Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

The Music Man

October 24, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Minolta DSC

JOSÉ XUNCAX FIRST LANDED IN JAIL at 13 for armed robbery. Since then, he’s been in and out of the system, as he calls it, six times. Now, at 15, tall, muscled, with close-cropped brown hair and a scar over his left eye, he’s serving six months for another robbery. He lives at Camp Mendenhall, a juvenile-detention facility tucked between the mountains at the northern edge of Los Angeles County. School never meant much to José, and he stopped going entirely after probation officers showed up in his classroom to execute a warrant. When he arrived at the camp, he was, by his own account, ... Read More

Are Vocational Education, Liberal Arts on a Collision Course?

October 3, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Last year, in Liberal Arts at the Brink, I analyzed changes between 1987 and 2008 in the majors of graduates from 225 private liberal arts colleges identified as the “Best” by U.S. News. The analysis revealed a substantial increase in the percentage of graduates whose majors were vocational (as opposed to liberal arts)—from 10.6 percent to 27.1 percent. Data for 2011 graduates are now available from the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. That year, two of the 225 colleges lost or gave up their accreditation and ceased operation; at the ... Read More

Sexists in White Coats: Men Favored for Laboratory Jobs

September 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Decades into the post-feminist era, there are still pockets of society where women are held back from advancement due to pervasive stereotypes. If that reminder conjures up images of a military base or a corporate boardroom, think again. We’re talking about university science laboratories. “Both male and female faculty judged a female student to be less competent and less worthy of being hired than an identical male student,” a Yale University research team reports in a disturbing new study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Specifically, the ... Read More

The Benefits of Interracial Roommates

September 18, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Is success in college influenced by your roommate’s race? Recently published research suggests it is, at least for some minority students. A study of 159 freshmen enrolled at a predominantly white, urban university in the Southern U.S. found minority students who were randomly assigned a white roommate “reported a greater sense of belonging, and received a higher GPA than minority students randomly assigned to a minority roommate.” There was no similar effect for white students. Writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, psychologists Natalie Shook of West Virginia ... Read More

Chicago Teachers’ Strike: What Do We Want? Better Management Gurus Might Help

September 17, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Chicago Teachers Union Strike

The Chicago teachers’ strike, which is now entering its second week, represents more than a simple dispute about pay and benefits, as many observers have noted. It’s more like a gauntlet thrown down against the entire education reform agenda—the broad centrist policy movement that seeks to bring merit pay, metrics, pink slips for underperformance, and other business school concepts to the American schoolhouse. Indeed, one of the main sticking points in the dispute is Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s desire to tie a substantial part of teachers’ professional evaluations—as much as 40 ... Read More

Mediocre Report Card for Charter Schools

September 12, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Do students attending charter schools outperform their peers? The highly charged issue is the subject of intense debate this week in both Chicago and Los Angeles. But for the most up-to-date answer to that question, one must turn to New York, where one researcher finds their impact on students to be extremely limited. “Although exposés in the media argue that a small group of high-profile charter schools is making waves and transforming the public school system, this analysis suggests that more charter schools are treading water,” concludes the University of Buffalo’s Robert Mark ... Read More

Gangster Anthropologist

September 11, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Jorja Leap and Gang Members

What's her deal? Jorja Leap immersed herself in the culture of Los Angeles’ notorious street gangs for over 10 years, interviewing and working with hundreds of active and former gang members. Isn’t that dangerous? “I started out in the late 1970s as this skinny little white social worker going into the projects.” When she returned to the streets years later as an anthropologist, former gang members she knew accompanied and vouched for her. “I’ve been in dangerous situations, but always felt very protected.” Complicating personal detail: Husband is a former LAPD deputy ... Read More

Arts-Heavy Preschool Helps Children Grow Emotionally

September 10, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Preschooler Painting

How do children learn how to learn? One essential skill is mastering their emotions – learning how to stay positive as much as possible, and how to deal with those inevitable interludes of sadness, anger or fear. Newly published research suggests low-income kids are more likely to develop these all-important abilities if they attend a unique preschool program that integrates education and the arts. The arts-rich curriculum produced more “positive emotions such as interest, happiness and pride, and greater growth in emotion regulation across the school year,” reports West Chester ... Read More

Infant Intelligentsia: Can Babies Learn to Read? And Should They?

September 10, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Baby with Book

THE VIDEO CLIP on Larry Sanger’s website shows the cofounder of Wikipedia looking both scholarly and paternal with his owlish glasses, thinning pate, open book, and lapful of chubby-cheeked 3-year-old. Sanger’s son is gazing hard at the book pages and pronouncing words with the charming r-lessness of a toddler: “Congwess shall make no waw wespecting an establishment of wewigion or pwohibiting the fwee exewcise theweof or abwidging the fweedom of speech or of the pwess…” It’s not clear whether the boy is working toward a doctorate, like his dad’s, or training to be our future ... Read More

Maven of Meth

September 5, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Donna Nelson

Bad news, entrepreneurial fans of Breaking Bad, the hit AMC series about a middle-aged chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin: you cannot actually learn to cook crystal meth by watching the show. “They deliberately put in faulty steps. They’ll start with one method of synthesizing methamphetamine but then switch to another,” says Donna Nelson, professor of chemistry at the University of Oklahoma. “It’s like watching a video of someone starting out on a trip to Dallas and ending up in Chicago.” The abundant “meth” that appears on-screen is actually cotton-candy-flavored sugar ... Read More