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Javier E

Obama's War on Inequality - The New York Times - 16 views

  • what can policy do to limit inequality? The answer is, it can operate on two fronts. It can engage in redistribution, taxing high incomes and aiding families with lower incomes. It can also engage in what is sometimes called “predistribution,” strengthening the bargaining power of lower-paid workers and limiting the opportunities for a handful of people to make giant sums.
  • We can see this in our own history. The middle-class society that baby boomers like me grew up in didn’t happen by accident; it was created by the New Deal, which engineered what economists call the “Great Compression,” a sharp reduction in income gaps.
  • Obamacare provides aid and subsidies mainly to lower-income working Americans, and it pays for that aid partly with higher taxes at the top. That makes it an important redistributionist policy — the biggest such policy since the 1960s.
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  • between those extra Obamacare taxes and the expiration of the high-end Bush tax cuts made possible by Mr. Obama’s re-election, the average federal tax rate on the top 1 percent has risen quite a lot. In fact, it’s roughly back to what it was in 1979, pre-Ronald Reagan, something nobody seems to know.
  • What about predistribution? Well, why is Mr. Trump, like everyone in the G.O.P., so eager to repeal financial reform? Because despite what you may have heard about its ineffectuality, Dodd-Frank actually has put a substantial crimp in the ability of Wall Street to make money hand over fist.
  • these medium-size steps put the lie to the pessimism and fatalism one hears all too often on this subject. No, America isn’t an oligarchy in which both parties reliably serve the interests of the economic elite.
  • Money talks on both sides of the aisle, but the influence of big donors hasn’t prevented the current president from doing a substantial amount to narrow income gaps — and he would have done much more if he’d faced less opposition in Congress.
Matt Renwick

Closing the Math Gap for Boys - NYTimes.com - 20 views

  • these economists are selling teenagers short
  • adolescence, like early childhood, is a “period of tremendous ‘neuroplasticity,
  • “It’s friendship and pushing — they nag them to success,”
Joshua Williams

What We Learn From School Tests - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • The relentless gaze on high-stakes tests and the culture spawned by No Child Left Behind is blinding us to the educational demands of the 21st century.
  • But first we need a national conversation on what the 21st century will require of our ever more diverse student population. There’s no doubt that an education that promotes life-long cognitive, behavioral and relational engagement with a complex and interconnected world is key. This means we’ll need intellectually curious and cognitively flexible workers comfortable with ambiguity, able to synthesize knowledge within and across disciplines and work collaboratively in diverse groups.
  • Moving forward, we need to go beyond the mastery of facts and rules. Instead, we should nurture interpersonal sensibilities in children and teenagers so that they learn to work in groups, within and across disciplines and cultures. In short, we need to educate, not test.
Steven Szalaj

Filling the Skills Gap - NYTimes.com - 2 views

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    Community Colleges are more necessary than ever
Javier E

Money Cuts Both Ways in Education - NYTimes.com - 19 views

  • If you doubt that we live in a winner-take-all economy and that education is the trump card, consider the vast amounts the affluent spend to teach their offspring.
  • This power spending on the children of the economic elite is usually — and rightly — cited as further evidence of the dangers of rising income inequality.
  • But it may be that the less lavishly educated children lower down the income distribution aren’t the only losers. Being groomed for the winner-take-all economy starting in nursery school turns out to exact a toll on the children at the top, too.
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  • There is a lively debate among politicians and professors about whether the economy is becoming more polarized and about the importance of education. Dismissing the value of a college education is one of the more popular clever-sounding contrarian ideas of the moment. And there are still a few die-hards who play down the social significance of rising income inequality.
  • When you translate these abstract arguments into the practical choices we make in our personal lives, however, the intellectual disagreements melt away. We are all spending a lot more money to educate our kids, and the richest have stepped up their spending more than everyone else.
  • spending on children grew over the past four decades and that it became more unequal. “Our findings also show that investment grew more unequal over the study period: parents near the top of the income distribution spent more in real dollars near the end of the 2000s than in the early 1970s, and the gap in spending between rich and poor grew.”
  • But it turns out that the children being primed for that race to the top from preschool onward aren’t in such great shape, either.
  • “What we are finding again and again, in upper-middle-class school districts, is the proportion who are struggling are significantly higher than in normative samples,” she said. “Upper-middle-class kids are an at-risk group.”
  • troubled rich kids. “I was looking for a comparison group for the inner-city kids,” Dr. Luthar told me. “And we happened to find that substance use, depression and anxiety, particularly among the girls, were much higher than among inner-city kids.”
  • “I Can, Therefore I Must: Fragility in the Upper Middle Class,” and it describes a world in which the opportunities, and therefore the demands, for upper-middle-class children are infinite.
  • “It is an endless cycle, starting from kindergarten,” Dr. Luthar said. “The difficulty is that you have these enrichment activities. It is almost as if, if you have the opportunity, you must avail yourself of it. The pressure is enormous.”
  • these parents and children are responding rationally to a hyper-competitive world economy.
  • “When we talk to youngsters now, when they set goals for themselves, they want to match up to at least what their parents have achieved, and that is harder to do.”
  • we live in individualistic democracies whose credo is that anyone can be a winner if she tries. But we are also subject to increasingly fierce winner-take-all forces, which means the winners’ circle is ever smaller, and the value of winning is ever higher.
Christopher Jackson

Is College Worth It? Clearly, New Data Say - NYTimes.com - 72 views

  • worth it.
    • Christopher Jackson
       
      "Worth it" suggests that the values in question are only those of money and calculation. Is that the best way to measure what college can offer?
  • Yes, college is worth it, and it’s not even close. For all the struggles that many young college graduates face, a four-year degree has probably never been more valuable.
  • he singer Jill Scott, who was being given an honorary doctorate, at graduation ceremonies at Temple University in Philadelphia this month.
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  • hat the pay gap has nonetheless continued growing means that we’re still not producing enough of them
  • experts and journalists
  • According to a paper by Mr. Autor published Thursday in the journal Science, the true cost of a college degree is about negative $500,000. That’s right: Over the long run, college is cheaper than free. Not going to college will cost you about half a million dollars.
  • education brings a huge return.
  • benefits of college don’t go just to graduates of elite colleges
Chai Reddy

Teaching for America - NYTimes.com - 24 views

  • 75 percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 to 24, are unable to enlist in the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record, or are physically unfit.
  • Tony Wagner, the Harvard-based education expert and author of “The Global Achievement Gap,” explains it this way. There are three basic skills that students need if they want to thrive in a knowledge economy: the ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving; the ability to communicate effectively; and the ability to collaborate.
  • Wagner thinks we should create a West Point for teachers: “We need a new National Education Academy, modeled after our military academies, to raise the status of the profession and to support the R.& D. that is essential for reinventing teaching, learning and assessment in the 21st century.”
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  • All good ideas, but if we want better teachers we also need better parents — parents who turn off the TV and video games, make sure homework is completed, encourage reading and elevate learning as the most important life skill.
Maureen Greenbaum

Are College Lectures Unfair? - NYTimes.com - 47 views

  • Research comparing the two methods has consistently found that students over all perform better in active-learning courses than in traditional lecture courses. However, women, minorities, and low-income and first-generation students benefit more, on average, than white males from more affluent, educated families.
  • research has demonstrated that we learn new material by anchoring it to knowledge we already possess
  • low-stakes quiz at the start of each meeting of their introductory psychology course. Compared with students who took the same course in a more traditional format, the quizzed students attended class more often and achieved higher test scores; the intervention also reduced by 50 percent the achievement gap between more affluent and less affluent students.
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  • act of putting one’s own thoughts into words and communicating them to others, research has shown, is a powerful contributor to learning. Active-learning courses regularly provide opportunities for students to talk and debate with one another in a collaborative, low-pressure environment.
Bill Kuykendall

Digital Domain - Computers at Home - Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality - NYTimes.com - 32 views

  • Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households.
  • little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.
  • few children whose families obtained computers said they used the machines for homework. What they were used for — daily — was playing games.
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  • “Scaling the Digital Divide,” published last month, looks at the arrival of broadband service in North Carolina between 2000 and 2005 and its effect on middle school test scores during that period. Students posted significantly lower math test scores after the first broadband service provider showed up in their neighborhood, and significantly lower reading scores as well when the number of broadband providers passed four.
  • The expansion of broadband service was associated with a pronounced drop in test scores for black students in both reading and math, but no effect on the math scores and little on the reading scores of other students.
  • THE one area where the students from lower-income families in the immersion program closed the gap with higher-income students was the same one identified in the Romanian study: computer skills.
  • How disappointing to read in the Texas study that “there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork.”
Joshua Williams

'No Child' Law Is Not Closing a Racial Gap - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “We’re lifting the basic skills of young kids,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “but this policy is not lifting 21st-century skills for the new economy.”
    • Joshua Williams
       
      Money Quote. Now then... How do we assess 21st Century Skills?
Javier E

College Freshmen Stress Levels High, Survey Finds - NYTimes.com - 13 views

  • In the survey, “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010,” involving more than 200,000 incoming full-time students at four-year colleges, the percentage of students rating themselves as “below average” in emotional health rose. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who said their emotional health was above average fell to 52 percent. It was 64 percent in 1985.
  • “More students are arriving on campus with problems, needing support, and today’s economic factors are putting a lot of extra stress on college students, as they look at their loans and wonder if there will be a career waiting for them on the other side.”
  • “Students know their generation is likely to be less successful than their parents’, so they feel more pressure to succeed than in the past,” said Jason Ebbeling, director of residential education at Southern Oregon University. “These days, students worry that even with a college degree they won’t find a job that pays more than minimum wage, so even at 15 or 16 they’re thinking they’ll need to get into an M.B.A. program or Ph.D. program.”
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  • For many young people, serious stress starts before college. The share of students who said on the survey that they had been frequently overwhelmed by all they had to do during their senior year of high school rose to 29 percent from 27 percent last year.
  • The gender gap on that question was even larger than on emotional health, with 18 percent of the men saying they had been frequently overwhelmed, compared with 39 percent of the women.
Steve Ransom

CUNY Adjusts Amid Tide of Remedial Students - NYTimes.com - 21 views

  • “The course is really a refresher, but they aren’t ready for a refresher. They need to learn how to learn.”
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Learning how to learn... this is the real problem, isn' it? If K-12 is failing, this is it.
  • The knowledge gap at community colleges is increasingly being recognized as a national problem.
  • “Many, many community college presidents will say that math developmental education is the most difficult problem they’re facing,”
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  • “There’s no question that the more remediation a student needs, the less likely they are ever to graduate.”
  • only about 25 percent of full-time students at the community colleges graduate within six years
  • “I embrace developmental education because it pivots lives,” Dr. Mellow said. “If students get an associate’s degree, they can become nurses, making $85,000 a year. If they don’t make it through that developmental class, they’ll barely make minimum wage.”
  • “For those who make it to the exit line, to see the beam on their faces is really incredible.”
Margaret FalerSweany

Academic Skills on Web Are Tied to Income Level - NYTimes.com - 41 views

  • a new study shows that a separate gap has emerged, with lower-income students again lagging more affluent students in their ability to find, evaluate, integrate and communicate the information they find online.
  • Teachers have to expect and recognize that they can’t just say ‘Google something,’ because some of our students still don’t know what that means
  • teachers often assumed that because adolescents seemed so comfortable with technology that they actually knew how to use it in an academic context. Teachers have the “perception that the students are already tech savvy and can navigate and move around more quickly than the teachers,” Mr. Damico said. “B
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