When experimental results appear that can't be explained, they're often discounted as being useless. The researchers might say that the experiment was designed badly, the equipment faulty, and so on.It may indeed be the case the faults occurred, but it could also be the case when consistent information emerges, but these possibilities are rarely investigated when the data agrees with pre-existing assumptions, leading to possible biases in how data is interpreted.. . . .I was particularly interested to read that breakthroughs were most likely to come from group discussions:"While the scientific...
Let's face it, science is boring
This is why I bailed out of biology after completing the degree (okay, mostly). Fascinating to know. Stultifying to do.It is now time to come clean. This glittering depiction of the quest for knowledge is... well, perhaps not an outright lie, but certainly a highly edited version of the truth. Science is not a whirlwind dance of excitement, illuminated by the brilliant strobe light of insight. It is a long, plodding journey through a dim maze of dead ends. It is painstaking data collection followed by repetitious calculation. It is revision, confusion, frustration, bureaucracy and bad coffee....
Ritalin Cures Next Picasso
WORCESTER, MA—Area 7-year-old Douglas Castellano's unbridled energy and creativity are no longer a problem thanks to Ritalin, doctors for the child announced Monday. "After years of failed attempts to stop Douglas' uncontrollable bouts of self-expression, we have finally found success with Ritalin," Dr. Irwin Schraeger said. "For the first time in his life, Douglas can actually sit down and not think about lots of things at once." Castellano's parents reported that the cured child no longer tries to draw on everything in sight, calming down enough to show an interest in televisi...
Have a Problem, Kid? Here, Take This Anti-Psychotic
New federally financed drug research reveals a stark disparity: children covered by Medicaid are given powerful antipsychotic medicines at a rate four times higher than children whose parents have private insurance. And the Medicaid children are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe conditions than their middle-class counterparts, the data shows.Those findings, by a team from Rutgers and Columbia, are almost certain to add fuel to a long-running debate. Do too many children from poor families receive powerful psychiatric drugs not because they actually need them — but because it is...
In Job Hunt, College Degree Can’t Close Racial Gap
Black joblessness has long far outstripped that of whites. And strikingly, the disparity for the first 10 months of this year, as the recession has dragged on, has been even more pronounced for those with college degrees, compared with those without. Education, it seems, does not level the playing field — in fact, it appears to have made it more uneven.College-educated black men, especially, have struggled relative to their white counterparts in this downturn, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate for black male college graduates 25 and older in 2009 has...
Thanks for lives past and present
crossposted from Daily KosI was, perhaps appropriately, listening to a recording of the Brahms Requiem when I saw the email: Greg Kannerstein had passed away. Let me quote two paragraphs from Haverford College President Steve Emerson's ('74) email: A mentor, student, teacher, colleague, coach and friend to thousands, Greg recently stepped down from his role as our Dean of the College after a 41-year career marked by boundless enthusiasm for Haverford. He had begun work on his new appointment as a Special Advisor to Institutional Advancement and Lecturer in General Programs when emerging health...
Creating a Democratic Learning Community
is the focus of a new book by Sam Chaltain, National Director of the Forum for Education and Democracy. Sam previously worked with the First Amendment Schools Project, an experience that helped shaped this book. He is also founding director of the Five Freedoms Project, which is a community educators, students and citizens committed to First Amendment Freedoms, democratic schools, and the idea that students should be seen and heard (and of which I am a member).American Schools: The Art of Creating a Democratic Learning Community has a Foreword by former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor - herself...
Feeling Technical?
I have an enormous problem communicating with the academic liberals--particularly the social scientists. I'm not talking about the sociologists who have creative, seminal minds like David Riesman or Robert Park. I'm talking about the ones who are just sort of electronic accessories to computers. They suffer from verbal diarrhea and mental constipation--I don't know any other way to describe it politely.--Saul Alinsky, Quoted in HorwittSomeone close to me is in a Ph.D. program that essentially drives their students into the ground with work (50-60 hours a week). The stats classes are actually...
An open letter to President Obama on schools, education and teaching
Dear Mr. President,I am writing to you as a National Board Certified Social Studies Teacher who voted for your as President even despite my concerns about your approach to educational policy. You were not my first choice, precisely because I, like many educators I know, were concerned both about your approach to some educational issues and some of the people advising you. Nevertheless, we all enthusiastically supported your candidacy, in many cases before you clinched the nomination.I will not speak for anyone except myself. Others are also writing open letters, as you can see at this website....
Racism and Education Reform
A question for all you foundations experts. On another blog we were having a discussion about the relationship between racism/classism and the belief that education reform is the key to social and economic change for the poor. I wondered whether a focus on education reform is a PC way for liberals to sublimate their racist/classist assumptions, consciously or not. And I wondered whether this association helps explain the incredible unresponsiveness of liberals to basic facts about education reform (like the fact that evaluating academic achievement in poor schools with standardized tests is...
We Need Fewer Science Majors Not More
It's an article of faith: the United States needs more native-born students in science and other technical fields. The National Academies' influential Rising Above the Gathering Storm report in 2006 said the nation should "enlarge the pipeline of students who are prepared to enter college and graduate with a degree in science, engineering, or mathematics" to remain competitive. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce had a similar message on the gap in so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) students a year before. President Barack Obama has pushed for more science teachers and...
Bad Economy: Sharp Rise in Runaways
Over the past two years, government officials and experts have seen an increasing number of children leave home for life on the streets, including many under 13. Foreclosures, layoffs, rising food and fuel prices and inadequate supplies of low-cost housing have stretched families to the extreme, and those pressures have trickled down to teenagers and preteens. . . .The best measure of the problem may be the number of contacts with runaways that federally-financed outreach programs make, which rose to 761,000 in 2008 from 550,000 in 2002, when current methods of counting began. (The number fell...
To Remember is to Forget: Rethinking Memory
“Having a memory that is too accurate is not always good” [from an evolutionary standpoint] . . . Put another way, memory and imagination are two sides of the same coin. Like memory, imagination allows you to put yourself in a time and place other than the one we actually occupy. This isn’t just a clever analogy: In recent neuroimaging studies, Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter has shown that remembering and imagining mobilize many of the same brain circuits. “When people are instructed to imagine events that might happen in their personal future and then to remember actual events in the past,...
Another Misleading Report About High School Dropouts and Income
So, below I have reproduced the take home table in a new report on the social/economic loss resulting from high school dropouts in America, and the major gains we could make if we could just get people to graduate. Of course, this argument is totally ridiculous. Among other things, it assumes the following:That if inner-city kids got high school diplomas they would automatically also head up into the next income strata.That having or not having a diploma is THE key influence on one's income strata.That new graduates would have the same academic rigor and opportunity of prior graduates.Reports...
The Lost Generation
Only 46% of people aged 16-24 had jobs in September, the lowest since the government began counting in 19...
The Encultured Brain: Why Neuroanthropology? Why Now?
Why Neuroanthropology? Why Now?By Greg Downey and Daniel LendeNeuroanthropology also has direct implications for anthropology and neuroscience. It demonstrates the necessity of theorizing culture and human experience in ways that are not ignorant of or wholly inconsistent with discoveries about human cognition from brain sciences. Rather than broad-based concepts like habitus or cognitive structure, neuroanthropology focuses on how social and cultural phenomena actually achieve the impact they have on people in material terms. Rather than assuming structural inequality is basic to all societies,...
Tuition Tax Credits
The right is always bleating about the need to have pilot programs that test their market-based approaches to educational reform. How’s this for a test?http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/09/27/the-fraud-of-gop-tax-and-school-choice-policy-shown-in-arizona/The state's Private School Tuition Tax Credits program covers the cost of private education, often for children whose parents could afford to pay it themselves - while allowing affluent families to reduce the amount of income tax they pay into the state's general fund. . . . [read ...
I’m currently taking a doctoral level course on education and economics. At our first meeting, the professor (whose PhD is in Economics) noted that the past two decades have seen the increasing influence of economic theory on education policy, with a sharply rising curve in the 21st century. I asked him why he thought that was and he gave me a great (and honest) answer: Economists have better theories. Economic theories have been honed for decades, even centuries, and economists have vastly better and more convincing quantitative tools to measure outputs. Besides, he said, economists think they’re...
Human Evolution and The Slow Development of Symbolic Thought
Fascinating FREE article at PLOS arguing that in human evolution symbolic thought evolved much later than the biological substrate that would have allowed it. I have no idea how generally accepted this is, but it's a fascinating idea with maybe some implications for human learning and theories of discourse.Evidently, then, “becoming human” took place in two separate stages. First, the distinctive modern human morphology became established, very clearly in Africa, and probably shortly after 200 Ka. This event involved a radical departure from the primitive Homo body form. Only ca. 100 Ka later,...
How Fiction Reading Affects Empathy
Through a series of studies, we have discovered that fiction at its best isn't just enjoyable. It measurably enhances our abilities to empathize with other people and connect with something larger than ourselves.h/t Neuroanthropol...
Think you can't trust the President?? At least trust the kids!
Cross-posted from Social Issues (the blog of the John Dewey Society Commission on Social Issues) http://deweycsi.blogspot.comI was greeted early yesterday morning by a local newspaper article noting that some folks (specifically, "conservatives," but it's hard to know who that refers to) are angry that President Obama plans to give a speech at a public school urging young people to stay in school and take advantage of the education being offered them. Throughout the day yesterday -- and this morning -- I encountered this "developing story" ... on CNN, in The New York Times, and elsewhere. What...
Two teachers on using test scores to evaluate teachers
One of the more controversial aspects of the Obama Education Department's approach has been its insistence upon using student test scores as a means of evaluating teachers for merit pay. This is in fact something Sec. Duncan has posed as a non-negotiable requirement for a state to be eligible for $4.5 billion in grants that are part of ARRA (stimulus). These funds, a part of the badly named Race to the Top (RtTP - as if the purpose of education is a race) have led Gov. Schwarzeneggar to try to change current law which that keeps test scores from being used to evaluate teachers.I want to share...
Lost Decade for Young Workers: The Job Situation for Our Graduating Students
Some of the report’s key findings include: * 31 percent of young workers report being uninsured, up from 24 percent 10 years ago, and 79 percent of the uninsured say they don’t have coverage because they can’t afford it or their employer does not offer it. * Strikingly, one in three young workers are currently living at home with their parents. * Only 31 percent say they make enough money to cover their bills and put some money aside—22 percentage points fewer than in 1999—while 24 percent cannot even pay their monthly bills. * A third cannot pay their bills and seven in 10 do not...
Incompetence as a Signalling Device: Academia in Italy
You can never complain about the US tenure process again . . ....
Teach for America vs. National Board Certification
If pressed to name my ultimate professional passion and goal—the thing I was put on earth to do—it might be something like “elevate the ideas and voices of excellent teachers.” Like many people in America, I think we can do a vastly better job of educating all our kids, across the socio-economic spectrum. We’re not going to get far with that goal until we upgrade our teaching force, however—skilled and dedicated boots on the ground.I have written about the experience of snooping through some internal TFA listserv messages about Linda Darling-Hammond and her prospective role in the Obama administration,...
Education: LISTEN TO THIS MAN!
How do you personally feel about the future of American education?I’m panicked, I’m worried. I think if we continue along the path that we’re going, our greatest days are behind us. But, I still believe we can turn it around. That’s why I’m still in the classroom, and I’m gonna do my best. But as long as we embrace “testing is everything,” and as long as we keep shrinking art programs and physical education programs, we’re not in a good place. Those are the things that inspire kids to do great things, so I hope we keep enlarging them, not shrinking them.The words are those of Rafe Esquith, at...
Childhood Food Insecurity / 10% of US Population Now on Food Stamps
Food StampsA record 32.2 million Americans are receiving food stamp assistance. As the economy grows bleak, 10 percent of the U.S. population fall below the threshold.Food Insecurity The states with the highest rates of food insecure children under 5 years of age. Food Insecure: unable to consistently access adequate amounts of nutritious food that is necessary for a healthy life. (As of 2007, PRIOR to the current downturn.) Louisiana 24.2%North Carolina 24.1%Ohio 23.8%Kentucky 23.3%Texas...
More from the Textbook Wars
[Houston Chronicle] Texas high school students would learn about such significant individuals and milestones of conservative politics as Newt Gingrich and the rise of the Moral Majority — but nothing about liberals — under the first draft of new standards for public school history textbooks. . . [read ...
Race and Diversity in the Age of Obama
Wide ranging summary of current research on race, "assimilation," immigration, and inequality in America, by Orlando Patterson.h/t Neuroanthropol...
NYT: Do Teachers Need Education Degrees?
Our new dean mentioned this posting to our college this week.http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/education-degrees-and-teachers-p...
How can we use bad measures in decisionmaking?
Reposted from my personal blog:I had about 20 minutes of between-events time Thursday morning and used it to catch up on two interesting papers on value-added assessment and teacher evaluation--the Jesse Rothstein piece using North Carolina data and the Koedel-Betts replication-and-more with San Diego data. Speaking very roughly, Rothstein used a clever falsification test: if the assignment of students to fifth grade is random, then you shouldn't be able to use fifth-grade teachers to predict test-score gains in fourth grade. At least with the set of data he used in North Carolina, you could predict...
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