Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Mindfulness Training Boosts Test Scores

March 27, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(PHOTO COLLAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK)

Studies reporting the benefits of mindfulness training keep rolling in—not quite with the regularity of those distracting thoughts that keep popping up in your head, but at a good clip nonetheless. The latest, from a team at the University of California, Santa Barbara, reports even a short, two-week course in focusing the mind can lead to immediate, tangible results: higher scores on tests measuring reasoning and comprehension. “Our results suggest that cultivating mindfulness is an effective and efficient technique for improving cognitive function, with wide-reaching ... Read More

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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

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Stop Griping About Standardized Tests

August 30, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

It's fashionable today to hear educational policymakers say something like this: "I'm not opposed to standardized testing. I'm just opposed to the way in which standardized tests are being used." That pronouncement is typically followed with a litany of grousing about standardized tests. At a "Save Our Schools March" held in July in Washington, D.C., the National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, a bevy of educational heavyweights and even one Hollywood star lambasted the No Child Left Behind law, focusing largely on its testing requirements. Here are four gripes ... Read More

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What Would Diane Ravitch Say?

August 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

In their embrace of testing, Sparks Middle School, Aspire Antonio Maria Lugo Academy and Wilmington Middle School reflect the data-driven approach to education that has dominated American schools since the No Child Left Behind Act was approved in 2001. These schools swear by their system, but it's a trend that many reformers decry, among them Diane Ravitch, the former assistant U.S. secretary of education. Ravitch, who initially supported No Child, now says the mandate for standardized testing is "part of the sickness of American education." She chronicled her change of heart in The Death ... Read More

More like this: Education, September-October 2011
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The Real Cheating Scandal of Standardized Tests

August 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Last week, Montana became the leader of what is likely to be a number of states that will rebel against the provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind law by refusing to raise test score targets as required by the law. The list of states and cities plagued by allegations of cheating on standardized tests is likely to grow beyond Washington, Baltimore, Atlanta, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. What are we to make of the Obama administration’s willingness to waive some of the most extreme penalties under the No Child law but to only offer the rather hollow response of calling for enhanced ... Read More

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The Kindergarten Advantage

November 21, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

An experienced teacher and a small class in kindergarten can set a person up for life, according to a large-scale study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. On average, a kindergarten teacher with more than 10 years on the job is worth an extra $1,100 per year to his or her students by the time they are earning a salary at age 27, the study shows. The lifetime gain for a class of 20 students with an above-average teacher totals $320,000 — and that's from a single year in a high-quality kindergarten class. "We're not saying that teachers should be paid this much," said John ... Read More

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A Compensation for Cold Weather: Higher IQs

November 17, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

With the red state/blue state divide rapidly devolving into a cliché, it’s clearly time to find a new way to splice the nation into subsections. Try this adversarial alignment on for size: Smart states/dumb states. Which is to say, cold states/warm states. It turns out those benumbed residents of Maine, Montana and Minnesota have something to brag about. A paper recently published in the journal Psychological Reports concludes that of the 48 contiguous United States, those with cooler average temperatures tend to have populations with higher IQs. A research team led by psychologist ... Read More

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Information Superhighway Just Vapid Transit?

September 29, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Consider an industrial printing press. It is expensive and technologically archaic. It groans and grinds. It clanks and spits grease. Roald Dahl could have built a short story around one: “The Finger Snatcher.” Now take the Internet. It is free and efficient. Anyone with a rudimentary sense of technology can use it to view or create content, so long as they have access to a computer and a little free time. At some point in the last decade, the latter of these two technologies eclipsed the former as the world’s most important vehicle of mass communication. By doing so it sparked a ... Read More

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Testing College Applicants’ Wisdom, Common Sense

September 19, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

As a small boy he was ignored and passed over by his teachers — he scored poorly on IQ tests and was obviously going nowhere. Ever since, Robert Sternberg, the new provost and senior vice president of Oklahoma State University, former dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University, former professor of psychology at Yale University and summa cum laude Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale, has been on a mission: He doesn't want it to happen to anyone else. "In the 1950s, when I was growing up," Sternberg said in his new book, College Admissions for the 21st Century, "the elementary ... Read More

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A Really Hard Test Really Helps Learning

January 19, 2010 • By • 3 Comments

The first time Sarah Patterson got pimped by her attending doctor, it was a distinctly unpleasant experience. A medical student at the University of California, San Francisco, Patterson had just begun a rotation on the wards of the city's General Hospital. While doing rounds, the doctor asked her, in front of their entire medical team, to list all of the causes of atrial fibrillation — a kind of medical school pop quiz that Patterson and her fellow students refer to as "getting pimped." "I didn't know all of them, and I fumbled and tried to string together what I knew into a coherent ... Read More

More like this: CAROUSEL, Culture, Culture & Society, Education
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