Posts
June 19, 2013
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So now we’ve come to the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the mammoth 1965 education law that created Title I funding for high-poverty schools and, in its 2001 reauthorization, resulted in the controversial No Child Left Behind education policy.
As Joy Resmovits at the Huffington Post wrote, Congress is now dealing with,
U.S. Senate and House Hearings on clashing bills that would overhaul No Child Left Behind, replacing the current waiver system with a
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Internships are the new entry-level jobs. In this economy, critics often argue, the unpaid internship is a good way into a company. It helps give one demonstrate experience demanded for real jobs, and it provides a great opportunity to display talent.
But it doesn’t really work out that nicely. According to a piece by Jordan Weissmann at the Atlantic:
For three years, the National Association of Colleges and Employers has asked graduating seniors if they've received a job offer and if
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3:25 PM | UC Berkeley's Disaster Sports Program
Time to update the amazing failing-upward saga of the UC Berkeley Intercollegiate Athletics program, because we have hit the front page of our local paper with another humiliating roundup. Just to review, we are talking about a $70m-per-year business that loses $10m sending athletes to compete against other schools in a couple of dozen sports where they have fun, do fairly well, and mostly graduate without a lot of handholding and tutoring. It also sells tickets and television access to
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June 18, 2013
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A new feature on U.S. News & World Report rates America’s teacher preparation programs. Surprise, they’re all pretty bad.
Together with the National Council on Teacher Quality, the publication has revealed its new rankings. Read it and weep.
While the 2013 teacher preparation rankings begins by informing interested parties that “with NCTQ's ratings of teacher prep programs, you can find the one that will get you classroom-ready from day one,” it actually does no such […]
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Image credit - Devin Castles
More Americans than ever are completing college, but blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans and men are falling behind.
A new study by the Lumina Foundation (using the most recent data available from 2011) finds that 38.7% of working-age Americans (ages 25-64) now have a post-secondary degree, up .4% from 2010. But among blacks, Hispanics and men, the rates of educational attainment are much lower. While 59.1% of Asians and 43.3% of whites have a post-secondary
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7:24 PM | Open Access inaction
From time to time, it's important to pause the bureaucratic debate about open access and recognise how stupid scientific publishing isLike many academics, I am currently trying to work out what I should think and do about Open Access. I share with many scientists strong personal commitments to the idea of openness. I am in this game because I think research is valuable, and I work at a University because I like the idea that research that should be in the public interest should mostly be
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As parents and students struggle to keep up with rising college tuition and take on greater burdens of debt, universities are being challenged to justify the ballooning athletic fees they tack on to the bill. In the 2010-11 academic year, the 227 public institutions in Division 1 of the National Collegiate Athletic Association collected more than $2 billion in athletic fees from their students -- or an average of more than $500 per enrollee -- according to research by Jeff Smith at the
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June 17, 2013
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8:21 PM | "Colllege" Baseball
The College World Series, while not nearly as popular as America’s basketball playoffs or its football bowl games, is a pretty big idea. The culmination of the NCAA Division I baseball championship occurs annually for a week and a half in June in Omaha, Nebraska.
It’s a highly choreographed endeavor, often looking rather like professional baseball.
Well, except sometimes. Here's the home dugout.
That’s right, colllege.
Workers corrected the error on Saturday.
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6:48 PM | The Professors Aren’t Retiring
One of the lines frequently used, at least in past years, to reassure those contemplating an academic profession, is that one should not worry too much about the lack of open tenure-track professor jobs . Many professors are old; eventually they’ve got to retire.
Eventually, yes, but not anytime soon. According to a piece at Inside Higher Ed based on a recent Fidelity Investments study of college faculty:
Some 74 percent of professors aged 49-67 plan to delay retirement past age 65 or
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4:34 PM | Why Parents Pay So Much for College
A friend of mine was feeling very ready to retire in his 60s after a long, demanding career. I was thus surprised when he told me over lunch that he was in some distress about his plans to stand down.Him: “Our last child, our daughter, is 17 and surprised us a few months ago by wanting to go to an expensive private college. She has her heart set on it. We have enough money saved for a state school but can’t afford this place unless I put off retirement and take a second
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June 14, 2013
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How’s technology being implemented in schools? Is it working?
Despite some 25 years worth of technology-in-schools enthusiasm, we really have no idea if it’s working. That’s one of the takeaways from a new study about technology in elementary and secondary schools recently conducted by Center for American Progress.
According to a piece by Motoko Rich in the New York Times:
With school districts rushing to buy computers, tablets, digital white boards and other
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Who says college doesn’t teach real-world skills?
Are you a journalist worried if your publication will survive, given the changing nature of the industry? It turns out there’s college preparation for that, too.
Many of the problems faced by real publications—declining advertising revenue and confusion about where to focus efforts in a changing world of journalism—are problems for college newspapers, too.
According to a piece at Poynter:
In an era of changing media
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The first challenge will be to find a world-changing challenge – preferably something that won't cost much to solveThe world of science policy is currently getting excited about prizes. A piece in Thursday's Nature, for which I provided some grumpy quotes, discusses the recent wave of science prizes that are trying to take their place beside the Nobels. And David Cameron on Friday announced a new set of prizes for solutions to "some of society's most pressing problems".Broadly speaking,
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June 13, 2013
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6:00 PM | Reviewing Fraudulent Research
Academic misconduct or, in layman’s terms, fraudulent research, is very serious offense, but it’s one that’s often hard to detect (particularly because most academic research, some 1.5 million new articles a year, is rarely read at all) but now there might be a way to speed up the process of cracking down on the problem.
Ladies and gentlemen, check out http://integru.org/, a Romanian-based website that encourages scholars to send in research that they think is fishy. Then […]
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One of the Supreme Court decisions education policy analysts are awaiting is the one on Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, a case in which two white women are suing Texas’s flagship university, arguing that the school’s affirmative action program—and therefor their rejection for admission—constitutes a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The case has important implications for affirmative action in college admissions but, as Ben […]
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The humanities matter. Books matter. Through open access, they can reach a wider audience than ever beforeA policy requiring open access to academic books? Surely that's asking for trouble? After all, it was only a few months ago that many humanities researchers were up in arms when Research Councils UK (RCUK) implemented its new policy on open access to journal articles. Although such measures are broadly accepted in the sciences, the RCUK policy was criticised by the Royal Historical Society,
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In the words of the playwright Bertolt Brecht, 'Welcome to the gutter, brother in science'I sympathise with David Nutt and his on-going battles for evidence-based policy on drugs. I really do. But to claim to have been privy to the "worst case of scientific censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Copernicus and Galileo" (Nature Reviews Neuroscience, coverage in the Independent) does seem a bit overblown.He's not the first to draw on such a narrative. Like many slightly loose
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June 12, 2013
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5:54 PM | Americans Opposed to Affirmative Action
In anticipation of the coming Supreme Court decision in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, in which two white women are suing Texas’s flagship university, arguing that the school’s affirmative action program—and therefor their rejection for admission—constitutes a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Washington Post-ABC News conducted a poll of how Americans feel about race in admissions. They don’t like it.
According to the
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Despite extensive hype about the future of online education, most students prefer to continue to take real courses. According to an article by Devin Karambelas in USA Today:
Despite the rapid growth of online learning, many college students say they still prefer the traditional classroom setting.
According to results of a new national research study, 78% of more than 1,000 students surveyed still believe it is easier to learn in a classroom.
But you can’t always get what you want. […]
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10:48 AM | A modest public spending proposal
What if ministers had to make an announcement every time the government spent £2m?The other day I received an email that could herald a revolution in Britain's public finances. It was a press release from the government, proudly informing me that Danny Alexander, the chief secretary to the Treasury, would be announcing a £2m investment into research into a new type of semiconductor.Now the research itself is nothing out of the ordinary: it's an experimental technology much like thousands of
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June 11, 2013
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6:48 PM | College Dropout Earn Less Than Graduates, But Still More Than Those Who Never Went to College
We often talk about college dropouts as if they just wasted money going to college. They took out all those loans an now they’re no better off, economically or professionally, than if they’d just stopped at high school, because they have no college degree.
That’s not really true. According to a recent study performed by the Hamilton Project, college dropouts still earn more than mere high school graduates. The Huffington Post explains:
It's easy to see why more struggled to
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4:14 PM | Why Don't Academics Write Clearly?
Post-doc writes in draft paper: “Conceptually, it seems reasonable to argue that bi-interactional similarity facilitates cohesion in incipient affiliates of Alcoholics Anonymous by triggering likeability and cohesion in self and observer, thereby infusing social and individual identity with a subjective sense of connection”.Me, scribbling note to post-doc in margin: “Does this mean that people like AA more if the people at the meeting are like them? If so, why not just say
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When the Royal Society commissions research of this type it endorses the idea that diversity should be argued on economic groundsYesterday afternoon an innocuous tweet floated innocently along my timeline. It was from the Royal Society, advertising a current funding call for some social research.OK. That's a good thing, right? The RS works in science policy, and evidence is always good… isn't it? When I read the subject of the call, I started to wonder. The Royal Society is soliciting bids
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The modification of the 2C climate target will put an end to the vision of a "science-based" climate policyThis Friday, another frustrating round of negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) ends in Bonn/Germany. It is highly doubtful that the international community will be able to agree on a treaty that would commit all industrialised countries and emerging economies to binding emissions reduction targets by the end of 2015.With global emissions
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June 10, 2013
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6:40 PM | Georgetown: Not Catholic Enough?
The author of The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty, has filed a complaint with the archbishop of Washington, DC, because he doesn’t think that Georgetown University (above), his alma mater, is being Catholic enough.
According to an article in the Washington Post:
The author says that Georgetown has violated church teaching for decades by inviting speakers who support abortion rights and refusing to obey instructions the late Pope John Paul II issued in 1990 to church-affiliated colleges
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It turns out that people who take classes using an MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) format do better when they also get outside help offline.
According to a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
For online learners who took the first session of “Circuits & Electronics,” the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s hallmark MOOC, those who worked on course material offline with a classmate or “someone who teaches or has expertise” in the subject did better
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June 07, 2013
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The average American who takes out loans to attend college faces some $27,000 o debt upon graduation. Student loan debt has quadrupled in the last decade. A lot of this increase surely has to do with the high and escalating cost of college—in America we expect students and parents themselves make significant contributions to pay for college.
In Sweden, however, college is free. Totally free, up to the PhD level. Institutions charge students no fees at all. And yet, according to an
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June 06, 2013
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The New York Times reports that the United Negro College Fund, the American foundation that since 1944 has funded scholarships for black students and supported America’s 39 private historically black colleges and universities, will change its motto.
Since 1972 it’s used the widely recognized "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." Now, according the Times article, it’s going to go with “A mind is a terrible thing to waste but a wonderful thing to invest in.” The […]
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We’ve long known that community college graduation numbers aren’t so good, but a recent report makes the true picture pretty clear, and disturbing.
According to a paper published by the Century Foundation, the vast majority of community college students (81 percent) plan to obtain a bachelor’s degree. Just 11.6 percent of them do, however.
We often talk about community college success in terms of time. It takes the average community college student five years to complete a […]
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Should the Manchester science museum close to save London's, or the other way around?After the recent outcry over the Royal Institution, it looks as if more of the UK's scientific heritage may be at risk: the Science Museum Group (SMG), in particular the Rail Museum in York, Bradford's Media Museum and the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI). Like the fuss over the RI, this raises questions about how we value science as part of British culture and gives some unusual insight into
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