Tag Archives: education

California’s Extreme Drought, Explained

by Myrna Posted on July 5, 2014

The state is experiencing the worst drought in its history. Find out just how bad the situation is getting and what it means for you. Excerpt from: California’s Extreme Drought, Explained Related ArticlesReactions to Hurricane Approaching N.C.Obama Mocks Congress on Climate ChangeScienceTake | Navigating Air and Water

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California’s Extreme Drought, Explained

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Can You Guess When Violent Crime in Our Schools Peaked?

by Burt Bollman Posted on June 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via Tim Lee, here’s a pretty interesting chart from a newly released report on crime in schools. It shows the rate of violent crime committed on campus: rape, robbery, assault, and sexual assault.1 And it sure looks pretty familiar, doesn’t it? It peaks in 1993, about 18 years after leaded gasoline started being phased out in 1975, then turned down and continued declining for the next 20 years.

Since the oldest students in our schools are 18 years old, the crime rate should start to flatten out approximately 18 years after the final elimination of leaded gasoline in 1995. That would be 2013. And so far, it looks like that’s about what’s happening.

All the usual caveats apply. This isn’t proof, it’s just a data point. But it’s a pretty compelling data point, isn’t it?

1Homicide isn’t included, but the homicide rate in schools is so low that it doesn’t affect these figures noticeably.

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Can You Guess When Violent Crime in Our Schools Peaked?

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Here’s Why Trade Schools Continue to Suck So Badly

by EricUmifqgovmol Posted on May 29, 2014

Mother Jones

For-profit colleges—aka trade schools—have a terrible track record. On average, their students rack up tons of debt and very few of them ever graduate. So why is it so hard to do something about them? Henry Farrell asks Suzanne Mettler about the politics of these schools:

Democrats worried about poverty used to defend for-profit colleges against fiscally conservative Republicans. Now Republicans (together with a few Democrats) are defending for-profit colleges against Democrats and reformers. Why did the partisan politics of for-profit education change so dramatically over a couple of decades?

During the Reagan Administration, Secretary of Education William Bennett criticized the for-profits as “diploma mills designed to trick the poor into taking on federally-backed debt,” and in 1990, Sens. Bob Dole and Phil Gramm introduced legislation to regulate them. Since the mid-1990s, however, GOP critics vanished after some party leaders began to champion the for-profits as a private-sector alternative to the higher education establishment. Given the dynamics of rising partisan polarization, the rank-and-file quickly fell in line. Some Democrats now seek to represent constituents who have been taken advantage of by such schools and incurred unpayable debts, but others continue to defend them.

Lovely, isn’t it? Democrats were finally ready to concede a point to Republicans, but apparently the horror of bipartisan agreement was too much for them. Still, I suppose there was never any real prospect of agreement anyway. I imagine that Republicans merely wanted to axe federal funding and let it go at that, while Democrats probably wanted to make for-profit schools perform better. The fundamental chasm between wanting to help poor people and not caring about poor people was undoubtedly never in any danger of being bridged.

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Here’s Why Trade Schools Continue to Suck So Badly

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Dot Earth Blog: Exploring the Social and Environmental Challenges as Brazil Prepares for Two Sports Spectacles

by LeesaRicketson Posted on May 19, 2014

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Codex: Adepta Sororitas (Enhanced Edition) – Games Workshop

The Adepta Sororitas, also known as the Sisters of Battle, are an elite sisterhood of warriors raised from infancy to adore the Emperor of Mankind. Their fanatical devotion and unwavering purity is a bulwark against corruption, heresy and alien attack, and once battle has been joined they will stop at nothing until their enemies are utterly crushed In this b

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Warhammer 40,000 (Interactive Edition) – Games Workshop

In the nightmare future of the 41st Millennium, Mankind teeters upon the brink of extinction. The galaxy-spanning Imperium of Man, beset on all sides by ravening aliens, foul traitors and Warp-spawned Daemons, looks once more to its greatest heroes to stave off the encroaching darkness. There is no time for peace. No respite. No forgiveness. There is only wa

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White Dwarf Issue 16: 17 May 2014 – White Dwarf

This issue sees Warhammer 40,000 reborn with a brand new edition of the game – we go deep and investigate all the exciting new bits, including the new missions, psychic phase and Unbound armies, and interview the rules team too. About this Series: White Dwarf is Games Workshop’s weekly magazine, and boasts a wealth of great content, from the latest new

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Citizen Canine – David Grimm

Dogs are getting lawyers. Cats are getting kidney transplants. Could they one day be fellow citizens? Cats and dogs were once wild animals. Today, they are family members and surrogate children. A little over a century ago, pets didn’t warrant the meager legal status of property. Now, they have more rights and protections than any other animal in the country

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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, says, “Yes,

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Cesar’s Way – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

“I rehabilitate dogs. I train people.” —Cesar Millan There are at least 68 million dogs in America, and their owners lavish billions of dollars on them every year. So why do so many pampered pets have problems? In this definitive and accessible guide, Cesar Millan—star of National Geographic Channel’s hit show Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan —reveals what do

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The Home Organizing Workbook – Meryl Starr

Failing the Mary Poppins’ snap-the-fingers approach to cleaning, here’s the next best thing: an utterly practical handbook that offers lasting results for anyone looking to banish clutter from every room in the house. Home organizer par excellence Meryl Starr offers up her hardworking organizing solutions in The Home Organizing Workbook, a straight

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Warhammer: Wood Elves (Interactive Edition) – Games Workshop

For millennia, the Wood Elves have dwelt beneath the leaves of Athel Loren, defending their greenwood home from the perils of the world. When the King in the Woods sounds his horn, longbows are strung and spears are sharpened as the hosts of Athel Loren assemble beneath ancestral banners. In the depths of the forests, enchantresses sing songs of awakening, r

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Marley & Me – John Grogan

The heartwarming and unforgettable story of a family and the wondrously neurotic dog who taught them what really matters in life. Now with photos and new material

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White Dwarf Issue 15: 10 May 2014 – White Dwarf

Things get apocalyptic for Warhammer 40,000 with the arrival of War Zone: Valedor – and the rules team write us a brand-new Dark Eldar datasheet you’ll only find in White Dwarf! Sprues and Glue, meanwhile, looks at the fine art of spraying your miniatures… and we have a sneak peek at the new Warhammer 40,000. About this Series: White Dwarf is Games Wo

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Dot Earth Blog: Exploring the Social and Environmental Challenges as Brazil Prepares for Two Sports Spectacles

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The Fulbright Program Is the Flagship of American Cultural Diplomacy. So Why Are We Cutting It?

by GTVMichale Posted on May 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Often it’s the little things coming out of Washington, obscured by the big, scary headlines, that matter most in the long run. Items that scarcely make the news, or fail to attract your attention, or once noticed seem trivial, may carry consequences that endure long after the latest front-page crisis has passed. They may, in fact, signal fundamental changes in Washington’s priorities and policies that could even face opposition, if only we paid attention.

Take the current case of an unprecedented, unkind, under-the-radar cut in the State Department’s budget for the Fulbright Program, the venerable 68-year-old operation that annually arranges for thousands of educators, students, and researchers to be exchanged between the United States and at least 155 other countries. As Washington increasingly comes to rely on the “forward projection” of military force to maintain its global position, the Fulbright Program may be the last vestige of an earlier, more democratic, equitable, and generous America that enjoyed a certain moral and intellectual standing in the world. Yet, long advertised by the US government as “the flagship international educational exchange program” of American cultural diplomacy, it is now in the path of the State Department’s torpedoes.

Right now, all over the world, former Fulbright scholars like me (Norway, 2012) are raising the alarm, trying to persuade Congress to stand by one of its best creations, passed by unanimous bipartisan consent of the Senate and signed into law by President Truman in 1946. Alumni of the Fulbright Program number more than 325,000, including more than 123,000 Americans. Among Fulbright alums are 53 from 13 different countries who have won a Nobel Prize, 28 MacArthur Foundation fellows, 80 winners of the Pulitzer Prize, 29 who have served as the head of state or government, and at least one, lunar geologist Harrison Schmitt (Norway, 1957), who walked on the moon—not to mention the hundreds of thousands who returned to their countries with greater understanding and respect for others and a desire to get along. Check the roster of any institution working for peace around the world and you’re almost certain to find Fulbright alums whose career choices were shaped by international exchange. What’s not to admire about such a program?

Yet the Fulbright budget, which falls under the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), seems to be on the chopping block. The proposed cut amounts to chump change in Washington, only $30.5 million. But the unexpected reduction from a $234.7 million budget this year to $204.2 million in 2015 represents 13 percent of what Fulbright gets. For such a relatively small-budget program, that’s a big chunk. No one in the know will say just where the cuts are going to fall, but the most likely target could be “old Europe,” and the worldwide result is likely to be a dramatic drop from 8,000 to fewer than 6,000 in the number of applicants who receive the already exceedingly modest grants.

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The Fulbright Program Is the Flagship of American Cultural Diplomacy. So Why Are We Cutting It?

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Bullying Victims Are Twice as Likely to Bring a Weapon to School

by KellieBagot Posted on May 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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A new study based on a survey of more than 15,000 American high school students found that victims of bullying are nearly twice as likely to carry guns and other weapons at school. An estimated 200,000 victims of bullying bring weapons to school over the course of a month, according to the authors’ analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control’s 2011 Youth Risk Surveillance System Survey. That’s a substantial portion of the estimated 750,000 high school students who bring weapons to school every month.

The study, presented yesterday at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies, found that 20 percent of participating students reported being victims of bullying, and that those teens were substantially more likely to carry weapons if they had experienced one or more “risk factors.” These included feeling unsafe at school, having property stolen or damaged, having been in a fight in the past year, or having been threatened or injured by a weapon. Among bullying victims experiencing all four of those factors, 72 percent had brought a weapon to school in the past month and 63 percent had carried a gun. Those victims were, according to the study’s authors, nearly 50 times more likely to carry a weapon in school as students who weren’t bullied.

For years, anti-bullying groups have drawn a connection between bullying and school shootings. The Department of Health and Human Services’s Stopbullying.gov website reports that the perpetrators of 12 of 15 school shootings in the 1990s had a history of being bullied. Witnesses of a 2013 shooting at Sparks Middle School in Nevada recall the 12-year-old shooter telling a group of students, “You guys ruined my life, so I’m going to ruin yours.”

However, focusing too much on bullying as a cause of school shootings may distract from other important factors, such as mental health and access to weapons. A Washington Post article last year summed up this critique: “We all want to find a simple motivation when children go to school intending to do harm, but the problem in blaming school shootings on ‘bullying’ is that it lets us off the hook too easily.”

Furthermore, there’s the question of correlation versus causation. The new study shows that students who are severely bullied are more likely to carry weapons, but it doesn’t show that students carry weapons because they have been bullied. It’s possible that carrying weapons precipitates rather than prevents conflict. The survey also didn’t ask if the students identified themselves as bullies, and since some students are both victims and bullies, one can’t assume that students are carrying weapons solely for protection.

Andrew Adesman, a co-author of the study and the chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York, recognizes these limitations. “We really don’t know the chronology here,” he explains. “We don’t know entirely whether the weapons carrying was purely defensive versus aggressive behavior.” But, he says, “Common sense suggests that kids who have weapons plan to use them if or when they need to.”

Adesman hopes that the study helps teachers identify students who may be carrying weapons. “If you can identify which kids are more severely victimized by these four risk factors—if a kid’s not coming to school and the teachers inquire and it turns out it’s because of safety concerns—that’s something that right there is one identifiable, possibly actionable red flag,” he says.

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Bullying Victims Are Twice as Likely to Bring a Weapon to School

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There’s an Award for Comprehensible Writing in Government. Guess Who Won.

by MahaliaCooke Posted on April 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s like the Oscars, but for paperwork.

The Clearmark Awards, sponsored by the DC-based Center for Plain Language, are handed out annually to the government agencies, corporations, and nonprofits that produce the most coherent literature. On Tuesday, for the 11th-consecutive year, the nominees gathered at the National Press Club in downtown Washington to nibble on chocolate mousse and celebrate their colleagues for making bureaucratic copy comprehensible. Up for awards were the Social Security Administration, for its redesigned website; the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, for its revision of its rules of procedure; and the National Diabetes Education Program, for its pamphlet on taking care of your feet. In a year in which a broken website became a symbol of bureaucratic ineptitude, these were the heroes the media never told you about.

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There’s an Award for Comprehensible Writing in Government. Guess Who Won.

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Proposed Bill Seeks to Boost Clean Energy Curriculum in Public Schools

by Collette77S Posted on April 4, 2014

Photo: Flickr/calmenda

A proposed Senate bill seeks to expand “green” energy curriculum to public middle and high schools across the country.

Proposed by Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), the bill would provide grant funding to colleges with green energy curriculum to expand their programs to middle and high schools, reports local Wisconsin paper Manitowoc Herald Times. The goal, the paper reported, is to get students interested in green jobs earlier in their educational careers.

Speaking in favor of the legislation, the paper asserted: “That is a good idea, regardless of where one stands on the controversial issue of expanding green energy in the future. It is not a given that wind, solar and other forms of alternative energy are the panacea advocates claim.

“Baldwin’s legislation, however,” the reporter goes on, “will help broaden educational opportunities for middle school and high school students, which is what those schools are supposed to do.”

Dubbed the Grants for Renewable Energy Education for the Nation (GREEN) Act, the bill asks for $100 million in federal funding for grants, which would be administered by the U.S. Department of Education. The bill is a companion to the House GREEN Act, sponsored by Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.).

Introduced to the Senate floor in late January, the bill has already been endorsed by the Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE).

ACTE Deputy Executive Director Steve DeWitt said the bill, “offers students exposure to the range of sustainable energy career options available today, while providing the education and training necessary to ensure that our nation’s workforce is prepared for the green jobs of the future.”

The fate of the bill is still to be decided, but Baldwin rightfully notes that jobs created in the clean energy field pay better than the average American job, with compensation rates 13 percent higher than the national average, meaning its passage may mean good things for the next generation.

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Proposed Bill Seeks to Boost Clean Energy Curriculum in Public Schools

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Pre-K Can Make You Healthier and More Talkative

by RNZEarnest Posted on March 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’m a fan of pre-K and early childhood interventions in general. For the most part, this isn’t because these programs boost IQ or increase academic performance. They may do a bit of that, but the evidence so far suggests that direct academic effects are modest. Rather, the benefits are mostly indirect: fewer behavioral problems; less teenage drug use; better impulse control; lower arrest rates; and so forth. Today, Aaron Carroll suggests yet another benefit: these programs produce healthier adults. That’s the conclusion of a long-term follow-up in the Carolina Abecedarian Project (ABC):

Males who were randomized to the ABC program had significantly lower blood pressure (systolic 143 vs 126). That’s a massive difference. They had significantly lower levels of hypertension. They had lower levels of metabolic syndrome and lower Framingham risk scores. To get a sense of the magnitude of the difference, one in 4 males in the control group had metabolic syndrome; none in the ABC group did. Women also had improvements, although not as dramatic.

Males in the intervention group were significantly more likely to have health insurance at age 30, and to have bought it. They were more likely to get care when they were sick at age 30, too. They were at lower risk for overweight throughout their childhood. Women in the intervention group were less likely to start drinking alcohol before age 17. They were more likely to be active and to eat more healthily.

The cost of this program was about $16,000 per child in 2010 dollars.

This isn’t a smoking gun. The sample size is small and the program was run a long time ago. But as Carroll says, that’s inevitable in long-term longitudinal studies: “Anytime you do a follow-up of 30+ years, by definition the intervention will be old by the time you get results. There’s no other way to do it. It’s such a silly attack.”

Along similar lines, Bob Somerby lavishes rare praise on a New York Times report by Motoko Rich about a program in Providence, RI, that intervenes with kids even before pre-K. The goal is a simple one. Researchers just want to get parents to talk to their children:

Recent research shows that brain development is buoyed by continuous interaction with parents and caregivers from birth, and that even before age 2, the children of the wealthy know more words than do those of the poor….Educators say that many parents, especially among the poor and immigrants, do not know that talking, as well as reading, singing and playing with their young children, is important. “I’ve had young moms say, ‘I didn’t know I was supposed to talk to my baby until they could say words and talk to me,’ ” said Susan Landry, director of the Children’s Learning Institute at the University of Texas in Houston, which has developed a home visiting program similar to the one here in Providence.

….As in Providence, several groups around the country — some of longstanding tenure — are building home visiting programs and workshops to help parents learn not only that they should talk, but how to do so.

“Every parent can talk,” said Dr. Dana Suskind, a pediatric surgeon at the University of Chicago who founded the Thirty Million Words Initiative, which oversees home visiting programs and public information campaigns. “It’s the most empowering thing,” said Dr. Suskind, who is securing funding for a randomized trial of a home-based curriculum intended to teach parents how they should talk with their children and why.

One of the most frustrating things about the education gap between rich and poor is that it shows up so early, and vocabulary appears to be one of the reasons. Even by the time they’re two or three, children of middle-class parents have vocabularies that are substantially larger than those of poor children. Even if poor kids get into a good-quality pre-K program, they’re behind from the beginning and they never catch up.

And plonking kids in front of the TV doesn’t do the trick. Vocabulary isn’t built by listening, but by interacting. It requires parents who talk to their children continuously. It barely even matters what they’re talking about.

The goal of programs like the one in Providence is to make sure that low-income parents know this. They may not have the time or money to do all the things for their kids that better-off parents can do, but they can talk to them. Doing that on a regular basis, starting very early in life, may turn out to be a critical component of any pre-K intervention program. Hopefully Suskind’s RCT will get funded and we’ll have firmer knowledge about this in the future.

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Pre-K Can Make You Healthier and More Talkative

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Imaginary Bracket: What If Spending More on Women’s Sports Meant NCAA Tourney Wins?

by Isabelta5 Posted on March 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Data from the US Department of Education

While Title IX has brought more opportunities for women in college athletics, the money still flows primarily to the men’s side of things. Looking at women’s athletic funding as a percentage of men’s athletic funding punishes football schools in a big way, since football teams tend to cost much more than others, and no schools have a women’s football team. Among BCS schools, Stanford does best—women’s teams receive 63 percent of the funding that men’s teams get. Oklahoma State, where women’s teams receive less than 23 percent of the funding men’s teams do, lags well behind the rest of the pack. The championship game brings together two DC teams that both spend more on women’s athletics than men’s, with American winning out by a single percentage point.

See what would happen if the richest teams won every tourney game.

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Imaginary Bracket: What If Spending More on Women’s Sports Meant NCAA Tourney Wins?

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