The Week: Most Recent education

The growing undercover effort to get God into biology class

By The Week Staff — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 07:12:00 -0500

Imagine an American public school where science textbooks were obligated to debunk Charles Darwin; where students could deny global warming and still get an A, and where college professors could tell Biology 101 students that the world was born on the back of a giant turtle. Sounds a little backwards for 2013, right?

Frighteningly, these are all real scenarios that could occur under new education bills proposed this year. But the language in most of these bills is so obtuse that you might not even know if you live in one of the six states considering them (Montana, Colorado...

Is preschool really a better investment than buying stock?

By The Week Staff — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 10:53:00 -0500

President Obama is visiting Georgia on Thursday to promote early childhood education, one of the priorities he plugged in his State of the Union address. Obama is proposing to essentially make preschool universal, with the federal government partnering with states to pay for early education for every 4-year-old in a low- or moderate-income family. In his speech, Obama said that studies have proven that children educated early "grow up more likely to read and do math at grade level, graduate high school, hold a job, form more stable families of their own."

Obama's on pretty solid ground here, ...

There is no education bubble

By The Week Staff — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 07:15:00 -0500

From the collapse of the housing market and the demise of such venerable investment banks as Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns to the culture-transforming rise of social media giants Facebook and Twitter, Americans have endured far more than their fair share of capitalism's creative destruction over the past decade. After so much tumult, it's only natural that pundits and prognosticators would attempt to look for the next bubble and predict when it's likely to pop. That has led some to conclude that a combination of skyrocketing tuition and technology-driven innovations will soon lead to the collapse...

America's nosediving law-school applications: By the numbers

By The Week Staff — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 15:12:00 -0500

Applications to U.S. law schools have plummeted to a 30-year low. With tuition rising and jobs increasingly scarce, more and more students are apparently concluding that the time and money it takes to get a law degree just won't pay off. "We are going through a revolution in law with a time bomb on our admissions books," Indiana University law professor William D. Henderson tells The New York Times. "Thirty years ago if you were looking to get on the escalator to upward mobility, you went to business or law school. Today, the law school escalator is broken." Here, a look at the dimming allure of...

When parents pay for college, could kids' grades suffer?

By The Week Staff — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 09:30:00 -0500

Having parents with financial means is generally assumed to give students a leg up in academia — but a new study finds that might not always be the case.

While the study, "More Is More or More Is Less? Parent Financial Investments During College," found that parents who fund their child's education increases the child's chances of attending college as well as their odds of graduating, parents' financial support actually decreases a student's GPA.

The study draws on data from the National Center for Education Statistics on parent financial contributions and student grades across all types...

The conservatives protesting an anti-bullying day for its 'gay agenda'

By The Week Staff — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 13:10:00 -0400

The controversy: For years, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has sponsored Mix It Up at Lunch Day, an anti-bullying initiative meant to encourage kids to eschew their social cliques and spend lunchtime with someone they might not normally sit next to. The national event is now observed by more than 2,500 schools, but still, "culture wars don't take a lunch break," says Alex Halperin at Salon. The conservative American Family Association (AFA) — a "Bible-based cultural watchdog" — is encouraging parents to protest the event by keeping their kids at home on Mix...

Why some doctors think Adderall is the cure for academic failure

By The Week Staff — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 16:40:00 -0400

It's no secret that some overachieving students abuse prescription stimulant drugs like Adderall or Ritalin to increase their concentration and improve grades. But according to The New York Times, some doctors are now prescribing drugs used to treat attention-deficit disorder to low-income students — even if the kids don't have ADD or another disorder that requires medication. These doctors argue that the drugs, which are often covered by Medicaid, are the cheapest and sometimes only way to help poor kids with fewer resources succeed academically. Of course, this practice is controversial...

The gym teacher who says he was beaten up by a first grader

By The Week Staff — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 13:20:00 -0400

The story: A former college football star and gym teacher at P.S. 330 in Queens, New York, is suing the city after he allegedly endured physical and emotional damage after being attacked by a 6-year-old pupil. According to John Webster, 27, first-grade student Rodrigo Carpio began attacking him after he reprimanded the boy for horseplay. Carpio reportedly "kicked and pinched" Webster, as well as the Elmhurst school's principal, and the school's security officer, during his tantrum, and the police were called. "He turned around and belted one last really good kick at my knee... that's when...

Is college a bad investment?

By The Week Staff — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 11:55:00 -0400

Americans "all seem to agree that a college education is wonderful," says Megan McArdle at The Daily Beast, but our obsession with getting a degree at all costs is getting out of hand. We're telling students that college grads make 80 percent more than their counterparts with just a high-school diploma, and that the student-loan debt they're piling up is a necessary investment. As a result, the number of bachelor's degrees awarded jumped by 50 percent between 1992 and 2008. The trouble is, 60 percent of those additional students wound up in jobs they probably could have landed without a degree...

Why Chicago teachers are striking: A guide

By The Week Staff — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 14:05:00 -0400

More than 26,000 teachers in Chicago are on strike for a second day, following a breakdown of negotiations between the city's powerful teaching unions and Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The strike has shuttered schools across the city — leaving some 350,000 students without class to go to — and "is shaping up to be one of the most important labor disputes in years," says Dylan Matthews at The Washington Post, with a potentially enormous impact on the future of organized labor, which has become an increasingly embattled political force. The fight also just so happens to fall...

Virtual Princeton: A guide to free online Ivy League classes

By The Week Staff — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 10:10:00 -0400

Why are colleges offering free classes?
They don't want to be left behind in the digital revolution that has already transformed the way we consume news, music, and books. Stanford, Duke, Princeton, and Johns Hopkins are among the 16 universities that have partnered with a newly launched company called Coursera to offer more than 100 free online courses this academic year; MIT, Harvard, and the University of California, Berkeley, are following suit through a nonprofit venture called edX. Now people anywhere in the world can take Stanford's "Introduction to Mathematical Thinking," learn the "Principles...

Should bullying victims get free plastic surgery?

By The Week Staff — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:47:00 -0400

The video: Nadia Ilse, a 14-year-old from Georgia, has been bullied for years for her protruding ears. Since first grade, she has been called "elephant ears" and "Dumbo," and went from being a talkative kid to an introvert. "It hurt so much," Nadia told CNN's Sanjay Gupta. "It happened so many times that it kind of all blends together." By the age of 10, Nadia was begging her mother for surgery to pin her ears back, but her family couldn't afford the $40,000 procedure. Little Baby Face, a nonprofit organization that gives bullying victims and children with facial deformities free plastic surgery...

The crucial need to hold students to a higher standard

By The Week Staff — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 06:35:00 -0400

Over the last few months, hundreds of thousands of high school seniors have walked across a stage and received a diploma, an important moment that should be applauded.

Unfortunately, for many of those students, that diploma represents a false promise.

Recent data from the ACT, Inc. shows that only 25 percent of high school students who take the test are college-ready in all subject areas. In my home state of Tennessee, the situation is even bleaker. All students in Tennessee take the ACT test, but only 15 percent meet college readiness benchmarks in English, math, reading, and science. While...

Should the bullied bus lady keep her six-figure donations?

By The Week Staff — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 15:20:00 -0400

A horrifying video showing New York middle school students bullying 68-year-old school bus monitor Karen Klein (watch it below) went viral a week ago, and the public continues to overwhelmingly support Klein, raising more than $648,000 (and counting) to fund a much-needed vacation for the abused grandmother. (Donors had originally aimed for just $5,000.) "I keep thinking, 'What have I done?'" Klein said on the Today show Monday morning. "I almost don't feel like I deserve it." Deserving or not, Klein plans to divide some of the money among her grandkids, invest some of it, and...

The Texas teacher who allegedly made kindergartners beat up a bully

By The Week Staff — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 07:41:00 -0400

A school district in suburban San Antonio, Texas, has dismissed one kindergarten teacher and suspended another for an unusual plan to fight bullying: According to a police report, a young teacher at Salinas Elementary School approached an older colleague for help dealing with "a bully in her classroom," named Aiden Neely. The older teacher had Neely, 6, come into her classroom, where she allegedly sat him down, lined up her kindergarten class, and had them smack Neely one-by-one to "teach him why bullying is bad," while she instructed the kids to "Hit him!" and "Hit him harder!" Neely's teacher...

Why investors should be allowed to buy 'stock' in college kids

By The Week Staff — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 09:38:00 -0400

U.S. taxpayers spend $43 billion a year subsidizing college educations, through Pell grants, federal direct loan programs, and congressional earmarks, says University of Chicago business professor Luigi Zingales in The New York Times. But there's a better, more efficient, way to make sure underprivileged kids can go to college: Have venture capitalists invest in promising students, much as they finance other "new ventures with no collateral." The students would graduate with no debt, only pay back their investors based on their post-graduate earnings, and the market, free from distorting subsidies...