It has been a rough stretch in Washington for for-profit higher education. The Obama administration has fought to tighten regulations linking student aid to graduates’ “gainful employment” prospects. Consumer advocacy groups have spotlighted the debt load that often comes unaccompanied by diplomas. Hollister Petraeus, the wife of David Patraeus, has been leading a crusade against for-profit schools that pursue veterans (and their lucrative G.I. benefits). And recently, the Government Accountability Office detailed an undercover investigation in which fictitious students enrolled ... Read More
Music Training Enhances Children’s Verbal Intelligence
October 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
A just-published study from Canada suggests early music education stimulates a child’s brain, leading to improved performance in an entirely different arena – verbal intelligence. “These results are dramatic not only because they clearly connect cognitive improvement to musical training, but also because the improvements in language and attention are found in completely different domains than the one used for training,” said York University psychologist Ellen Bialystok, one of the paper’s co-authors. “This has enormous implications for development and education.” The study, ... Read More
Lee Baca Wants to Educate L.A.’s Prisoners
April 21, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca wants to teach criminals a lesson — literally. The top cop of America's most populous county is launching a new initiative aimed at offering education to every one of the 160,000 inmates who pass through his lockups each year. Liberal reformers have long advocated such a course, citing studies showing lower recidivism rates among prisoners who learn while locked up. But it's extraordinary talk coming from the man who runs America's biggest jail system. Baca's Education-Based Incarceration initiative officially launched last year but is still in the ... Read More
Clarity Not Always the Best for Learning
April 18, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
I had a physics teacher in college whose lectures were so amazing that I often felt like I already knew everything he was saying. It was so clear and organized it almost seemed like common sense. It seems pretty obvious that utter clarity is a hallmark of truly excellent teaching. There's just one problem: It may not be true. In my case, I had trouble remembering the lectures after they were over. And that’s part of the problem with clarity: According to growing mountain of research, understanding isn't enough. It's the struggle that makes us learn. By making things too clear, teachers ... Read More
The Cash Benefits of a Catholic Education
April 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Catholic high schools in the United States have long boasted a 99 percent graduation rate compared to 73 percent for public schools, and they report sending twice as many students to four-year colleges. Now, an education study from Michigan State University system's Oakland University finds there may be a substantial cash benefit for those who obtain a Catholic high school degree. On average, it shows, students who graduated in 1957 from Catholic high schools earned 18 percent higher wages in their mid-30s and mid-50s than their peers in public high schools. It's true that Catholic ... Read More
How Did Students Become Academically Adrift?
March 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Here's the situation. You're an assistant to the president at DynaTech, a firm that makes navigational equipment. Your boss is about to purchase a small SwiftAir 235 plane for company use when he hears there's been an accident involving one of them. You have the pertinent newspaper clippings, magazine articles, federal accident reports, performance graphs, company e-mails and specs and photos of the plane. Now, write a memo for your boss with your recommendation on the SwiftAir 235 purchase. Include your reasons for finding that the wing design on the plane is safe or not and your ... Read More
Derek Bok on Fixing College Failure
March 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
A longtime critic of higher education, Derek Bok is the author of six books on the ivory tower, most recently Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More, published in 2005. Bok has an insider's view: He was president of Harvard from 1971 to 1991 and acting president from 2006 to 2007, the only person to serve twice in the job. During his first stint, Bok established what is now the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning to help boost the quality of instruction at Harvard. Today, at 80, he is a research professor at the ... Read More
The Educational Gap for Infants
February 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Family income and parental education begin to make a difference in a child’s mental achievement as early as infancy, according to new research in behavioral genetics that advances the ill effects of poverty to late infancy. In a study of 750 pairs of infant twins from a range of places, family incomes and ethnicities, a team of researchers led by Elliot Tucker-Drob of the University of Texas at Austin found that 2-year-olds from affluent families were scoring moderately higher than their lower-income peers on tests of mental capacity. The tests included pulling a string to ring a bell, ... Read More
Book Banners Finding Power in Numbers
February 10, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
On the website Parents Against Bad Books In Schools, some of the works deemed "sensitive, inappropriate and controversial" for K-12 students, even those who are college-bound or in advanced placement classes, include Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, Richard Wright's Black Boy, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. "Bad is not for us to determine," says the disclaimer on the site. "Bad is what you determine is bad." One of the purposes of PABBIS.org, the disclaimer goes on to say, is to "provide information related to bad ... Read More
Texas Children: Canaries in the Coal Mine
January 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Texas. Merely mentioning the state's name evokes a vision of wide-open spaces, rugged independence and, most importantly, unrivaled economic prowess. The Lone Star State has carefully nurtured its national reputation as an economic leader. In fact, the official website of three-term Gov. Rick Perry includes a brag page; reading the national headlines listed there could lead even the most cynical Texan to blush with pride. It looks like Texas' longtime model of cutting spending and never raising taxes works exceptionally well, so it's not surprising that many states are following Texas' ... Read More
