Category Archives: Parenting

Deep Learning

memkite:

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:

On Student Loan Debt

Michael Haltman:

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”

Lindsay Gellman:

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.

Madison School Board Accountabilty Commentary.

New on Campus: The 3-Year Degree

Melissa Korn:

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.

Seeing Red: Stanford v. Harvard

Meg Bernhard:

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

Alexandra Osola:

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

Richard Fry:

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

Lisa Grey:

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

Poets & Quants:

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

Steve Cohen:

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

Redefined Ed:

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

Returns on College Endowments Average 15.8. Percent

Tamar Lewin:

The average return, after fees, on college and university endowments was 15.8 percent in the fiscal year that ended in June, up from 11.7 percent the previous year, according to the preliminary data collected for the annual Nacubo-Commonfund Study of Endowments, which will be released in January. The largest endowments — those over $1 billion — had the highest average return, 16.8 percent. The study, based on data from 426 colleges, found that colleges were allocating more than half their investments — and almost two-thirds of the largest endowments — to alternative strategies such as hedge funds and private equity.

‘We have to do better’ – Trenton school officials seek reversal of low test scores

Jenna Pizzi:

For students from third to eighth grades, achievement has remained stagnant over the last five years. Last school year, the district had 26.9 percent of third graders ranked as proficient or above in language arts. That proficiency stayed in the low 20 percent range for grades four through seven. In eighth grade, 42.2 percent were ranked as proficient or higher in language arts and literacy.

Math scores hovered between 44 and 32 percent proficient in the 2013-2014 school year for grades three through six. For grades seven and eight, scores sank to 20 and 25 percent, respectively.

In the HSPA test given to 11th graders, there was a 71 percent proficiency in language arts and a 39 percent proficiency in math. There has been an improvement in language arts in the last four years, said Edward Ward, supervisor of instructional technology and accountability.

Johnson said her team is crafting a response by gathering information from teachers in high achieving schools in the district about their best practices and proven methods while also examining what works throughout the state and country.

Via Laura Waters.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Philadelphia schools crippled by budget “crisis” ($2,814,500,000 budget or $21,425/student!)

PBS Newshour:

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

Larry Gordon:

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?

James Marshall Crotty:

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

Gale Holland:

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

Daisy Christodoulou:

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.

Pushing back on reckless critique of charter schools

Crystal Williams:

Who is Julia Sass Rubin and what does she have against my kids?

Yesterday, the Rutgers University associate professor was quoted in The Star Ledger saying that “people in abject poverty don’t have the bandwidth to even evaluate charter schools. . . .It’s just not going to be high on their list.”

And about a month ago, in her quest to restrict the choice that parents like me have, she falsely suggested that the school my child attends in Newark loses more black boys to attrition than the district schools and that our school doesn’t serve “difficult” black boys.

Nothing could be further from my reality.

7 countries where Americans can study at universities, in English, for free (or almost free)

Rick Noack:

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

Lorraine Luk:

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

Joe Pinsker:

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.

The Inheritance of Education

Richard V. Reeves and Joanna Venator:

Income is the currency of most mobility research – but money is not all that matters in life. There is a long list of other goods in life, including education, wellbeing, trust, agency, interesting work, and so on. Like most mobility researchers, we focus on income because it does matter in itself; because it can be converted to many of the other goods; and because it provides a robust basis for measurement and comparison.

Schooling and Social Mobility

But the transmission of education advantage is also of great interest. Even if someone does not convert a higher level of education into higher income, they are still better off. They can choose more interesting jobs, even if they are not highly-paid. They have more knowledge of the world and possibly of themselves. Education is a good in its own right, not just as a ticket to a fatter paycheck.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Having Babies New Sex-Ed Goal as Danish Fertility Rates Drop

Frances Schwartzkopff:

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:

Most Autistic People Have Normal Brain Anatomy

Nueroskeptik:

Published in Cerebral Cortex by Israeli researchers Shlomi Haar and colleagues, the new research reports that there are virtually no differences in brain anatomy between people with autism and those without.

What makes Haar et al.’s essentially negative claims so powerful is that their study had a huge sample size: they included structural MRI scans from 539 people diagnosed with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 573 controls. This makes the paper an order of magnitude bigger than a typical structural MRI anatomy study in this field. The age range was 6 to 35.

The scans came from the public Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) database, a data sharing initiative which pools scans from 18 different neuroimaging centers. Haar et al. examined the neuroanatomy of the cases and controls using the popular FreeSurfer software package.

Parents feel ‘unequipped’ to help children with maths

Josie Gurney-Read:

“It’s not a subject, maths, it’s a language. A language, without which, we cannot communicate. The teaching of arithmetic and algebra, for example, is like teaching the grammar of this language.”

It will perhaps be unsurprising to most that Carol Vorderman, who spent 26 years as co-host on the Channel 4 quiz show Countdown, should be working towards giving schoolchildren the resources and opportunity to achieve highly in maths at primary school.

Having created The Maths Factor – an online maths school for primary age children – four years ago, Vorderman will attend the first ‘graduation day’ today, for children who have made exceptional progress through the program.

Related: Math Forum.

UNC-Chapel Hill Should Lose Accreditation

Brian Rosenberg:

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

Emma McKinney:

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.

How Standing Desks Can Help Students Focus in the Classroom

Holly Korbey:

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.

I am a 14-year-old Yazidi girl given as a gift to an ISIS commander. Here’s how I escaped.

Mohammed Salih:

As the sun rose over my dusty village on Aug. 3, relatives called with terrifying news: Jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) were coming for us. I’d expected just another day full of household tasks in Tel Uzer, a quiet spot on the western Nineveh plains of Iraq, where I lived with my family. Instead, we scrambled out of town on foot, taking only our clothes and some valuables.

After an hour of walking north, we stopped to drink from a well in the heart of the desert. Our plan was to take refuge on Mount Sinjar, along with thousands of other Yazidis like us who were fleeing there, because we had heard a lot of stories about Islamic State brutality and what they had done to non-Muslims. They’d been converting religious minorities or simply killing them. But suddenly several vehicles drew up and we found ourselves surrounded by militants wearing Islamic State uniforms. Several people screamed in horror; we were scared for our lives. I’ve never felt so helpless in my 14 years. They had blocked our path to safety, and there was nothing we could do.

The riddle of black America’s rising woes under Obama

Edward Luce:

A paradox haunts America’s first black president. African-American wealth has fallen further under Barack Obama than under any president since the Depression. Yet they are the only group that still gives him high ratings. So meagre is Mr Obama’s national approval rating that embattled Democrats have made him unwelcome in states that twice swept him to power. Those who have fared worst under Mr Obama are the ones who love him the most. You would be hard-pressed to find a better example of perception-driven politics. As the Reverend Kevin Johnson asked in 2013: “Why are we so loyal to a president who isn’t loyal to us?”

The problem has taken on new salience with the resignation of Eric Holder. America’s first black attorney-general has tried to correct the gulag-sized disparities in prison sentencing between blacks and whites. His exit leaves just two African-Americans in Mr Obama’s cabinet. Given the mood among Republicans, it is hard to imagine the US Senate confirming a successor to Mr Holder who shares his priorities.

Mr Obama shot to prominence in 2004 when he said there was no black or white America, just the United States of America. Yet as the continuing backlash to the police shooting of an unarmed young black man in Ferguson has reminded us, Mr Obama will leave the US at least as segregated as he found it. How could that be? The fair answer is that he is not to blame. The poor suffered the brunt of the Great Recession and blacks are far likelier to be poor. By any yardstick – the share of those with subprime mortgages, for example, or those working in casualised jobs – African-Americans were more directly in the line of fire.

The Changing Profile of Student Borrowers Biggest Increase in Borrowing Has Been Among More Affluent Students

Richard Fry:

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.

In Context: The big business of high school sports

Marketplace:

Illinois based-Paragon Marketing Group is working on a deal to bring high school football to a national audience. The group – which brought LeBron James’s high school basketball games to TV – is currently in negotiations with several states and ESPN to bring some type of high school football playoff to television. ESPN wouldn’t comment on the negotiations, with Paragon saying the talks are ongoing and private.

Yet, at least one contract between Paragon and one of the states it’s working with has been made public: Florida officials have agreed to let two state high schools participate in such a playoff each year.

Paragon Marketing Group will pay the Florida High School Athletic Association $10,000 each year for allowing the state’s schools to participate in a national playoff or bowl series. If two or more teams from Florida are picked to participate by Paragon, the Florida High School Athletic Association would receive $40,000.

Meanwhile, Florida high schools participating in a playoff will receive $12,500 for appearing in the game, and another $25,000 in merchandising fees. Paragon Marketing, the group organizing the event has until October 31st to cancel a playoff or high school bowl series this year, according to the contract the team signed with Florida.

How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy’s B.F.F.

Judith Newman:

Just how bad a mother am I? I wondered, as I watched my 13-year-old son deep in conversation with Siri. Gus has autism, and Siri, Apple’s “intelligent personal assistant” on the iPhone, is currently his B.F.F. Obsessed with weather formations, Gus had spent the hour parsing the difference between isolated and scattered thunderstorms — an hour in which, thank God, I didn’t have to discuss them. After a while I heard this:

Gus: “You’re a really nice computer.”

Siri: “It’s nice to be appreciated.”

Gus: “You are always asking if you can help me. Is there anything.

The Ivy League is ripping off America!

Robert Reich

Imagine a system of college education supported by high and growing government spending on elite private universities that mainly educate children of the wealthy and upper-middle class, and low and declining government spending on public universities that educate large numbers of children from the working class and the poor.

You can stop imagining. That’s the American system right now.

Government subsidies to elite private universities take the form of tax deductions for people who make charitable contributions to them. In economic terms a tax deduction is the same as government spending. It has to be made up by other taxpayers.

Study Finds Many Colleges Don’t Require Core Subjects Like History, Government

Douglas Belkin:

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.

Campus Is this the end of the collegiate bacchanal?

Heather MacDonald:

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

Via Grant Wiggins:

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

Ford Motor Company:

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

Sally Weale:

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.

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.

Teachers Expectations Strongly Predict College Completion

Ulrich Boser, Megan Wilhelm, and Robert Hanna:

People do better when more is expected of them. In education circles, this is called the Pygmalion Effect. It has been demonstrated in study after study, and the results can sometimes be quite significant. In one research project, for instance, teacher expectations of a pre-schooler’s ability was a robust predictor of the child’s high school GPA.

Raising student expectations has been in the news a lot recently as part of a larger conversation about improving learning outcomes. Most notably, a group of states have developed the Common Core State Standards, which go a long way toward establishing higher standards by setting out what students should know and be able to accomplish in reading and math. More than 40 states have adopted the standards so far. Recently, however, there has been a great deal of political pushback against them; a number of states, including Oklahoma, recently abandoned the reform effort.

The importance of the Pygmalion Effect
To look at the issue of expectations more closely, we analyzed the National Center for Education Statistics’ Education Longitudinal Study, or ELS, which followed the progression of a nationally representative sample of 10th grade students from 2002 to 2012. The ELS has a longitudinal design, which allows researchers to link teacher expectations to individual student data collected up to 10 years later. For some findings, we conducted a logistic regression of students’ actual academic outcomes on teachers’ expectations. In other areas, we reported simple frequencies.

The Status of College Dropouts: Struggling With Debt and No Degree

Carly Stockwell:

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

Alexandra Sifferlin:

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.

New Jersey’s charter school law is too restrictive (Madison lacks independent charters)

Laura Waters:

Last week the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) published a new study, “The Health of the Public Charter School Movement: a State-by-State Analysis.” No worries here: according to NAPCS’s data, New Jersey is in fine fettle, ranking fourth among twenty-six states. (The analyses are restricted to states that serve more than one percent of students through public charters.)

However, a closer look at our scores reveals an infirmity that belies our glowing complexion: N.J.’s charter school sector soldiers in spite of the Legislative failure to ameliorate our outdated, pockmarked charter school law. Prognosis is guarded.

NAPCS’s new report, a follow-up to its research on model public school laws, creates a rubric based on 11 factors that indicate a healthy charter school environment. These include increases in the number of children served by these independent public schools; proportional representation of students who qualify for free and reduced lunch; proportional representation of children with disabilities and English language learner status; innovative practices like extended school calendars and higher education courses; rate of charter school closures.

Madison’s rejected charter schools include the Studio school and the Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

The status quo governance (and spending, > $15k / student or double the national average) continues despite long term disastrous reading results.

Educational credentialing and household income: 1973-2013

Paul Campos:

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

Peter Cunningham:

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.

Why the White House Fudged the Numbers on Student Loans

Liz Peek:

Unfortunately, it turnsout the numbers are bogus.

In keeping with a White House that talks a good game on transparency but that is cloaked in secrecy, the Department of Education moved the goalposts at the last minute, changing how the default rates were calculated and thus sparing some colleges from tough penalties. It has so far refused to say which schools were given a reprieve, though it appears likely that black colleges were the major beneficiaries.

The academic world has been anxiously awaiting the Department of Education’s annual announcement on student loan defaults. As of this year, schools with three consecutive years of default rates above 30 percent (or one year above 40 percent) will risk losing federal financial aid. The review was expected to clobber the for-profit sector, but also to penalize some smaller schools characterized by higher-then-average

Connecticut Targets Homeschoolers

Matthew Hennessy:

But while Lanza’s abnormal social and emotional development surely contributed to his crime, homeschooling neither exacerbated his mental illness nor obscured it from local education officials. Lanza attended traditional public schools up to the eighth grade. From the beginning, everyone knew he was different. As Andrew Solomon detailed earlier this year in The New Yorker, Lanza suffered from sensory issues and received speech and occupational therapy beginning in kindergarten. At every juncture of his early life, he was analyzed and agitated over by psychologists, counselors, behaviorists, and other state-credentialed educators. Yet Lanza’s troubles deepened, and his anti-social behavior grew worse. Peter and Nancy Lanza were as desperate to help their son find psychological peace as they were to identify a school environment in which he could thrive. At 13, he was sent to a private psychologist, who diagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome. At 14, he underwent a psychiatric assessment at the Yale University Child Study Center, where obsessive-compulsive disorder was added to his growing list of personality disorders. The Lanzas considered moving 50 miles away, to a town with a school district known for excellence in special education. They briefly enrolled him in a Catholic school.

The Secret Sauce of College Admissions

Dr. Brian Mitchell:

Moody’s issued a report last week pointing to a basic discrepancy in how we view college admissions that underscores the collapse of the college tuition-dependent finance model.

In its report, Moody’s noted that applications to private colleges rose 70 percent from 2004 to last year but the annual total of new high school graduates rose only five percent. The credit rating agency argued that the rise in applications created a perception of far greater selectivity than actually occurred at many colleges and universities.

While the argument made centered upon private colleges and universities, the same may be said for many public sector institutions. Indeed, it seems that the only group isolated from this perception was a handful of the most selective colleges and universities, whether private or public. In these cases, global branding, consumer perceptions, alumni “feeder” and job placement networks, and financial aid policies may play a larger role to assure more broadly-based, genuinely highly selective admission classes.

The truth is that selectivity is often based on how you measure and value it. Many colleges and universities have “carve out,” “conditionally accepted,” or wait list graduates lined up to create the illusion of far greater selectivity than actually exists. Thus, while the aggregate applicants/admit number may be correct, the route to acceptance may vary widely depending on what each candidate brings to the table.

Is Google Making Students Stupid?

Nick Romeo:

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

Adam Grant:

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

Ben Schiller:

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

Alex Konrad:

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.

Legacy: just a byproduct of a broken system

Tass Saperstein:

Even after years of campaigns for diversity, increased financial aid, and accessibility to all students, Harvard’s campus still does not accurately reflect society today. A recent article in The Crimson, “What Should Harvard’s Legacy Be” urged the College to “eliminate legacy preference in admissions, to make the admissions process more transparent…and to actively strive toward a legacy of equal access for its many qualified applicants” in order to better combat its homogeneity. Unfortunately, in a society dominated by institutional benefits for the wealthy, preference for legacy applicants is a tiny detail in the larger picture of Harvard’s massively flawed “meritocracy.”

First of all, it must be established that legacy applicants don’t have such high acceptance rates simply because of their legacy status. Different studies have cited a multitude of statistics; the most commonly cited stating that in the 30 most elite universities, primary legacies are 45.1 percent more likely to be accepted. There is a fundamental problem with this data. These statistics not only downplay the merit of these applicants, but they also ignore the institutional educational benefits they have received. Being a Harvard legacy means that they are significantly more likely to come from a family of wealth that values education. The annual survey by The Crimson of the current freshman class states that on average, legacy students have higher test scores than their non-legacy counterparts. Furthermore, 37.3 percent of legacies come from families with incomes of $500,000 or more. They have more access to key resources such as college counselors, SAT tutors, and job or internship opportunities. All of these factors create a significantly more desirable college applicant. They aren’t being accepted to Harvard solely because they are legacies; they are being accepted because they are taking advantage of the plethora of resources at their disposal. And who can blame them?

Ivy League grade inflation

The Economist:

“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

Mason Levinson:

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.

Jennifer Gonerman:

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

Navneet Kapur:

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.

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

Dmitri Mehlhorn:

One of the most-hotly debated questions is how strong is the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers compared to the school reform movement. When it comes to the money that is key to political influence, there is no doubt: The NEA and AFT together spend roughly $700 million per year, consistently, on a broad spectrum of political communication activities opposed to reform. This means that the financial (and political) muscle of the two unions is far greater than that of school reform organizations such as Democrats for Education Reform, StudentsFirst (for which I used to work), Stand for Children, Black Alliance for Educational Options, and the American Federation for Children.

To understand the unions’ advantages, start with the AFT and NEA national budgets. The AFT has 1.6 million members and generated $233 million in revenue (net of borrowing) as of 2013-2014, according to this week’s Dropout Nation analysis of financial data; the NEA had 3.1 million members and national revenues of $387 million in 2012-2013. This total is only the beginning. Although teachers have “unitary dues” where they pay once for national, state, and local affiliates, the state and local portions of the bill vary greatly and can be quite significant. In the state of New Jersey, for instance, compulsory dues come to $936 per teacher, less than $200 of which go to national. In Chicago, the compulsory dues that the AFT’s Chicago Teachers Union deducts from paychecks amount to $1,060 per teacher a year, several hundred dollars more than go to Illinois and national combined. Average dues of nearly $1,000 per year appear quite common.

The $63 million spent by Walton family on ed reform last year < 1/10th amount spent by NEA and AFT.

ComputerCOP: The Dubious ‘Internet Safety Software’ That Hundreds of Police Agencies Have Distributed to Families

Dave Maass:

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.

Commission: Evaluate some home-schooled kids for emotional issues (!)

Ken Dixon:

Parents who home-school children with significant emotional, social or behavioral problems would have to file progress reports prepared by special education program teams, under a proposal being considered by the governor’s Sandy Hook Advisory Commission.

Commission members acknowledged Tuesday that the proposal, contained in a tentative section of the panel’s final report, could be controversial and prompt opposition from parents of home-schooled children across the state.

But the commission, which is preparing its final report to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, said tighter scrutiny of home-schoolers may be needed to prevent an incident such as the December 2012 slaughter of 20 first-graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. The murders were carried out by Adam Lanza, a disturbed 20-year-old who had been home-schooled by his mother, Nancy Lanza, whom he also shot to death on the morning of his murder spree.

Madison Schools’ Mental Health Programs Cheered

Kelly Meyerhoffer:

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

Allison Slater Tate:

On the days that I drive the middle school carpool, I purposely choose a route that takes us past a huge river. Some mornings, the water looks like glass; others, it reflects the moody clouds above with choppy waves – either way, it’s gorgeous. Every time we drive past it, I point 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.

Banking’s future: Goodbye credit cards, hello social media probes

CNBC:

Advancements in technology will make banking very personal within the next decade—it may require your eye or finger to pay for shopping and your social network profile may determine your access to credit, the Daily Mail reports.

Banks may request access to clients’ Facebook account and see whether users have a stable friends network—a sign they may be less of a credit risk than users who change friends frequently, financial technology expert Gi Fernando told the Daily Mail.

The Manipulators: Facebook’s Social Engineering Project

Nicholas Carr:

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

Daniel Lemire:

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.

A story about Jessica

Swift in Security

I want you to imagine someone for me. Her name is Jessica and she is 17 years old. She lives in a two bedroom apartment with her mother and uses an old laptop she got from one of her mom’s ex boyfriends. With it, she browses the portals that serve as her connection to the community constructed around attending the same high school. She is concerned with boys and love and the next rent payment keeping her and her mother in the apartment.
She doesn’t have the money for a new laptop. She doesn’t have the money to upgrade it, either. She doesn’t even know how you do that. She has other interests, like biology. She just worries about how she would pay for college, if she can keep her grades up enough to get a scholarship somehow.
The only person she knows in her whole life that’s good with computers is Josh, in English class. She knows she needs an antivirus, so she asks him. He gives her an option that costs $50 a year, but he notices her sudden discomfort and kindly mentions about an antivirus that’s free. When she goes home she downloads and installs it. It took some effort and it seemed complicated and took awhile, but there was now a reassuring new icon in the bottom right of her screen that says “Protected” when she hovers the mouse icon thing over it.

Guilty until proven innocent: How letting my kid play alone outside led to a CPS investigation

Kari Ann Roy:

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.

11 Things Only Parents of Boys Understand

Shannon Ralph:

Years ago, when my children were nothing more than an unsuspecting twinkle in my eye, I had a vision of what parenthood would look like. In my vision, there were tea parties and tutus. There were hours spent quietly reading on the couch together. There were Disney princesses and Dora the Explorer. There were little striped dresses and polka-dotted leggings. There were braids and pigtails. There was shopping and giggling. There was peace and love and joy and… and… peace.

Then, I had boys.

It seems harsh to say that my vision of parenthood went straight to hell, but… well, my vision of parenthood went straight to hell.

What was I to do with these loud, smelly, noisy creatures? These things who were constantly moving. And climbing. And yelling. And body-slamming one another unprovoked. How could I — a woman and a lesbian, to boot — possibly ever understand these wailing little creatures capable of peeing on their own heads?

It seemed an impossible undertaking, but I am here to say that after 11 years of parenting boys, I have learned a few things. I am sure all of you parents of boys can relate.

Splitting classes by ability undermines efforts to help disadvantaged children, finds research into English primaries

Richards Adams:

Splitting pupils as young as six into classes based on ability – known as streaming – makes the brightest children brighter but does little to help the rest to catch up, according to new research into schools in England.

The analysis of the progress made by 2,500 six and seven-year-olds in state primary schools in England, conducted by academics at the Institute of Education in London, found that the use of streaming appears to entrench educational disadvantage compared with the results of pupils who were taught in all-ability classes.

But, does the other approach make a difference? Madison’s experience with English 10 and small learning communities has not moved the needle.

Facebook and OkCupid’s psychological studies were illegal under Maryland law, professor argues

Brian Fung:

“What Facebook and OkCupid did wasn’t just unethical. It was illegal.”

So says James Grimmelmann, a law professor at the University of Maryland who’s taking aim at the social media sites for conducting psychological research on its users without properly informing them. Now Grimmelmann is calling on Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler to force Facebook and OkCupid to stop conducting tests on Maryland residents.

Facebook created a firestorm earlier this year when it acknowledged it had published a scientific paper on mood manipulation based on a secret experiment it did with some users’ newsfeeds. The experiment, conducted in 2012, hid emotionally charged content from nearly 700,000 English-speaking users’ newsfeeds to try to learn whether emotions were contagious on the network. Turns out they are; “sadder” newsfeeds made people more likely to post sad things, and “happier” newsfeeds made people more likely to post happy things.

Bad behavior is the elephant in the classroom

Tom Bennett:

Finally, Ofsted address one of the most serious impediments to children’s learning in the UK: low-level disruption. It’s amazing how much time and money is invested in poking through the grisly entrails of neuroscience, cognitive psychology and school structures in order to establish how we can squeeze a carat or two more gold out of the school goose’s ileum, when there’s piles of the stuff to be scooped up elsewhere.

Behaviour. It’s always been about behaviour. From the day I stepped into a classroom, the biggest obstacle I faced in getting students from average A to brilliant B was how they behaved, or didn’t. My first day, a student started dealing skunk at the back of the room; by the end of it, someone had told me to f*** Off, twice (and that was just the head, ho ho). But they weren’t the biggest problems for teaching; the Kryptonite for learning was the low-evel stuff – the chatting, the sullen refusals, the phones, the rocking, the headphones, paper-throwing. Everything that doesn’t look like anything special in description, but collectively erodes the lesson like a universal solvent.

I’ve been writing about this since before the first incarnation of Noel Edmonds. I’ve been running the TES behaviour forum for almost six years, and working with hundreds of schools, coaching, training and advising on behaviour. And this report is spot-on.

A New Start on Accountability

Paul Hil, l Robin Lake & Michael Petrilli, via a kind Deb Britt email:

Every child should be in a school where he or she can learn effectively. That’s not a controversial goal in itself, but the methods meant to accomplish it can become hot buttons. That’s the case with No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which made the goal a national policy. It’s also becoming the case with the Common Core, under which states commit to educate children to rigorous standards.

Actions taken in pursuit of the goal are controversial because they are difficult and complicated. There is a lot of work of many kinds to be done: improving teacher training, experimenting with more effective methods, and continuously improving learning opportunities for children. Moreover, none of these tasks are enough by themselves. What ties them together is accountability—the use of standards, measures, judgments, and remedies to ensure that students are making significant progress over time and, if some are not, ensure that they have access to better opportunities.

Wealthy L.A. Schools’ Vaccination Rates Are as Low as South Sudan’s

Olga Khazan:

When actors play doctors on TV, that does not make them actual doctors. And that does not mean they should scour some Internet boards, confront their pediatricians, and demand fewer vaccinations for their children, as some Hollywood parents in Los Angeles have apparently been doing.

The Hollywood Reporter has a great investigation for which it sought the vaccination records of elementary schools all over Los Angeles County. They found that vaccination rates in elite neighborhoods like Santa Monica and Beverly Hills have tanked, and the incidence of whooping cough there has skyrocketed.

Here’s a map of the schools with dangerously low vaccination rates (an interactive version is on their site). Note how the schools cluster together as little red dots all over the wealthy, crazy Westside—not unlike crimson spots on a measles patient:

Why Federal College Ratings Won’t Rein In Tuition

Susan Dynarski:

College costs have been rising for decades. Slowing — or even better, reversing — that trend would get more people into college and help reduce student debt. The Obama administration is working on an ambitious plan intended to rein in college costs, and it deserves credit for tackling this tough job.

Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to work, at least not in controlling tuition at public colleges, which enroll a vast majority of students. The plan might dampen prices at expensive private colleges, but some of them may close if they can’t survive on lower tuition.

The program is an attempt to rate colleges according to practical measures like dropout rates, earnings of graduates and affordability. The aim is to improve the quality of higher education while also bringing down costs.

The lessons of student debt

Gillian Tett:

Now, Warren is not the only person decrying this state of affairs: the spiralling cost of education provokes widespread alarm these days. But what is notable about Warren is that she is one of the few politicians who openly attacks the financial industry, US Treasury and Federal Reserve alike. This, of course, is the key reason she is unlikely to ever become a serious contender for the Democratic Party nomination: Warren’s outspoken comments have created many enemies in Washington and Wall Street. But her willingness to articulate unpleasant facts – such as the shocking explosion in student loans – is also a key reason she commands strong populist support in some quarters. Political giants such as Clinton ignore this at their peril; even (or especially) at a time when America is supposed to be enjoying an economic “recovery”.

Taxpayer subsidized student loans should be the exception rather than the rule.

Following in a Sibling’s Footsteps

Kaitlin Mulhere:

The college enrollment decisions of older siblings could be an important cue to whether and where their younger siblings attend college, according to a new study by researchers from Harvard University and the College Board.

Ultimately, the research aims to determine the power of peers’ decisions on college enrollment, and siblings are the easiest peers to identify in available data.

The study found that 69 percent of younger siblings enrolled in the same type of college as their older sibling (either a two-year or four-year institution), while 31 percent of younger siblings applied to the college their older sibling attended.

Most impressive to the researchers was that about 20 percent of younger siblings actually enrolled at the same college as their older sibling.
The positive relationship between older and younger siblings’ college choices was similar across demographic groups and was stronger between siblings who resemble each other more in academic skills, age or gender. That suggests the relationship between siblings’ college choices may be more than a simple coincidence, said Joshua Goodman, an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Delaware attempts to restructure school governance

Matthew Albright:

The Delaware Department of Education says six low-income schools in Wilmington are failing, and the way to fix them is to make the more than 200 teachers reapply for their jobs – and to hire elite principals at each school who won’t have to follow most district rules while earning annual salaries of $160,000.

Mark Murphy, secretary of education, says it’s necessary for teachers to reapply for their jobs to ensure that every educator in the six “priority” schools has the commitment and skill to improve student achievement, as measured by the state’s standardized tests.

Outrage is bubbling among teachers, parents and school administrators in the schools – Bancroft Elementary, Stubbs Elementary and Bayard Middle in the Christina School District and Warner, Shortlidge and Highlands elementary schools in Red Clay School District.

They contend this is a state takeover, not a school turnaround.

The state asks that districts sign a Memorandum of Understanding by month’s end to begin establishing a plan for each school, all of which serve students who come from neighborhoods grappling with poverty.

“Actually, public education is getting better, not worse”

Catherine Rampell:

I suspect other, less nefarious factors affect perceptions more. With college becoming the norm, the types of workers with no more than a high school diploma are more likely to be in the lower part of the talent distribution today than they were a generation ago. Employers might conflate this shifting composition of high-school-educated workers with a diminishing quality of high school education itself.

The truth is, today’s young people do need more, or at least different, kinds of training and education to succeed in the global marketplace for talent. And plenty of policy changes — like making the most challenging school districts more attractive places to work — could help improve outcomes for our most disadvantaged students. But in the meantime, let’s stop denying the measurable, if modest, progress that U.S. schools have made in the last half-century.

Deja vu: School report card shows vulnerable students left behind in Madison

Jeff Spitzer-Resnick:

Black, Hispanic and low-income students, as well as students with disabilities and English language learners, show proficiencies well below those of the district as a whole, Jeff Spitzer-Resnick points out on his blog.

“While overall the Department of Public Instruction considered that MMSD ‘meets expectations,’ a closer examination of vulnerable student populations suggests many MMSD students are not receiving an education which will prepare them adequately for adulthood,” writes Spitzer-Resnick, an attorney who has blogged before about school district accountability.

Citing information from the Report Card detail available here on the DPI website, Spitzer-Resnick compares district-wide levels of proficiency in reading and math with consistently lower levels among students of color, low-income students and those with disabilities or limited English language skills.

Hardly a recent issue, unfortunately. Madison’s long term disastrous reading results.

More, here.

Meanwhile, Madison continues to support wide low income variation across its schools.

The Economic Price of Colleges’ Failures

Kevin Carey:

Four years ago, the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa dropped a bomb on American higher education. Their groundbreaking book, “Academically Adrift,” found that many students experience “limited or no learning” in college. Today, they released a follow-up study, tracking the same students for two years after graduation, into the workplace, adult relationships and civic life. The results suggest that recent college graduates who are struggling to start careers are being hamstrung by their lack of learning.

“Academically Adrift” studied a sample of students who enrolled at four-year colleges and universities in 2005. As freshmen, they took a test of critical thinking, analytic reasoning and communications skills called the Collegiate Learning Assessment (C.L.A.). Colleges promise to teach these broad intellectual skills to all students, regardless of major. The students took the C.L.A. again at the end of their senior year. On average, they improved less than half of one standard deviation. For many, the results were much worse. One-third improved by less than a single point on a 100-point scale during four years of college.

This wasn’t because some colleges simply enrolled smarter students. The nature of the collegiate academic experience mattered, too. Students who spent more time studying alone learned more, even after controlling for their sociodemographic background, high school grades and entrance exam scores. So did students whose teachers enforced high academic expectations. People who studied the traditional liberal arts and sciences learned more than business, education and communications majors.

In the School-to-Work Transition, Can We Teach a Growth Mindset and Grit to Help Youth Succeed ?

World Bank:

How can we best help children and youth succeed in life? This question is a top concern among parents, educators and policymakers all over the world. Growing attention has focused on the key role of socio-emotional skills, such as grit (perseverance) and motivation to overcome obstacles and failures, in the path to success. Recent prominent examples of the spotlight on this topic are Salman Khan’s (of the online Khan Academy fame) Huffington Post blog on the subject, and the recent LinkedIn post by World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim.

This is not just another policy fad. It is backed by a burgeoning body of empirical research. Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset” theory posits that individuals who believe that their intelligence or their skills are not fixed, but, rather, can be improved through effort and dedication, are more likely to succeed. In her Mindset book, Dr. Dweck demonstrates how children with growth mindsets perform better in school compared to their fixed-mindset peers, and how people with similar talents in sports, music, or management are more likely to succeed when they hold growth mindsets. She advises parents and teachers to change the way we praise children: Saying “I am really impressed with how hard you worked to solve this problem,” rather than “You solved it so quickly, you are so smart!”

In their research, Angela Duckworth and colleagues have added that the belief that change through self-mastery is possible leads to sustained effort for achieving one’s goals. They have written extensively on Grit as a strong predictor of success, whether at school, the workplace, marriage or the military.

The big college ranking sham: Why you must ignore U.S. News and World’s Report list

Matthew Segal:

If you are like many young Americans, you have probably seen U.S. News and World Report’s newest college rankings, which were released last week. Ignore them.

First, you won’t be surprised with the results (hint: It was a toss-up between Harvard, Yale and Princeton for the top spot). Second, these rankings exhibit a callous disregard for college affordability, prioritizing schools that spend more money on flashy amenities rather than scholarships and grants. Third, the magazine glamorizes selectivity, which creates a culture of exclusion that shuns low-income students the hardest.

Over the past 30 years, college tuition increased by roughly 1,120 percent and the gap between high- and low-income kids with access to it has widened – from 31 percent to 45 percent. With college students’ biggest worry being their student loan debt, one would think that affordability would factor into U.S. News and World Report’s ranking formula. You would be wrong. Not only are they not considered, but often the ranking methods actually encourage higher college spending in other, less needed areas.

EC Book Review: Building a Better Teacher

Amanda Ripley:

A refreshing new book chronicles how teachers are made—not born–and what it will take to move the U.S. into the next frontier of education reform.

If you have time to read only one chapter of one book this fall, consider the first pages of Building A Better Teacher, a new book by journalist Elizabeth Green. It opens with you—the reader–temporarily cast as the protagonist. You’re a teacher walking into a 5th grade classroom. It sounds contrived, I know, and yet it works.

“Your job, according to the state where you happen to live and the school district that pays your salary,” Green writes, “is to make sure that, sixty minutes from now, the students have grasped the concept of ‘rate.’”

What do you do?

In this way, we walk through the hundreds of micro-decisions a teacher must make in a single hour. Do you call on Richard, a new African-American student who says he hates math but has his hand raised anyway? If he’s wrong, will he shut down for the rest of class?

You call on Richard. His answer makes no sense to you. Do you correct him yourself right away? Or do you call on the white girl next to him who has the right answer more often? You decide to ask the rest of the class if anyone can explain what Richard was thinking. No one responds. You feel the dread creep in. But then Richard speaks up. “Can I change my mind?”

With Tech Taking Over in Schools, Worries Rise

Natasha Singer:

At a New York state elementary school, teachers can use a behavior-monitoring app to compile information on which children have positive attitudes and which act out. In Georgia, some high school cafeterias are using a biometric identification system to let students pay for lunch by scanning the palms of their hands at the checkout line. And across the country, school sports teams are using social media sites for athletes to exchange contact information and game locations.

Technology companies are collecting a vast amount of data about students, touching every corner of their educational lives — with few controls on how those details are used.

When College Grads Earn Like High School Grads

Jordan Weissmam:

For the average graduate, going to college is a wonderfully profitable investment. The evidence is unambiguous. Even after subtracting tuition and all the years of foregone salary, the pay boost from a degree will still pay for itself, and then some. The problem is that the “average” college student doesn’t really exist; she’s an imaginary amalgam of state school grads and Ivy League alums, of education majors and engineering nerds.

Once you ignore averages, and start looking across the entire earnings spectrum, the question of whether higher education is financially worthwhile for everybody becomes more complicated. Recently, researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York noted that the bottom 25 percent of college degree holders basically earn no more than the median worker who ended his or her education after high school.

Submitting essays: The jeopardy of just-in-time

The Economist:

“HARD work might pay off after time,” says the adage, “but procrastination will always pay off right now.” While inherently plausible, it would be unwise to adopt this advice as a lifestyle guide. The possible consequences of such a strategy have been spelt out in a paper just released by the University of Warwick in Britain.

David Arnott, a professor at the university’s business school, says he long believed that late submissions were reflected in lower grades. With a colleague, he devised a study looking at 777 undergraduate marketing students over a five-year period. It tracked the submission of online essays for end-of-term assignments for two modules: one from the first-year, the other the third-year (no students were included in both groups).

The pair were concerned that students’ study habits, particularly a tendency towards procrastination, could have a detrimental impact on their grades. This would mean that tests were, in effect, not only a measure of their marketing knowledge, but also of their propensity to put things off. If true, simple interventions like varying the nature of submissions or simply warning students of the perils of procrastination could raise grades.

A Survey of Grown Unschoolers I: Overview of Findings

Peter Grey:

In a study that preceded the one to be described here, my colleague Gina Riley and I surveyed parents in unschooling families—that is, in families where the children did not go to school and were not homeschooled in any curriculum-based way, but instead were allowed to take charge of their own education. The call for participants for that study was posted, in September, 2011, on my blog (here) and on various other websites, and a total of 232 families who met our criteria for participation responded and filled out the questionnaire. Most respondents were mothers, only 9 were fathers. In that study we asked questions about their reasons for unschooling, the pathways by which they came to unschooling, and the major benefits and challenges of unschooling in their experience.

I posted the results of that study as a series of three articles in this blog—here, here, and here—and Gina and I also published a paper on it in the Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning (here). Not surprisingly, the respondents in that survey were very enthusiastic and positive about their unschooling experiences. They described benefits having to do with their children’s psychological and physical wellbeing, improved social lives, and improved efficiency of learning and attitudes about learning. They also wrote about the increased family closeness and harmony, and the freedom from having to follow a school-imposed schedule, that benefited the whole family. The challenges they described had to do primarily with having to defend their unschooling practices to those who did not understand them or disapproved of them, and with overcoming some of their own culturally-ingrained, habitual ways of thinking about education.

San Diego’s School District Now Has a Military-Grade Armored Truck Share Tweet

John Dyer:

South Africa deployed them en masse for the first time during the apartheid era. The United States left some behind in Iraq, allowing the Islamic State militants to seize them in their reign of terror. Now, the San Diego Unified School District has one too.

Yes, we’re talking about armored military trucks, designed to withstand land mines and improvised exploding devices, or IEDs.

On Wednesday, news that the school district’s police department recently acquired a 14-ton mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle, or an M-RAP, caused a stir in San Diego. The school district’s police force, which employs real cops but is separate from the city’s police department, received the truck for free from the same federal program that gave military equipment to the Ferguson, Missouri police and other cities around the country. The district spent $5,000 shipping the thing from Texas.

San Diego School Board Trustee Scott Barnett said the police didn’t ask whether they could have the vehicle. If they had asked, he would have argued against it. The schools need to keep kids safe, he said, but educating students is their primary mission. He thought the M-RAP was overkill.

6 things the happiest families all have in common

Eric Barker:

Here’s what makes strong, happy families:

1) Create a family mission statement

I asked Bruce what he would recommend if he could only give one piece of advice.

He said: “Set aside time to talk about what it means to be a part of your family.”

Ask: “What are your family values?” In business-speak: Develop a mission statement for your family.

Education successes offer template for Oklahoma

The Oklahoman:

STUDENT achievement has surged dramatically in several countries around the world, surpassing the United States. Journalist Amanda Ripley convincingly suggests those nations’ experiences should inform education policy in Oklahoma.

In writing “The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way,” Ripley reviewed other nations’ school systems and interviewed foreign-exchange students. (This included a look at Oklahoma.) She discussed her findings at a luncheon last week hosted by Stand for Children, which advocates for better schools.

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international test for 15-year-olds administered in reading, math and science. In recent years, students in about 40 of 60 participating countries have demonstrated significant improvement in at least one subject area. “And some of these are complicated countries,” Ripley said. “They’re not all Finland. You’re now seeing countries like Estonia, Vietnam, Canada, Poland, countries with significant levels of child poverty that dramatically improved their outcomes and their equities.”