When the ACA provision that allowed the uninsured to receive insurance from government coordinated exchanges finally was on the verge of going into effect, the conservative think-tank FreedomWorks initiated a civil-disobedience campaign, of sorts. They tried to enlist masses of young people to reject the inexpensive and often government-subsidized insurance now available to them. But…
Several days ago, in an article for Salon, Lindsay Abrams reported that the state of Wyoming rejected the Next Generation Science Standards being implemented nationwide as part of the effort to increase student interest and achievement in the STEM disciplines. As has been the case whenever and wherever these science standards have been challenged, one…
A student group calling themselves the Young Invincibles has graded each of the fifty states on five criteria: tuition costs, spending per student, burden on families, financial aid, and the degree to which higher education is treated as a priority in state budgets. The scores for each category have then been averaged in a weighted…
After something of a hagiography of Shavar Jeffries, David Brooks gets to his point in a New York Times column called “How Cities Change”: Now Jeffries is running for mayor of Newark against City Councilman Ras Baraka. The race has taken on a familiar shape: regular vs. reformer. Brooks is casting Jeffries as an education reformer and…
A blogger named “thequotableyeti” provides a high-school teacher’s warning to college professors about the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Though she or he starts out a little unkindly toward us, the points made are important. After the complaint, the blogger begins with a very good point: The common core purports to make students college and…
When I said “Blind peer review is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet” (it was picked up by Inside Higher Ed), I was thinking narrowly. At that point, all I really was advocating was for a more fruitful method of peer review, something we can certainly establish (and cheaply) in our current digital environments. Today,…
On Saturday, Salon ran a terrific article by Suzanne Mettler with this headline: “More Bad News for Millennials: College Is Actually Making Inequality Worse” [http://www.salon.com/2014/03/15/more_bad_news_for_millennials_college_is_actually_making_inequality_worse/]. Given the current attention to the issue of income inequality, the headline does a disservice to what is actually a very complex analysis of the economic impact of enrollment and…
It was reported this past week that the Stanford University’s Faculty Senate approved two new joint majors that combine computer science with English or music. The joint majors, part of the CS+X program developed by the computer science department, are expected to be attractive to several audiences, “humanists who want a competitive edge on the…
It’s time. The college acceptance letters — distributed via the web or in “fat or thin” envelopes — are beginning to trickle out as we move to the formal notification date of April 1. Those who have applied to American colleges and universities are experiencing some mix of optimism, consternation, anxiety and resignation. Now is…