — neither of which warmed to Evers’ similar “Fair Funding for our Future” budget proposals in 2010 and 2012.
“This is our third kick at the cat to get Fair Funding passed,” said DPI spokesman John Johnson.
The proposal calls for a 2.5% increase in state aid in the first year of the budget, which Johnson said would put the state back on track from the education cuts in the last four years. The 2016-’17 school year would see an even larger increase, 4.9%, in state aid. In total, that accounts for a $453 million increase in general school aid, according to the DPI.
The plan also calls for a $160 million increase in separate aid for specific uses, known as categorical aid.
More significant for school districts is Evers’ aim to increase the revenue limit — or the amount districts can raise in state aid and local property taxes — by $200 per pupil in 2015-’16 and $204 per pupil in 2016-’17.
Current state law calls for no increase to the revenue limit in 2015-’16 and thereafter, according to the DPI.
The DPI wants to tie the revenue limit increase each year to the rate of inflation.
Props to Molly Beck for including total spending. Ideally, the article would incorporate performance information…
Wisconsin’s K-12 taxes & spending have increased substantially over the years. Outcomes
I taught my black kids that their elite upbringing would protect them from discrimination. I was wrong
I knew the day would come, but I didn’t know how it would happen, where I would be, or how I would respond. It is the moment that every black parent fears: the day their child is called a nigger.
My wife and I, both African Americans, constitute one of those Type A couples with Ivy League undergraduate and graduate degrees who, for many years, believed that if we worked hard and maintained great jobs, we could insulate our children from the blatant manifestations of bigotry that we experienced as children in the 1960s and ’70s.
We divided our lives between a house in a liberal New York suburb and an apartment on Park Avenue, sent our three kids to a diverse New York City private school, and outfitted them with the accoutrements of success: preppy clothes, perfect diction and that air of quiet graciousness. We convinced ourselves that the economic privilege we bestowed on them could buffer these adolescents against what so many black and Latino children face while living in mostly white settings: being profiled by neighbors, followed in stores and stopped by police simply because their race makes them suspect.
But it happened nevertheless in July, when I was 100 miles away.
Related: The Poverty & Education Forum.
Deep Learning
Added 152 new Deep Learning papers to the Deeplearning.University Bibliography, if you want to see them separate from the previous papers in the bibliography the new ones are listed below. There are many very interesting papers, e.g. in the medicine (e.g. deep learning for cancer-related analysis such as mammogram and pancreas cancer, and heart diseases), in addition to the social network category as shown here:
The Places in America Where College Football Means the Most
It is hard to explain to someone who grew up in a big city in the Northeast just how big a deal college football is in the Southeast.
College sports, and particularly football, occupy a role at the center of daily life in the South — like in South Carolina, where one of us grew up — that is hard to imagine for many people who grew up in New York or Boston.
Last month we published The Upshot’s map of college football fandom, showing where people root for what college teams. That map offers great detail about what teams college football fans root for in a given location, but nothing about how concentrated college football fans are in that place.
Here, we are looking at another question: not which teams fans root for, but the proportion of the population in various places who are fans of any college football team. We asked Facebook to compile that information, and the results offer a portrait of America’s college-football obsession — or lack thereof. To be more specific:
On Student Loan Debt
The cartoon below provides a tongue-in-cheek alternative payback method for unemployed or under-employed recent college graduates!
Currently the recent college graduate unemployment rate in the nation is running in the range of 8.5% compared to the overall national average under 6% (new employment data will be released tomorrow).
This statistic, when coupled with an average individual student loan debt burden of more than $29,000 and outstanding aggregate student loan debt nationally above $1 trillion, poses a problem.
In addition there are few parents of college-age students who haven’t heard the stories of college graduates unable to find full-time work in their chosen field instead taking part-time jobs or unpaid internships simply to build their resume.
On B-School Test, Americans Fail to Measure Up; “Improve K-12 Math”
New waves of Indians and Chinese are taking America’s business-school entrance exam, and that’s causing a big problem for America’s prospective M.B.A.s.
Why? The foreign students are much better at the test.
Asia-Pacific students have shown a mastery of the quantitative portion of the four-part Graduate Management Admission Test. That has skewed mean test scores upward, and vexed U.S. students, whose results are looking increasingly poor in comparison. In response, admissions officers at U.S. schools are seeking new ways of measurement, to make U.S. students look better.
Domestic candidates are “banging their heads against the wall,” said Jeremy Shinewald, founder and president of mbaMission, a New York-based M.B.A. admissions-consulting company. While U.S. scores have remained consistent over the past several years, the falling percentiles are “causing a ton of student anxiety,” he said.
we continue to play in the “C” (D?) leagues.
Madison’s disastrous reading scores.
Math forum audio and video. Math task force.
New on Campus: The 3-Year Degree
To combat rising college costs and student debt, more schools are offering a time- and money-saving idea: a three-year bachelor’s degree.
Schools including Purdue University, the University of Iowa and the University of South Carolina are betting that students will want to finish college sooner by spending a year less on campus. Whether there will be many takers, however, remains unclear.
Many early experiments with accelerated degrees have fallen flat. While cost is a crucial consideration for most families, and the vast majority need to borrow money, many students are eager to enjoy every bit of traditional college life, including social activities, athletics and summers off. The accelerated programs require students to give up some of these perks.
“Parents are really interested in saving time and money, [but] the students are really interested in the four years of a college experience,” said Jenna Templeton, vice president of academic affairs at Chatham University in Pittsburgh.
In California education debate, the tide is turning
The easy re-election win of state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson on Tuesday was a big disappointment to education reformers. They believed Marshall Tuck — a polished, well-funded Democrat with a strong record as an education executive in Los Angeles — was the perfect candidate to unseat Torlakson, a Bay Area Democrat who has acted more like an appendage of the state teachers unions than a nonpartisan officeholder devoted to improving schools.
But in the big picture, we think Tuck’s candidacy will be remembered as one of the turning points in a period in which the school reform debate at long last took center stage in California. The education establishment is like a supertanker that requires the application of vast energy to make it to change course. There are subtle but unmistakable signs this course change has begun.
UW Madison to assist liberal arts majors in job search
Call it the cranky parent appeasement program, designed to arm UW-Madison students majoring in art history or Polish or zoology with answers to a common question: How will you get a job in that?
John Karl Scholz, dean of the College of Letters and Science, is launching a large new program to improve career planning and job outcomes for students in his college, by far the largest at the university with more than 16,000 undergraduates in 39 departments.
The effort comes amid some questions nationally about the value of a college degree, especially in liberal arts majors that don’t lend themselves directly to a career path but cost the same — and result in the same debt loads — as more job-ready majors such as accounting or nursing.
Scholz pointed to evidence that majoring in what makes the heart sing does lead to jobs that make the wallet smile.
“Trying to spark their imagination about what they can do with different majors strikes me as really important,” said Scholz, in his second year as dean.
Harvard secretly photographed students to study attendance
Harvard University has revealed that it secretly photographed some 2,000 students in 10 lecture halls last spring as part of a study of classroom attendance, an admission that prompted criticism from faculty and students who said the research was an invasion of privacy.
The clandestine experiment, disclosed publicly for the first time at a faculty meeting Tuesday night, came to light about a year-and-a-half after revelations that administrators had secretly searched thousands of Harvard e-mail accounts. That led the university to implement new privacy policies on electronic communication this spring, but another round of controversy followed the latest disclosure.
“You should do studies only with the consent of the people being studied,” Harvard computer science professor Harry Lewis said in an interview Wednesday.
Lewis said he learned about the study from two nontenured colleagues and asked administrators about it during the packed faculty meeting.
Seeing Red: Stanford v. Harvard
STANFORD, Calif.—Stanford buzzes. Walk across any of the 8,000-plus acres of earthy-red tiles and dusty, rolling hills of the university’s grounds and you’ll find yourself dodging hundreds of bicycles, whose moving gears and wheels make the campus hum.
More than 13,000 bikes belonging to students and faculty traverse campus daily, according to the school’s website, and it’s no wonder why. Stanford University, a massive tract of land that occupies what was once Leland Stanford’s Palo Alto Stock Farm, is its own city, so large it requires an individual zip code.
In a way, the constant motion of Stanford’s bikers is indicative of the university’s dynamism. Even the university’s motto, “Die Luft der Freiheit weht”—or, “The Winds of Freedom Blow”—nods at Stanford’s focus on the cutting-edge of research and education in the 21st century.
Thousands of bikes decorate the Stanford campus.
Too Many Kids Quit Science Because They Don’t Think They’re Smart
For most students, science, math, engineering, and technology (STEM) subjects are not intuitive or easy. Learning in general—and STEM in particular—requires repeated trial and error, and a student’s lack of confidence can sometimes stand in her own way. And although teachers and parents may think they are doing otherwise, these adults inadvertently help kids make up their minds early on that they’re not natural scientists or “math people,” which leads them to pursue other subjects instead.
So what’s the best way to help kids feel confident enough to stay the STEM course? To answer this question, I spoke with Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University in California. Over the past 20 years, Dweck has conducted dozens of studies about praise’s impact on students’ self-esteem and academic achievement. Here is a transcript of our conversation, which has been condensed and lightly edited.
Alexandra Ossola: What sparked your interest in this field?
The Changing Profile of Student Borrowers Biggest Increase in Borrowing Has Been Among More Affluent Students
Share of College Graduates From High-Income Families who Borrow Has DoubledIn 2012, a record share of the nation’s new college graduates (69%) had taken out student loans to finance their education, and the typical amount they had borrowed was more than twice that of college graduates 20 years ago. A new Pew Research Center analysis of recently released government data finds that the increase in the rate of borrowing over the past two decades has been much greater among graduates from more affluent families than among those from low-income families. Fully half of the 2012 graduates from high-income families borrowed money for college, double the share that borrowed in 1992-93.1
The rise in the rate of borrowing was also substantial among upper-middle-income graduates, with 62% of 2012 graduates from upper-middle-income households leaving college with debt, compared with 34% roughly 20 years ago.
Somewhat related: Wisconsin Governor Walker on the student loan crisis. Walker’s comments on the Doyle era mirror my limited experience.
The best thing parents can do for schools
I’m the parent of a public school student myself. So I know how much parents want to help.
American parents are more involved in the schools than ever before — much more so than in other countries.
I followed three American kids who studied as foreign exchange students in Finland, South Korea and Poland. You didn’t see parents at those schools. They weren’t coaching soccer or accompanying classes on field trips. I didn’t see those kinds of extracurricular activities. Instead, the parents were involved at home, working directly with their child’s education.
Research shows that it’s much more impactful to prioritize learning at home over community-building activities.
There’s this amazing study: The more time that parents spent on extracurriculars in a country’s schools, the worse the kids did in reading. It’s shocking.
The Teachers Unions First Lost The Media; Have They Now Lost Everyone Else, Too?
Andrew J. Rotherham & Richard Whitmire:
This may mark one of the great missed opportunities in education. With a sympathetic president as a partner, national union leaders could have spent the last five years telling their members the truth: The nation’s classrooms are changing fast, now at 50 percent poor and minority students, and our schools are simply not good enough for too many students. So the entire education sector, including teachers, must change as well.
But they didn’t. Instead, union leaders spent the last five years telling their members that change was not necessary. You are blameless, they insisted in their fight against “reformers.” You’re being demonized. Poverty is to blame, not our schools.
Those demanding change, they insisted, are “corporate reformers” out to “privatize” your schools. What’s needed instead, they told their teachers, was a massive digging-in to block those very changes.
Stanford MBA’s shift away from tech
Lured by some of the most exorbitant pay packages ever given to MBAs, Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business made finance once again the industry of choice this year. Nearly three of every ten MBA graduates at Stanford, or 29% of the Class of 2014, accepted job offers in finance, up from 26% last year. So much for all those reports suggesting that finance is out of favor.
The increase, largely due to more acceptances in private equity, investment banking and investment management, came at the expense of the technology industry and consulting. Last year 32% of Stanford’s graduating MBAs rushed into tech. This year, the percentage fell to just 24%. Consulting fell to 16%, down three full percentage points from the 19% who chose to become consultants last year. For the consulting industry, it’s one of the lowest draws out of the Stanford pool ever. Only five years ago, in 2009, 32% of the class headed into the field.
Lies, Damned Lies, and College Admissions
College-application season is shifting into high gear, and with it comes anxiety and abuses—on both sides of the admissions desk. Some wealthy parents will pay private counselors more than $40,000 for “tweaking” their kids’ essays, on the implicit promise that these consultants have connections inside admissions offices, where many once worked. For their part, admissions directors want more applications so that they can reject a higher percentage of qualified kids. By boosting their rejection rates, they improve their school’s position in most rankings. While the current admissions system works well for a small number of colleges and over-achieving kids, for everyone else, the process is broken. Colleges, government, and the media all share in the blame.
Recently, Inside Higher Education, with Gallup’s help, published its annual survey of college- admissions officers. The report was sobering: 93 percent of the college-admissions officers surveyed said they believed colleges lie about key data they report, such as average SAT scores of admitted students. Why? It makes their schools appear more selective, which attracts more applicants. Sixty-five percent of admissions officers said that their institution did not meet its enrollment goals last year.
FL families begin using new parental choice scholarship accounts
One of the nation’s newest parental choice programs is shifting into higher gear.
PLSAFamilies of hundreds of Florida students with significant special needs, including autism, Down syndrome and cerebral palsy, have been given the green light to begin using Personal Learning Scholarship Accounts for the 2014-15 school year.
So far, parents of more than 1,200 students have been awarded PLSAs, which give them the resources and flexibility to access a range of educational services, including private schools, tutors, therapists, curriculum and materials. The Florida program is the second of its kind in the country, and some education policy experts see it and a similar program in Arizona as models for a new wave in parental choice.
– See more at: http://www.redefinedonline.org/2014/11/fl-families-begin-using-new-parental-choice-scholarship-accounts/#sthash.aUCDrsjl.dpuf
Why I Wasn’t Able to Talk to New York City’s Teachers
What makes for a great teacher? For generations, educators operated on the belief that great teaching was mostly an art, which the talented refine in the privacy of the classroom over many years of work. Think Sidney Poitier’s Mark Thackeray in To Sir with Love or Richard Dreyfuss as Glenn Holland in Mr. Holland’s Opus. The trouble with this romanticized idea is that it all depends on the individual. Yes, some educators grow and develop on their own initiative. But this model assumes that all teachers will naturally progress and negates the possibility that any educator can be coached or challenged to improve.
And because teaching happens behind closed doors, this conventional wisdom protects less-competent teachers from being assessed and, if necessary, removed. Truly awful teachers can effectively commit malpractice (like bad doctors) against thousands of unsuspecting students throughout a thirty-year career and still collect the same pay, benefits, and pensions as their most effective peers.
Minneapolis’ worst teachers are in the poorest schools, data show
Minneapolis officials say they’re taking action to balance needs with abilities.
New teacher evaluation data show that Minneapolis schools with the largest number of low-income students have the highest concentration of poor-performing instructors.
Students in the most affluent neighborhoods of the city are far more likely to have the best and most experienced teachers, according to school district records obtained by the Star Tribune.
The new information is emerging as Minneapolis schools are facing federal scrutiny for an achievement gap between white and minority students that is among the worst in the nation.
“It’s alarming that it took this to understand where teachers are,” Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson said Friday. “We probably knew that, but now have the hard evidence. It made me think about how we need to change our staffing and retention.”
Philadelphia schools crippled by budget “crisis” ($2,814,500,000 budget or $21,425/student!)
JOHN TULENKO: Last month, about 1,000 ninth graders marched to the football field at Northeast High School for a very different kind of kickoff ceremony.
WOMAN: We are doing a mock graduation. It’s an opportunity for our incoming ninth grade class to make a commitment. We want to put the urge in them that they promise they are going to be right back here in June 2018.
JOHN TULENKO: But hanging over this ceremony and the odds students will graduate is a school budget crisis that’s been called the worst in the country. Northeast has 3,000 students and two principals, Sharon McColskey and Linda Carroll.
SHARON MCCOLSKEY, Northeast High: In past years, operating budgets were probably 10 times what ours is right now, if not more.
Just the thought of opening the schools with what we have in the bank, real or in our budget, was really scary.
Philadelphia’s 2014-2015 $2,814,500,000 budget for 131,362 (2013–14) students. That’s $21,425 per student!
Related: Philadelphia school reform commission cancels teacher union contracts.
UCLA faculty approves diversity class requirement
The faculty of UCLA’s largest academic unit voted by a narrow margin to require future undergraduates to take a course on ethnic, cultural, religious or gender diversity. The move came after three previous efforts had failed.
Officials announced Friday that the faculty of the UCLA College of Letters and Science voted 332 to 303, with 24 blank ballots, to start the requirement for incoming freshmen in fall 2015 and new transfer students in 2017.
Is Sudden Decline Of For-Profit Colleges Good For Education?
Though most for-profit college programs will remain open under the new Obama administration gainful employment regulations, the brand value of the for-profit college industry has been significantly hurt by intense scrutiny at all levels of government. Investigations by 37 state attorneys general, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the SEC and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have heaped a world of financial pain – enrollment at for-profit colleges is down 9.7% this year – and negative publicity on the sector. While some for-profits will fight the administration’s new regulations in court — or hope that a newly Republican Congress will block spending for the mandates – many for-profits have already decided to opt out of the market altogether.
Last week, the Pittsburgh-based Education Management Corporation (EDMC) decided to go private, in part to avoid quarterly scrutiny by investors of its sizable legal issues. Moreover, Grand Canyon University (GCU) – whose spirituality-inflected curriculum, sports teams (Go Antelopes), and profitability set it apart from other for-profits – is considering going nonprofit in part to avoid the “stigma” that is attached to the “for-profit college” label. Then there’s the case of Corinthian Colleges, which was forced to “teach out” or sell most of its North American locations.
K – 12 tax and spending climate: Child poverty in U.S. is at highest point in 20 years, report finds
Child poverty in America is at its highest point in 20 years, putting millions of children at increased risk of injuries, infant mortality, and premature death, according to a policy analysis published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.
As the U.S. emerges from the worst recession since the Great Depression, 25% of children don’t have enough food to eat and 7 million kids still don’t have health insurance, the analysis says. Even worse: Five children die daily by firearms, and one dies every seven hours from abuse or neglect.
New report by the Sutton Trust: What Makes Great Teaching
Today the Sutton Trust and the University of Durham have published a fascinating new report called What Makes Great Teaching? It sets out to answer that title question, as well as looking at ways we can measure great teaching, and how that could be used to promote better learning. Here is my short summary of some key points from the report.
1. What is effective teaching? This report is very honest about the fact that we don’t have as clear an idea of what good teaching is as we think we do. I think this is an important point to make. Too often, reports like this one start from the point of assuming that everyone knows what good teaching is, and that the challenge is finding the time/money/will/methodology to implement changes. This report is saying that actually, there are a lot of misconceptions about what good teaching is, and as such, reform efforts could end up doing more harm than good. We need to think more clearly and critically about what good teaching is – and this report does that. As well as listing what effective teaching practices are, it also lists what ineffective practices are. This list has already received some media attention (including a Guardian article with a bit from me), as it says that some popular practices such as learning styles and discovery learning are not backed up by evidence. The report draws its evidence from a wide range of sources, including knowledge from cognitive psychology. It cites Dan Willingham quite a lot, and quotes his wonderful line that memory is the residue of thought. As regular readers will know, I think cognitive psychology has a lot to offer education, so it is great to see it getting so much publicity in this report.
It’s All About Nuance. How to Convey and Discern Email Tone.
Everyone has been there. You’re emailing back and forth with someone at work and then all of a sudden, a sentence gives you pause. You think, Wait a second. Is she mad at me?
You reread it. Five minutes go by and you still can’t tell if you somehow offended this person or are completely missing a joke. Eventually, you just craft a vague response and hope for the best.
Tone can be hard to discern and convey over email and any other digital communication. In fact, a 2005 study, amusingly titled “Egocentrism over e-mail,” found that people vastly overestimate how often the recipient of a message will correctly identify their intended tone, whether serious or sarcastic. Senders estimated nearly 80 percent accuracy. In reality, recipients sensed the right tone only 56 percent of the time.
Newsroom Open House
The Simpson Street Free Press will celebrate 23 years of academic success – Sunday, November 2, 12-3pm. Visit Dane County’s first after-school (and summer) youth center dedicated solely to core subject academics. Meet our student writers and see academic achievement in action. Get a newsroom tour from local kids who tackle achievement gaps everyday – with writing and hard work. Preview data that shows real results. SSFP students will thank all of you, the many Friends and supporters who make this youth center, and our students, successful. Location: South Towne Mall, 2311 West Broadway.
The Simpson Street Free Press (SSFP) delivers core subject academic instruction in after-school settings. Students (ages 8-18) write and produce five separate youth newspapers, including a new bilingual publication: La Prensa Libre de Simpson Street. SSFP graduates (now in college) supervise younger students. SSFP also operates a network of youth book clubs. The goal of the SSFP is to foster literacy, spark student success, and bridge achievement gaps.
The SSFP formula accomplishes multiple outcomes. Central to SSFP pedagogy is across the curriculum instructional practices. Lesson plans are designed to support in-school learning. Students encounter predictable connections to the school day. Young writers conduct research, use technology, write and read extensively. They learn practical and transferable academic strategies. They acquire real-world workplace skills. School grades and attendance are measured. SSFP students participate in civic discourse and influence their peers. As their name suggests, free speech and journalism are great ways to spark learning.
How Standing Desks Can Help Students Focus in the Classroom
The rise of the standing desk may appear to be a response to the modern, eat-at-your-desk, hunched-over worker chained to her computer, but history paints a different picture: Hemingway, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson all stood while they worked. Donald Rumsfeld had a standing desk, and so did Charles Dickens. Workplaces are moving toward more standing desks, but schools have been slower to catch on for a variety of reasons, including cost, convenience, and perhaps the assumption that “sit down and pay attention” is the best way to learn.
Mark Benden, Associate Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health at Texas A&M Health Science Center, is looking to change all that. Too much sitting is bad for our health, he said, and students are now facing a host of challenges that may stem in part from too much time in a chair, including obesity and attention disorders. So five years ago, Benden and his team began studying what happened to students when they got out of their traditional seats and moved to standing desks.
This University Teaches You No Skills—Just a New Way to Think
Ben Nelson says the primary purpose of a university isn’t to prepare students for a career. It’s to prepare them for life. And he now has $70 million to prove his point.
Nelson is the founder and CEO of a new experiment in higher education called Minerva Project. He says when it comes to learning, job training is the easy part. With the emergence of online courses, it’s easier and cheaper than ever to acquire the hard skills you need to land a job. “Why would you spend a quarter of a million dollars and four years to learn to code in Python?” he says. “If that’s the role of universities, you’d have to be insane to go to universities.”
But that doesn’t mean Nelson believes the country’s liberal arts colleges are doing a particularly terrific job either. He argues most schools do little more than teach students a core canon of information, a practice he says is archaic, given how much information people have access to these days. “Today, it’s absurd to say you need to know this information and without this information, you’re not an informed person,” he says.
7 countries where Americans can study at universities, in English, for free (or almost free)
Since 1985, U.S. college costs have surged by about 500 percent, and tuition fees keep rising. In Germany, they’ve done the opposite.
The country’s universities have been tuition-free since the beginning of October, when Lower Saxony became the last state to scrap the fees. Tuition rates were always low in Germany, but now the German government fully funds the education of its citizens — and even of foreigners.
Explaining the change, Dorothee Stapelfeldt, a senator in the northern city of Hamburg, said tuition fees “discourage young people who do not have a traditional academic family background from taking up study. It is a core task of politics to ensure that young women and men can study with a high quality standard free of charge in Germany.”
What might interest potential university students in the United States is that Germany offers some programs in English — and it’s not the only country. Let’s take a look at the surprising — and very cheap — alternatives to pricey American college degrees.
Kano Rides Global Coding Wave
Riding on growing interest in coding, London-based startup Kano Computing Ltd. has shipped thousands of toolkits that allow users to build a computer and write software easily.
Last year, Kano raised about $1.5 million through crowd-funding site Kickstarter to manufacture the kit. The company has also raised over $2 million from investors including Index Ventures, Apple’s former Senior Director James Higa and Lady Gaga’s former manager Troy Carter to strengthen its team and further develop the product, said Kano co-founder and chief executive Yonatan Raz-Fridman.
The company has shipped 18,000 kits to customers on its pre-order list, including Kickstarter CEO Yancey Strickler and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, said Raz-Fridman. Since the beginning of this month, the Kano kit has been available for $149.99 online, including free shipping to 86 countries.
Princeton Gets 10 Times as Much Tax Money per Student as Public Colleges
In 2002, Meg Whitman (Princeton class of ‘77), then president of eBay, pledged $30 million to her alma mater to be put toward building a dorm in her own name. The ultimate cost of the 500-student dorm, which required “skilled masons to cut thousands of pieces of stone” and featured three-inch-thick oak doors, worked out to about $200,000 per bed. Despite parting with $30 million at the time, one economist estimated that the real cost of the donation to her was much less: $20 million, thanks to the tax exemptions that come with donating to a university. In essence, the U.S. Treasury covered the $10 million gap.
The government—and thus, taxpayers—give a surprising amount of money to elite private colleges, a lot of which is hard to see because it comes in the form of tax deductions like Whitman’s. Equally hard to see, and perhaps even more lucrative, is that the federal government doesn’t tax the income that universities earn on their billion-dollar endowments. Some of these deductions exist to promote research; others exist because colleges, as institutions, make commitments to serve the public good.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Having Babies New Sex-Ed Goal as Danish Fertility Rates Drop
Sex education in Denmark is about to shift focus after fertility rates dropped to the lowest in almost three decades.
After years of teaching kids how to use contraceptives, Sex and Society, the Nordic country’s biggest provider of sex education materials for schools, has changed its curriculum to encourage having babies under the rubric: “This is how you have children!”
Infertility is considered “an epidemic” in Denmark, said Bjarne Christensen, secretary general of the Copenhagen-based organization. “We see more and more couples needing to get assisted fertility treatment. We see a lot of people who don’t succeed in having children.”
Today’s key fact: you are probably wrong about almost everything
Alberto Nardelli and George Arnett:
Britons overstate the proportion of Muslims in their country by a factor of four, according to a new survey by Ipsos Mori that reveals public understanding of the numbers behind the daily news in 14 countries.
People from the UK also think immigrants make up twice the proportion of the population as is really the case – and that many more people are unemployed than actually are.
Such misconceptions are typical around the world, but they can have a significant impact as politicians aim to focus on voter perceptions, not on the actual data.
Bobby Duffy, managing director of the Ipsos Mori social research institute, said:
UNC-Chapel Hill Should Lose Accreditation
I have read many responses to the report of corruption at Chapel Hill. Some argue that those at the center of the activities were simply trying to help at-risk students, to which my response is that awarding credits and grades without providing instruction is not “help” in any sense that I can accept. In the case of student athletes, I see it as closer to exploitation for the benefit of the university. Some argue that this behavior is widespread among institutions with highly visible Division I sports programs and therefore should provoke no particular surprise or outrage.
I hope that this last claim is untrue. If it is, however, the only way to alter such behavior is to respond with force and clarity when it is uncovered. Reducing the number of athletic scholarships at Chapel Hill, or vacating wins, or banning teams from postseason competition, is in each case a punishment wholly unsuitable to the crime. The crime involves fundamental academic integrity. The response, regardless of the visibility or reputation or wealth of the institution, should be to suspend accredited status until there is evidence that an appropriate level of integrity is both culturally and structurally in place.
Anything less would be dismissive of the many institutions whose transcripts actually have meaning.
RACE FOR A SCHOOL PLACE: Trojan Horse academy among most sought after schools
A school at the heart of the Trojan Horse scandal has proven to be one of most sought after secondaries in the Midlands, the Birmingham Mail can exclusively reveal.
Park View School the Academy in Alum Rock was flooded with 884 applications – despite only being able to offer 120 places to pupils this academic year.
The over-subscribed school was so popular with parents wanting their child to start Year 7 at the controversial academy this September that it was flooded with more than SEVEN applications for each of its places.
School discipline: is this working?
Stories of schools struggling with what to do with misbehaving kids. There’s no general agreement about what teachers should do to discipline kids. And there’s evidence that some of the most popular punishments actually may harm kids.
How Standing Desks Can Help Students Focus in the Classroom
The rise of the standing desk may appear to be a response to the modern, eat-at-your-desk, hunched-over worker chained to her computer, but history paints a different picture: Hemingway, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson all stood while they worked. Donald Rumsfeld had a standing desk, and so did Charles Dickens. Workplaces are moving toward more standing desks, but schools have been slower to catch on for a variety of reasons, including cost, convenience, and perhaps the assumption that “sit down and pay attention” is the best way to learn.
Mark Benden, Associate Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health at Texas A&M Health Science Center, is looking to change all that. Too much sitting is bad for our health, he said, and students are now facing a host of challenges that may stem in part from too much time in a chair, including obesity and attention disorders. So five years ago, Benden and his team began studying what happened to students when they got out of their traditional seats and moved to standing desks.
The Changing Profile of Student Borrowers Biggest Increase in Borrowing Has Been Among More Affluent Students
Share of College Graduates From High-Income Families who Borrow Has DoubledIn 2012, a record share of the nation’s new college graduates (69%) had taken out student loans to finance their education, and the typical amount they had borrowed was more than twice that of college graduates 20 years ago. A new Pew Research Center analysis of recently released government data finds that the increase in the rate of borrowing over the past two decades has been much greater among graduates from more affluent families than among those from low-income families. Fully half of the 2012 graduates from high-income families borrowed money for college, double the share that borrowed in 1992-93.
The rise in the rate of borrowing was also substantial among upper-middle-income graduates, with 62% of 2012 graduates from upper-middle-income households leaving college with debt, compared with 34% roughly 20 years ago.
Vatican Library Puts 4,000 Ancient Manuscripts Available Online For Free
The Vatican Apostolic Library is now digitising its valuable ancient religious manuscripts and putting them online via its website, available for the public to view for free, as well as turning to crowdfunding to help it complete its work.
The Vatican Library was founded in 1451 AD and holds over 80,000 manuscripts, prints, drawings, plates and incunabula (books printed prior to 1500 AD) written throughout history by people of different faiths from across the world.
Big data is coming to education; the next step is figuring out how to use it
OETC:
Big data is coming to education; the next step is figuring out how to use it.
Horace Dediu is an expert at using big data to understand technology’s accelerating development. He has been interviewed by Forbes, Fortune, and various other news sources as an Apple expert, and his independent blog, Asymco, is filled with facts and data regarding mobile communication products and the companies that create and sell them. Dediu’s model is the opposite of that of most analysts: he charges for his opinions but offers all of his data for free. On November 7 at Impact Hub, Dediu will share both data and opinions with educational leaders at SPARK Seattle 2014.
With the upcoming educational leadership event in mind, we conducted a brief personal interview with Dediu. Read the full interview below!
Study Finds Many Colleges Don’t Require Core Subjects Like History, Government
A majority of U.S. college graduates don’t know the length of a congressional term, what the Emancipation Proclamation was, or which Revolutionary War general led the American troops at Yorktown.
The reason for such failures, according to a recent study: Few schools mandate courses in core subjects like U.S. government, history or economics. The sixth annual analysis of core curricula at 1,098 four-year colleges and universities by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that just 18% of schools require American history to graduate, 13% require a foreign language and 3% economics.
Is E-Reading to Your Toddler Story Time, or Simply Screen Time?
Douglas Quenqua, via a kind reader:
Clifford the Big Red Dog looks fabulous on an iPad. He sounds good, too — tap the screen and hear him pant as a blue truck roars into the frame. “Go, truck, go!” cheers the narrator.
But does this count as story time? Or is it just screen time for babies?
It is a question that parents, pediatricians and researchers are struggling to answer as children’s books, just like all the other ones, migrate to digital media.
For years, child development experts have advised parents to read to their children early and often, citing studies showing its linguistic, verbal and social benefits. In June, the American Academy of Pediatrics advised doctors to remind parents at every visit that they should read to their children from birth, prescribing books as enthusiastically as vaccines and vegetables.
Highly educated, unemployed and tumbling down the ladde
In the upside-down, topsy-turvy world of jobs these days, even an advanced degree can’t protect some Americans from tumbling down the economic ladder.
The conventional wisdom that more education bears fruit in the labor market gets turned on its head when it comes to unemployment. For people with masters and even doctoral degrees, long-term unemployment is especially insidious. At best, these formerly high-earning professionals face the prospect of a years-long climb back to their former level of income and stature, while they delay retirement to rebuild their decimated nest eggs.
Others won’t be that lucky. Debt, foreclosure and evaporated savings push them out of the middle class, and some just keep falling.
Campus Is this the end of the collegiate bacchanal?
It is impossible to overstate the growing weirdness of the college sex scene. Campus feminists are reimporting selective portions of a traditional sexual code that they have long scorned, in the name of ending what they preposterously call an epidemic of campus rape. They are once again making males the guardians of female safety and are portraying females as fainting, helpless victims of the untrammeled male libido. They are demanding that college administrators write highly technical rules for sex and aggressively enforce them, 50 years after the proponents of sexual liberation insisted that college adults stop policing student sexual behavior. While the campus feminists are not yet calling for an assistant dean to be present at their drunken couplings, they have created the next best thing: the opportunity to replay every grope and caress before a tribunal of voyeuristic administrators.
The ultimate result of the feminists’ crusade may be the same as if they were explicitly calling for a return to sexual modesty: a sharp decrease in casual, drunken sex. There is no downside to this development.
A veteran teacher turned coach shadows 2 students for 2 days – a sobering lesson learned
The following account comes from a veteran HS teacher who just became a Coach in her building. Because her experience is so vivid and sobering I have kept her identity anonymous. But nothing she describes is any different than my own experience in sitting in HS classes for long periods of time. And this report of course accords fully with the results of our student surveys.
I have made a terrible mistake.
I waited fourteen years to do something that I should have done my first year of teaching: shadow a student for a day. It was so eye-opening that I wish I could go back to every class of students I ever had right now and change a minimum of ten things – the layout, the lesson plan, the checks for understanding. Most of it!
This is the first year I am working in a school but not teaching my own classes; I am the High School Learning Coach, a new position for the school this year. My job is to work with teachers and admins. to improve student learning outcomes.
As part of getting my feet wet, my principal suggested I “be” a student for two days: I was to shadow and complete all the work of a 10th grade student on one day and to do the same for a 12th grade student on another day. My task was to do everything the student was supposed to do: if there was lecture or notes on the board, I copied them as fast I could into my notebook. If there was a Chemistry lab, I did it with my host student. If there was a test, I took it (I passed the Spanish one, but I am certain I failed the business one).
My class schedules for the day
(Note: we have a block schedule; not all classes meet each day):
Ford celebrates 30th anniversary of high school science & technology program
The new Ford Blue Oval STEM Scholarship Program will provide $500,000 in scholarships over four years to 50 students to pursue qualifying STEM degrees
To be considered for the scholarship program, students must have been associated with one of three Ford-supported STEM programs – For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, Ford Next Generation Learning or Ford High School Science and Technology Program
More than 10,000 participants have completed the Ford High School Science and Technology Program to date, some of whom continued on in Ford’s internship program and are now Ford employees
Ford today announced a new Ford Blue Oval STEM Scholarship Program during the kickoff of its 30th annual High School Science and Technology Program (HSSTP). The new scholarship program will provide $500,000 in scholarships over four years to 50 students interested in pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering or mathematic (STEM) fields.
Felicia Fields, group vice president, Human Resources and Corporate Services, made the announcement as she spoke to HSSTP participants and employee volunteers at the Ford Research and Innovation Center during the first session of the 2014-15 program.
The school with no rules that teaches the unteachable
Ian Mikardo High School, in London’s east end, is the end of the line, a special school for boys aged 11-16, who have been deemed unteachable.
The boys, who have severe social, emotional and behavioural difficulties, are among the most troubled and troubling children in the country and have been excluded from their previous, mainstream schools. They are also about to appear on television, as the subjects of the latest documentary tracing the everyday ups and downs of school-life, following the hugely popular Educating Yorkshire, Essex and now the East End.
The boys’ stories feature poverty and bereavement; they may have witnessed domestic violence or murder. Their homes are unstable, their accomodation is crowded and temporary. This week a new boy kicked in a window at school. It turned out his family were to be evicted the next morning and he didn’t know where he was going to live.
What Happens When Second Graders Are Treated to a Seven-Course, $220 Tasting Meal
One Saturday afternoon last month, six second graders from P.S. 295 in Brooklyn got a head start on the fine-dining life when they visited the acclaimed French restaurant Daniel. There, five waiters presented them with a seven-course tasting menu (after the trio of canapés and an amuse-bouche, naturellement). The meal was overseen by the star chef and eponym himself, Daniel Boulud, whose goal was, he says, “for the children to really discover a lot of flavor, a lot of layers, a lot of texture.” These discoveries included Smoked Paprika Cured Hamachi (the “most-foreign thing for them,” Boulud says), Crispy Japanese Snapper (“which they loved to see”) and Wagyu Beef Rib-Eye (“a big success”). To capture the children’s reactions, the magazine asked Jeffrey Blitz, the director of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Spellbound,” to make a video. The initiates seemed to enjoy the experience, but that isn’t to say they loved all those flavors and textures. At one point, after tasting a custom-made nonalcoholic cocktail, 7-year-old Chester Parish said: “This is, like, the only good course. It’s yummy.”
David and Samantha Cameron look to send daughter to inner city comp
Robert Mendick, and Peter Dominiczak:
David Cameron, who was famously educated at Eton College, is considering sending his elder daughter to an ethnically diverse, inner city comprehensive.
Mr Cameron is understood to have visited the school – a Church of England all-girls’ comprehensive close to Downing Street – in the search for a place next September for his 10-year-old daughter Nancy.
It is understood Mr Cameron and his wife Samantha, who studied at Marlborough College – the same school as the Duchess of Cambridge – have decided to spurn a fee-paying school for Nancy.
The Status of College Dropouts: Struggling With Debt and No Degree
College is often touted as a requirement for a high-paying job, or a ticket to the middle class, especially for low-income students. However, college is also growing increasingly unaffordable for everyone but the most well-to-do families.
With students of all backgrounds unable to afford the rising cost of college on their own, the government is eager to assist by loaning them tens of thousands of dollars in order to pursue their degree.
The problem? Many of these students don’t graduate college, and when they drop out they are often burdened with debt that could be difficult for them to repay.
Less than half of college students graduate within four years, with about a quarter of first-time degree seekers not finishing their degree within six years. Not measured in these graduation rates are part-time students, transfers, and adult students, who make up a large chunk of the student population and who also often take out loans to help with tuition costs.
How Preschoolers Can Predict Disease Outbreaks
Preschoolers might be the key to identifying the next big disease outbreak, finds a new study soon to be presented at the American Academy of Pediatrics national conference.
The idea is simple—the researchers created an online disease surveillance system that allows child care staff to log symptoms, like fever or stomach flu, that they see in the young kids they care for. Nearby public health departments have access to the real-time data, which helps them quickly spot emerging trends. Health officials can then loop back to the child care staffers about a spreading illness, along with instructions on how to handle it, so that the caretakers can prepare for it and alert parents.
Dangerous Places for Girls’ Education
Rebecca Winthrop and Eileen McGivney:
This week, we’re focusing on the challenges facing millions of marginalized girls who can’t access a safe, high-quality education. Yesterday we explored the data on enrollment, child marriage and attacks against girls’ education and identified hotspots—areas where girls do not have the same access to education as boys. Today, we have a top 10 list that you don’t want to be on—especially if you’re a girl.
Our data points to 10 countries in the world where girls are especially struggling to get an education, sometimes literally risking their lives to do so. These hotspots are characterized by far fewer girls than boys enrolled in secondary school, high rates of child marriage, and attacks on girls’ education. So while girls’ education has been a success story in many parts of the globe, in these countries girls are still severely disadvantaged.
Educational credentialing and household income: 1973-2013
It’s well known that having more educational credentials correlates strongly with higher income. This correlation has led lots of people to make the common sense assumption that increasing the educational credentials of the population as a whole will in turn produce higher incomes. Common sense assumes, as it so often does in a naive pre-theoretical way, that correlation equals causation.
At a more sophisticated theoretical level, the assumption at work here is that enhanced credentials signal enhanced human capital. In other words, more education (or in any case more educational credentials — a distinction which is usually ignored) creates or enhances abilities in its recipients they would not otherwise have, and these abilities allow them to perform work they would not otherwise be able to do.
If we then further assume that this work would not be performed, or at least not be performed as profitably, in the absence of the enhanced abilities signaled by the credentials, then enhanced human capital increases income by ameliorating structural un-and-underemployment.
That’s why almost all of Tom Friedman’s conversations with garrulous cab drivers invariably end with him concluding that everybody needs to get an advanced degree in bio-mechanical statistics, because in a globalized flat world we can no longer afford for the average person to be average.
Strong Appetite Among Parents for Improving Public Education
New survey research of public school parents commissioned by Education Post shows a high level of faith and trust in local public schools, principals and teachers, along with considerable concern that today’s schools are not preparing our children to fully compete in the global economy.
The results also reveal an equally significant appetite for positive change, with only 3 percent of those surveyed saying they believe schools are “fine as is.”
There is broad support for the kind of improvements needed—high standards, meaningful accountability and quality educational options for parents seeking the right school environment for their children—along with honest questions about what is and isn’t working and what it means for their own child.
Ending higher ed’s tuition addiction to produce teachers we need
If colleges want to reverse the declining number of teachers of color, create more STEM teachers, and calibrate teacher supply with district demand, then teacher preparation programs need to become less dependent on individuals’ tuition.
The current tuition-driven system is incentivizing teacher preparation programs to prioritize quantity over districts’ needs.
The country needs more effective STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) teachers as well as teachers of color. President Obama endorsed the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology’s 2010 report that called for the recruitment and development of 100,000 new STEM teachers over the next decade. Despite being over half of all public school students, people of color only represent 15 percent of teachers (projected 5 percent by 2020). Since collegiate teacher prep programs educate 90 percent of all teachers, universities must lead the charge in cultivating these areas of need.
Is Google Making Students Stupid?
One of the oldest metaphors for human interaction with technology is the relationship of master and slave. Aristotle imagined that technology could replace slavery if devices like the loom became automated. In the 19th century, Oscar Wilde foresaw a future when machines performed all dull and unpleasant labor, freeing humanity to amuse itself by “making beautiful things,” or simply “contemplating the world with admiration and delight.” Marx and Engels saw things differently. “Masses of laborers are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine,” they wrote in the Communist Manifesto. Machines had not saved us from slavery; they had become a means of enslavement.
Today, computers often play both roles. Nicholas Carr, the author of the 2008 Atlantic cover story “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, confronts this paradox in his new book, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, analyzing the many contemporary fields in which software assists human cognition, from medical diagnostic aids to architectural modeling programs. As its title suggests, the book also takes a stand on whether such technology imprisons or liberates its users. We are increasingly encaged, he argues, but the invisibility of our high-tech snares gives us the illusion of freedom. As evidence, he cites the case of Inuit hunters in northern Canada. Older generations could track caribou through the tundra with astonishing precision by noticing subtle changes in winds, snowdrift patterns, stars, and animal behavior. Once younger hunters began using snowmobiles and GPS units, their navigational prowess declined. They began trusting the GPS devices so completely that they ignored blatant dangers, speeding over cliffs or onto thin ice. And when a GPS unit broke or its batteries froze, young hunters who had not developed and practiced the wayfinding skills of their elders were uniquely vulnerable.
Throw out the college application system
THE college admissions system is broken. When students submit applications, colleges learn a great deal about their competence from grades and test scores, but remain in the dark about their creativity and character. Essays, recommendation letters and alumni interviews provide incomplete information about students’ values, social and emotional skills, and capacities for developing and discovering new ideas.
This leaves many colleges favoring achievement robots who excel at the memorization of rote knowledge, and overlooking talented C students. Those with less than perfect grades might go on to dream up blockbuster films like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg or become entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Barbara Corcoran and Richard Branson.
Standing desks are coming to schools
Increasing numbers of adults are throwing away their office chairs in favor of standing desks, believing that staying on their feet during working hours will improve their health. Should we be encouraging kids to do the same?
Yes, according to a study from three schools in Texas. It shows that when kids are given the opportunity to stand during classroom time, they burn more calories and seem to have greater attention span.
With $40 Million In New Cash, Parent-Teacher App Remind Targets A Billion Users Worldwide
Lost permission slips and forms sent by a teacher to their student’s parents have long been a right of passage, but perhaps not for much longer. With nearly every student, parent and teacher all carrying a mobile phone, the question isn’t so much whether there’s an easier way to communicate from the classroom to the home, but how to do it in a way that doesn’t feel invasive or forced.
A startup called Remind thinks it’s figured out the balance, and its user growth would suggest that cofounder Brett Kopf is on to something. And two top Silicon Valley venture capital investors agree, betting another $40 million on Kopf in a Series C round announced Tuesday.
Ivy League grade inflation
“WE DO not release statistics on grade-point averages so we can’t speak to the accuracy of the information you have.” That was a flack for Yale, but other Ivy League colleges—with the partial exception of Princeton—were equally reluctant to discuss their grading practices with The Economist.
Are they trying to hide something? Perhaps. Stuart Rojstaczer, a critic of grade inflation, has estimated average grades over time by combining dozens of unofficial and official sources. The results are startling (see chart). In 1950, Mr Rojstaczer estimates, Harvard’s average grade was a C-plus. An article from 2013 in the Harvard Crimson, a student newspaper, revealed that the median grade had soared to A-minus: the most commonly awarded grade is an A. The students may be much cleverer than before: the Ivies are no longer gentlemen’s clubs for rich knuckleheads. But most probably, their marks mean less.
Long Island High School Football Player Dies After Game
A high school football player from Long Island, New York, died after colliding with an opponent in a game last night.
Tom Cutinella, a junior at Shoreham-Wading River High School in New York, died after colliding with a player from John Glenn High School’s team in Elwood, New York, Steven Cohen, superintendent of Shoreham-Wading River School District, said in a statement posted on the district website.
He was the third high-school football player to die in the past week, according to ESPN. Cornerback Demario Harris Jr. of Charles Henderson High School in Troy, Alabama, died after collapsing on the field following a tackle, and linebacker Isaiah Langston of Rolesville High School in North Carolina died after collapsing following pregame warmups, ESPN said.
A boy was accused of taking a backpack. The courts took the next three years of his life.
In the early hours of Saturday, May 15, 2010, ten days before his seventeenth birthday, Kalief Browder and a friend were returning home from a party in the Belmont section of the Bronx. They walked along Arthur Avenue, the main street of Little Italy, past bakeries and cafés with their metal shutters pulled down for the night. As they passed East 186th Street, Browder saw a police car driving toward them. More squad cars arrived, and soon Browder and his friend found themselves squinting in the glare of a police spotlight. An officer said that a man had just reported that they had robbed him. “I didn’t rob anybody,” Browder replied. “You can check my pockets.”
The officers searched him and his friend but found nothing. As Browder recalls, one of the officers walked back to his car, where the alleged victim was, and returned with a new story: the man said that they had robbed him not that night but two weeks earlier. The police handcuffed the teens and pressed them into the back of a squad car. “What am I being charged for?” Browder asked. “I didn’t do anything!” He remembers an officer telling them, “We’re just going to take you to the precinct. Most likely you can go home.” Browder whispered to his friend, “Are you sure you didn’t do anything?” His friend insisted that he hadn’t.
At the Forty-eighth Precinct, the pair were fingerprinted and locked in a holding cell. A few hours later, when an officer opened the door, Browder jumped up: “I can leave now?” Instead, the teens were taken to Central Booking at the Bronx County Criminal Court.
Ranking Universities Based on Career Outcomes
More than ever, students go to college because they want to get jobs — good jobs. To that end, students and parents want to know which schools give them the best chance at getting a desirable job after graduation. This is where we can help.
By analyzing employment patterns of over 300 million LinkedIn members from around the world, we figured out what the desirable jobs are within several professions and which graduates get those desirable jobs. As a result, we are able to rank schools based on the career outcomes of their graduates.
Defining “desirable jobs”
We define a desirable job to be a job at a desirable company for the relevant profession. For example, we define desirable finance jobs as finance jobs at companies desirable for finance professionals.We start with identifying desirable companies for each profession.We let the career choices of our members tell us how desirable it is to work at a company. To illustrate this, imagine there are two companies, A and B. If more finance professionals are choosing to leave company A to work at company B, the data indicates that getting a finance job at B is more desirable. This is based on the hypothesis that when a professional moves from one company to another, she gives the company she moves to a strong vote of confidence.
Explore Linkedins’ University rankings.
ComputerCOP: The Dubious ‘Internet Safety Software’ That Hundreds of Police Agencies Have Distributed to Families
For years, local law enforcement agencies around the country have told parents that installing ComputerCOP software is the “first step” in protecting their children online.
Police chiefs, sheriffs, and district attorneys have handed out hundreds of thousands of copies of the disc to families for free at schools, libraries, and community events, usually as a part of an “Internet Safety” outreach initiative. The packaging typically features the agency’s official seal and the chief’s portrait, with a signed message warning of the “dark and dangerous off-ramps” of the Internet.
As official as it looks, ComputerCOP is actually just spyware, generally bought in bulk from a New York company that appears to do nothing but market this software to local government agencies.
The six paths of the typical US college graduate—and why they’re all wrong
Andrew Yang, via Kate Zellmer:
There are currently six prominent paths for achievement-minded recent college graduates: financial services, management consulting, law school (still), med school, and grad school/academia. The sixth is Teach for America, which continues to draw approximately 5,000 graduates (and 50,000 applicants) a year from universities across the country.
Madison Schools’ Mental Health Programs Cheered
Eight years ago, a community health report from the Fox Valley uncovered an alarming trend among local high school students: one in four reported experiencing depression, and more than one in 10 had attempted suicide.
An experiment soon followed that placed licensed therapists with expertise in children’s mental health in elementary, middle and high schools.
“We decided if students had trouble making their appointment (at community clinics), let’s bring the appointment to them,” said Mary Wisnet, one of the program’s officers.
Parenting as a Gen Xer: We’re the first generation of parents in the age of iEverything
On the days that I drive the middle school carpool, I purposely choose a route that takes us past a huge river. Some mornings, the water looks like glass; others, it reflects the moody clouds above with choppy waves – either way, it’s gorgeous. Every time we drive past it, I point it out to my car full of 12-year-olds: “Look at the water today. Isn’t it beautiful?” No one in the car looks up. They are all looking down at their phones, playing games with each other, texting a friend or watching a YouTube video. Sometimes, if I am lucky, I will get a mercy grunt out of one or two of them in reply.
It struck me recently, after one of my quiet carpool rides, that my generation of parents – we of the soon-to-be or recently 40 year old Gen X variety, the former latchkey children of the Cold War and an MTV that actually played videos, former Atari-owners who were raised by the the Cosby Show and John Hughes, graduated high school with the kids from 90210, then lumbered through our 20s with Rachel, Ross, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe, and Joey and flip phones – is perhaps the last to straddle a life experience both with and without the Internet and all its social media marvels. After all, I didn’t even learn to use e-mail until I was 19 and a sophomore in college in 1993, and only for a slightly cringe-worthy reason: a cute boy at another college asked me to e-mail him.
The Manipulators: Facebook’s Social Engineering Project
SINCE THE LAUNCH of Netscape and Yahoo! 20 years ago, the development of the internet has been a story of new companies and new products, a story shaped largely by the interests of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. The plot has been linear; the pace, relentless. In 1995 came Amazon and Craigslist; in 1997, Google and Netflix; in 1999, Napster and Blogger; in 2001, iTunes; in 2003, MySpace; in 2004, Facebook; in 2005, YouTube; in 2006, Twitter; in 2007, the iPhone and the Kindle; in 2008, Airbnb; in 2010, Instagram; in 2011, Snapchat; in 2012, Coursera; in 2013, Google Glass. It has been a carnival ride, and we, the public, have been the giddy passengers.
This year something changed. The big news about the net came not in the form of buzzy startups or cool gadgets, but in the shape of two dry, arcane documents. One was a scientific paper describing an experiment in which researchers attempted to alter the moods of Facebook users by secretly manipulating the messages they saw. The other was a ruling by the European Union’s highest court granting citizens the right to have outdated or inaccurate information about them erased from Google and other search engines. Both documents provoked consternation, anger, and argument. Both raised important, complicated issues without resolving them. Arriving in the wake of revelations about the NSA’s online spying operation, both seemed to herald, in very different ways, a new stage in the net’s history — one in which the public will be called upon to guide the technology, rather than the other way around. We may look back on 2014 as the year the internet began to grow up.
Academia or industry
Tenure is overrated. Most folks in industry that have worked just as hard as tenured professors, have savings, reputation and skills that are in demand. But if you are risk averse, then a government job is also quite safe even if you don’t formally have tenure. And academics with tenure lose their jobs all the time. There is always a clause saying that under “financial hardship” management can dismiss professors. And even with tenure, you still have to justify your job, constantly. If you create trouble, people can make your life hell. If you fail, people can humiliate you publicly. If you get into a fight with a tenured colleague, the fight can last decades and be unpleasant.
It is a lot easier to move back and forth between these occupations that people make it out to be. So while you can’t go back in time per se, professors move to industry all the time, and vice versa. To a point, you can even do both. It is not difficult to get some kind of honorary position with a research institute when you work in industry.
Guilty until proven innocent: How letting my kid play alone outside led to a CPS investigation
Monday. Late-morning. Hotter than hot.
Not even 24 hours home from vacation, and I was going through the piles of mail. There was a knock at the door, which was weird because no one ever knocks on our door unless it’s the UPS guy, and he doesn’t come until dinnertime. Corralling the crazy barky dog, I looked out the front-door window and saw a woman I did not know — and my 6-year-old.
I whipped the door open, trying to figure out what was happening. The woman smiled. My son frowned. And as soon as the door opened he flew into the house, running as far away from the woman as he could.
Online Learning is Just as Effective as Traditional Education, According to a New MIT Study
More than 7.1 million students are currently taking at least one online course. Despite the apparent popularity, however, educators have given the trend low marks.
But a new study from MIT suggests naysayers should think otherwise. Massive open online courses are not only effective, researchers have discovered, they are as effective as what’s being traditionally taught in the classroom — regardless of how prepared or in the know students are.
Researchers’ findings have been published in the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, and co-author David Pritchard, MIT’s Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics, knows they will be controversial.
“A number of well-known educators have said there isn’t going to be much learning in MOOCs,” said Pritchard to MIT News, “or if there is, it will be for people who are already well-educated.”
The group, comprised of researchers from MIT, Harvard and Tsinghua University, completed a before-and-after test on students taking “Mechanics ReView,” an introductory mechanics course offered on massive open online learning platform edX. Researchers then conducted a similar test on students taking the class residentially, discovering: