WANTED Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You'll get paid when we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.
Canadian students’ math skills have been on a decade-long decline because rote learning was replaced by discovery-based methods that promoted multiple strategies and estimations, according to a new report that calls for a return to tradition.Yes, yes, yes!
“You know what’s the worst kind of instruction? The kind of instruction that makes kids feel stupid.
And that’s what a lot of that discovery stuff does; their working memory gets overloaded, they’re confused. That’s bad instruction,” said Anna Stokke, an associate professor in the University of Winnipeg’s department of mathematics and statistics, who wrote the C.D. Howe Institute report.
The report draws on results from national and provincial tests as well as an OECD assessment performed every three years in more than 60 countries that measures how well 15-year-olds can apply skills in reading, math and science to real life situations.
Canada fell out of the top 10 countries for math in 2012...
The report puts a good deal of the blame on discovery or experimental learning approaches that encourage students to explore different ways to solve math problems instead of using a single standard algorithm and often promote concrete tools such as drawing pictures, or using blocks or tiles to represent math concepts. The idea is students will gain a deeper understanding of math and be better equipped to apply it to a variety of situations.
What really happens, though, says the report, is students’ working memories get overwhelmed if they don’t know their times tables and can’t quickly put a standard algorithm to work to solve a more complex problem, both features of what’s known as “direct instruction.” Key operations, such as addition and subtraction of fractions, are overly delayed until the middle school years, just as students need that facility to tackle algebra.
Such concepts should be introduced earlier, says the report. And while it stops short of throwing discovery learning out completely, it says the curriculum balance should be tilted in favour of direct instructional methods, recommending an 80/20 split as a rule of thumb.
Gov. Chris Christie is backing away from the use of Common Core school standards, saying the system isn't working for students in New Jersey.
In a speech Thursday, the likely Republican presidential contender will make the case that the standards have brought confusion and frustration to parents and classrooms.
The Common Core standards spell out what academic skills students should master at each grade level. They have been adopted by most states and the federal government, through a grant program, encourages states to use them. But they are unpopular among many parents, teachers, and GOP voters nationwide.
"It's now been five years since Common Core was adopted. And the truth is that it's simply not working," Christie says in excerpts released by his office ahead of the speech at Burlington County College. "Instead of solving problems in our classrooms, it is creating new ones. And when we aren't getting the job done for our children, we need to do something different"...
Christie has been gradually backing away from the support he expressed for the standards less than two years ago, when he declared that "this is one of those areas where I've agreed more with the president than not."
A significant percentage of the Harvard University Class of 2015 graduated with an A- GPA or better, according to a new survey from student newspaper The Harvard Crimson.It's not the world's best sampling methodology, but that's still an awful lot of students getting A-'s.
For years, Harvard has been the subject of grade inflation suspicions, which this new survey seems to fuel.
"Over half the respondents reported a GPA of at least 3.67, the cutoff for an A- average," The Crimson reports. Around half of Harvard's Class of 2015 — 760 students — responded to The Crimson's survey.
However, 72% of respondents "think grade inflation is not much of a problem or not a problem at all at Harvard."
Jeremy Rawls is a student at Mississippi College. He’s also a Marine, having spent two combat tours in Iraq. Rawls suffers from PTSD, a condition which affects many veterans.Comments?
The college just suspended him for a reason many, including Rawls himself, are calling dubious.
Why did they suspend him? Rawls requested to see a non-Muslim counselor as part of his PTSD treatment.
He discussed the situation with Campus Reform, noting that he was paired with a female counselor who wore traditional Muslim dress:
“It’s not that I didn’t want to participate,” he said. “I didn’t want to traumatize her and it wasn’t a good environment to be talking about [my disabilities] with that specific person.”Rawls claims that his requests for transfer were continuously ignored, until he received a letter alerting him of the suspension:
“Their response was suspending me pending a mental evaluation which I provided and then they put me on further restriction and a reintegration program,” he said.The letter also labeled the two-tour Marine as a threat to campus safety.
Here's a good example of why so many of us disliked school even if we dig edumication.
Via the Twitter feed of Lizbuddie comes the story of Anthony Mazur, a 16-year-old student at Texas' Flower Mound High School. A photographer for the yearbook, Mazur took pictures of athletes and other students and then posted them on a Flickr account where he sold some of them to parents. As it happens, according to his school district's policy, there's no issue with that and Mazur apparently owns the the copyright to work he produces.
Cue administrative outrage:
Back in March, Mazur says he was called into FMHS Assistant Principal Jeffrey Brown’s office, where he saw that Brown had his website pulled up on a computer there. He said that Brown was angry at him, and told him that posting the pictures online was illegal, and violated copyright. According to Mazur, Brown also worked the angle (contrary to the policy listed above) that the camera belonged to the district. When Mazur argued that the copyright belonged to him, he says that Brown changed his tune and said that it violated student privacy. Brown allegedly told Mazur at the time that a parent had complained.
Ridiculous.Mazur alleged that Brown told him in a coercive tone “I’m just asking you to take the website down, I’m not asking you to return any money.” Mazur said he assumed Brown meant the school, with regards to returning money. Mazur said Brown told him that he “wouldn’t report [Mazur] to the IRS” over the money he earned from selling the photos. Brown told Mazur that he was issuing an “administrative directive” to take the photos down. At this point, Mazur said he requested that his parent be brought into the discussion.The school said that a student had complained and posting pictures violated privacy concerns. But that's not what the parents of Mazur were told:
After the meeting, the Mazurs said they received a written administrative directive ordering him to take the pictures down. Len Mazur said the reasoning listed on the directive was not related to privacy concerns, but “because he posted with the intention to profit”. The Mazur’s would not say how much money, even in general terms, that Anthony had earned from selling his photos. But Anthony said that his customers were all parents of the students in the photos, buying the digital photo for their own use. “It doesn’t matter whether he sold one or a million pictures,” said Len Mazur, who insisted that it was the principle of applying the law correctly that was important.It turns out that the school's "acceptable use policy" (AUP) doesn't clearly apply to the situation at hand. The Lewisville Texan Journal has a wide-ranging account of the mess (which is ongoing) and has posted damning documents of the school's bullying tactics. The school district's communications person hasn't gotten back to folks with pertinent information.
I THINK IT’S A SMART GOP MOVE: A half-dozen GOP Senators have signed onto a bill sponsored by Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO) that would require drug companies that sell contraceptives to file an OTC (over-the-counter) request with the FDA. It’s a smart move to battle the inane #waronwomen accusation incessantly hurled at the GOP. But guess who opposes this move?
The Colorado Republican’s push to make birth control available over-the-counter is not winning him more allies among women’s reproductive health groups, however.Groups like Planned Parenthood have opposed the idea, which they argue could drive up contraception prices.The group has pointed to ObamaCare’s contraception mandate — requiring insurance plans to cover all FDA-approved forms of birth control — and said that insurers may no longer cover the medication if it’s not prescribed by a doctor.So let me get this straight: A coalition of GOP Senators is trying to make contraceptives more readily available to women by making them OTC, but liberal/progressive groups like Planned Parenthood oppose the idea, simply because women might actually have to pay for their contraceptives rather than get them free? Besides, I’m not convinced that merely making contraceptives OTC would alter Obamacare’s mandate that they be provided for free. Seems to me Planned Parenthood’s opposition is purely ideological: They can’t stand the idea that their #waronwomen narrative against Republicans could be proven patently false. Plus, far fewer women (especially young women) will need to go to Planned Parenthood if they can just go to the local drugstore and obtain contraceptives. That would leave Planned Parenthood mostly in the business of STD testing, pregnancy testing and abortions.
They are only four words in a 900-page law: “established by the state.”
But it is in the ambiguity of those four words in the Affordable Care Act that opponents found a path to challenge the law, all the way to the Supreme Court.
How those words became the most contentious part of President Obama’s signature domestic accomplishment has been a mystery. Who wrote them, and why? Were they really intended, as the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell claim, to make the tax subsidies in the law available only in states that established their own health insurance marketplaces, and not in the three dozen states with federal exchanges?
The answer, from interviews with more than two dozen Democrats and Republicans involved in writing the law, is that the words were a product of shifting politics and a sloppy merging of different versions. Some described the words as “inadvertent,” “inartful” or “a drafting error.” But none supported the contention of the plaintiffs, who are from Virginia.
Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist who helped design the Massachusetts health law that was the model for Obamacare, was a key influence on the creation of the federal health law. He was widely quoted in the media. During the crafting of the law, the Obama administration brought him on for consultation because of his expertise. He was paid almost $400,000 to consult with the administration on the law. And he has claimed to have written part of the legislation, the section dealing with small business tax credits.
After the law passed, in 2011 and throughout 2012, multiple states sought his expertise to help them understand their options regarding the choice to set up their own exchanges. During that period of time, in January of 2012, Gruber told an audience at Noblis, a technical management support organization, that tax credits—the subsidies available for health insurance—were only available in states that set up their own exchanges.
A video of the presentation, posted on YouTube, was unearthed tonight by Ryan Radia at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank which has participated in the legal challenge to the IRS rule allowing subsidies in federal exchanges. Here’s what Gruber says.
What’s important to remember politically about this is if you're a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits—but your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you’re essentially saying [to] your citizens you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country. I hope that that's a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these exchanges. But, you know, once again the politics can get ugly around this. [emphasis added]Here’s the video, which according to YouTube's date stamp was uploaded by Noblis on January 20, 2012. The relevant passage starts around minute 31.
He doesn’t flinch over returning to the 90 percent personal income tax rates of the 1950s for top earners. And if reducing income inequality reduces economic growth, he says, that’s fine. “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants,” he said, “when children are hungry in this country.”Do people work for the government, or does government work for the people? We know Comrade Bernie's answer to that question.
http://you.regettingold.com/xx/xx/19xx/World War I.
April 22nd, 1915:
The start of the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium
Nearer to your birth date than today!
UNEXPECTEDLY! Sticker Shock for Some Obamacare Customers. “So the proposed 2016 Obamacare rates have been filed in many states, and in many states, the numbers are eye-popping. Market leaders are requesting double-digit increases in a lot of places. Some of the biggest are really double-digit: 51 percent in New Mexico, 36 percent in Tennessee, 30 percent in Maryland, 25 percent in Oregon. The reason? They say that with a full year of claims data under their belt for the first time since Obamacare went into effect, they’re finding the insurance pool was considerably older and sicker than expected.”Sure is.
Gee, that’s bad luck.
Women Now Demanding To Be Treated As Eggshells, Not Equals
Camille Paglia gets it right on sexual harassment, from Playboy from 1995:Go read the whole thing.
"[You can't have] the Stalinist situation we have in America right now, where any neurotic woman can make any stupid charge and destroy a man's reputation. If there is evidence of false accusation, the accuser should be expelled. Similarly, a woman who falsely accuses a man of rape should be sent to jail. My definition of sexual harassment is specific. It is only sexual harassment-by a man or a woman-if it is quid pro quo. That is, if someone says, "You must do this or I'm going to do that"-for instance, fire you. And whereas touching is sexual harassment, speech is not. I am militant on this. Words must remain free. The solution to speech is that women must signal the level of their tolerance-women are all different. Some are very bawdy."
Actually, a law professor with an evolutionary orientation, Wayne State's Kingsley Browne, argues that men shove each other around with language; it's a form of exercising dominance.
And if women are actually men's equals, their response to language isn't filing suit -- or trying to bring down a man's career through social media because he makes a joke.
In fact, Browne points out, men using language to shove women around the same way they do to other men involves treating women equally.
It used to be that women marched around claiming that they weren't fragile little dollies; that they could handle what men could. Now just the opposite is the case. Women get men fired over jokes overheard at conferences.
America must break its “addiction” to bachelor’s degrees and become better acquainted with the financial benefits of one- and two-year degrees and certificates, an education researcher argued at a recent panel discussion about what level of higher education it takes to break into the middle class.
“When you ask people what they think about postsecondary education, they say ‘bachelor’s,’” said Mark Schneider, Vice President and Institute Fellow of the Education Program at the American Institutes for Research, or AIR.
“I think of this as a bachelor’s addiction which has to be broken and has to be changed,” Schneider said. “The contemporary bachelor’s degree takes too long, it’s too expensive and it’s not for everyone.”
Schneider presented wage-earnings data that show various one- and two-year degrees and several certificates enable holders to command salaries that surpass those of some bachelor’s degree holders.
Technical careers are particularly rewarding, Schneider said as he presented figures that show plumbers and technicians in a variety of fields that only require a certificate all earn upward of $71,000 — several thousand dollars more per year than many bachelor’s degree holders — a decade after they complete their educational program.
“Where you learn how to fix things, you win,” Schneider said.
The growth in associate’s degrees and other sub-baccalaureate credentials awarded has also outpaced that of bachelor’s degrees, 39 percent versus 18 percent from 2008 to 2013, respectively, figures provided by Schneider show.
Schneider made his remarks Monday at AIR during a social mobility lecture series titled “Do You Need a Bachelor’s to Join the Middle Class?”
The WaPo’s Charles Lane looks at the economics of Bernie Sanders’s “free” college plan...
Lane goes on to examine how “free” college is working in Germany...
But these “free” college plans aren’t really about economics. They’re about anti-economics, the belief that incentives don’t matter, that somehow simply putting more money into higher education without any reform will somehow result in a better system. “Scarcity?” “Prices?” Feh. Just cut a check. How should education best deliver knowledge and credentials in the 21st century? “Free” college provides no answers. Makes for a catchy campaign idea, I guess.
Ethnic Minorities Deserve Safe Spaces Without White PeopleThe author is putting lipstick on a pig, trying to defend the indefensible.
Last week The Ryersonian reported on an incident that involved two first-year journalism students who were turned away from an event organized by Racialized Students' Collective because they are white. Since then there has been a lot of commentary on the piece and a lot of debate -- a lot of the criticism is valid.
There are two sides to the story: 1) the media has a right to attend public events and report on matters that are in the public interest. The student media needs to cover initiatives that are happening on campus so that we draw attention to them and in turn create awareness (The Ryersonian reported that one student said he was covering the meeting for an assignment). 2) Marginalized groups have a right to claim spaces in the public realm where they can share stories about the discrimination they have faced without judgment and intrusion from anyone else.
I am a person of colour and a journalist and so there are two conflicting voices inside my head. But in this case one voice, that of a person of colour, is louder and my conscience does not allow me to be impartial. I have to take a side.
The organizers of the event, the Racialized Students' Collective, should have done a better job of labelling this event as a safe space on the Ryerson Students' Union online calendar. They should label safe spaces clearly and maybe even host events that educate the public on what they mean. Doing so will help the public and the media have a better understanding of the purpose and value of these spaces.
However, the point to note is not that two white students were asked to leave the event, but rather that this was a safe space and that we as a newsroom, as a campus and as a society are not as knowledgeable as we should be about what these spaces mean.
MAYBE B.U. NEEDS TO RETHINK ITS HIRING PROCESS: BU hire set up sex profile for rival: Was ‘jealous’ coed when busted in 2008...Read more details at Instapundit.
Did BU know about all these problems when they hired her? If not, why not? And what characteristics did she possess that made her more appealing than the other 100+ candidates?
It's easy to spot overt calls for censorship from the commentariat. Those have become more common in the wake of both tumultuous events (like the violence questionably attributed to the "Innocence of Muslims" video, or Pamela Geller's "Draw Muhammad" contest) and mundane ones (like fraternity brothers recorded indulging in racist chants).How many of those have you heard recently? Read the whole piece to see how those are woven into the anti-free-speech web.
But it's harder to detect the subtle pro-censorship assumptions and rhetorical devices that permeate media coverage of free speech controversies. In discussing our First Amendment rights, the media routinely begs the question — it adopts stock phrases and concepts that presume that censorship is desirable or constitutional, and then tries to pass the result off as neutral analysis. This promotes civic ignorance and empowers deliberate censors.
Fortunately, this ain't rocket science. Americans can train themselves to detect and question the media's pro-censorship tropes. I've collected some of the most pervasive and familiar ones. This post is designed as a resource, and I'll add to it as people point out more examples and more tropes...
Trope One: "Hate Speech"...
Trope Two: "Like shouting fire in a crowded theater"...
Trope Three: "Not all speech is protected"...
Trope Four: "Line between free speech and [questioned expression]"...
Trope Five: "Balancing free speech and [social value]"...
Trope Six: "This isn't free speech, it's [category]"...
Trope Seven: "Fighting words"...
Trope Eight: "[Professor] explained . . . ."
Trope Nine: "This speech may be protected for now, but the law is always changing"...
A federal judge ruled late Tuesday that a lawsuit challenging mandatory union fees paid by government workers in Illinois can move forward. The judge’s ruling was in response to legal action taken in March by three state workers represented by attorneys at the Chicago-based Liberty Justice Center and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
“Government workers should not be forced to pay money to a government union to keep their jobs,” said Jacob Huebert, senior attorney at the Liberty Justice Center. ”With today’s ruling, the court recognized that these workers deserve to have their day in court.”
The U.S. Department of Education is poised to announce a limited exemption to the federal ban on prisoners receiving Pell Grants to attend college while they are incarcerated.
Correctional education experts and other sources said they expect the department to issue a waiver under the experimental sites program, which allows the feds to lift certain rules that govern aid programs in the spirit of experimentation. If the project is successful, it would add to momentum for the U.S. Congress to consider overturning the ban it passed on the use of Pell for prisoners in 1994...
Even a limited experiment will provoke controversy. Spending government money on college programs for convicted criminals is an easy target for conservative pundits and for some lawmakers from both political parties...
The administration estimated that roughly 4,000 of the 60,000 incarcerated juvenile offenders would be eligible for federal aid. That investment makes sense, they said, given that it costs an average of $88,000 per year to lock up a juvenile offender. And inmates of all ages are half as likely to go back to jail if they take college courses.
A proposed change to state law that has advanced in Springfield could expand high school students' access to college credit through AP testing — but could also have a financial impact on state colleges and universities in Illinois, which could lose out on tuition revenue.
The AP testing program awards students whose knowledge has surpassed the high school level, and can save them time and money in college because they don't have to pay to take the equivalent courses.
But college standards for granting credit for AP tests vary widely. The tests are scored on a 5-point scale, but while some colleges and universities will award credit for scores as low as 2, others require the top score of 5 in certain subjects, according to the College Board, which administers the program. At some schools, the standards vary by subject, while the University of Illinois has different thresholds for different campuses.
To standardize the criteria, lawmakers are considering passing a law to require public universities and colleges in Illinois to give course credit for scores of 3 or better...
Last year in Illinois, nearly 116,000 AP tests were awarded scores of 3 or better, according to a coalition backing the legislation that includes state education groups and the College Board. At an average cost of $426 per credit hour, that would add up to $148 million in savings overall, proponents say.
AP credit could cost colleges and universities lost tuition from those students who can skip over classes, but officials say many AP students simply take other classes instead, to add depth or breadth to their education. Or they can use the lightened course load to improve their chances of graduating on time.
