Tag Archives: education

How Beyoncé Is Saving the Planet With Her New Album

by Myrna Posted on December 17, 2013

Purchasing “Beyoncé” online instead of on CD could cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 80 percent. Courtesy Columbia Records Last Friday, in an act of screw-you-I’m-Beyoncé badassness, the singer and Columbia Records dropped her entire self-titled fifth album exclusively for digital download on iTunes. Of course, it’s not the first digital launch, but it’s one of the most successful: So far,”Beyoncé” has smashed records, moving more than 800,000 electronic copies in just three days to become the US iTunes Store’s fastest selling album ever; it is currently number one on iTunes in 104 countries, and it’s only a matter of time before it takes pole position on the Billboard 200. As Beyoncé raps on the track “Flawless”: Bow down bitches. While the world collectively freaks out over the singer’s scarily impeccable secrecy (a leaky NSA could learn a few tricks), let’s take a moment to enjoy what Beyoncé’s digital-first release means for the planet. Given its size, and recent industry trends, this may well be one of the most climate-friendly major studio releases yet. Beyoncé has promised physical CDs (remember those?), saying they’ll hit shelves in time for stocking-stuffing. And while we don’t know yet how many of them she plans to issue, there’s reason to believe that digital downloads are beginning to erode the need for a massive physical rollout: Target, estimated to be the nation’s fourth biggest music retailer, has already decided not to sell the CD version because of low sales projections. This chart, from MusicTank, shows just how little energy it takes to consume a three-minute track of digital music, compared to a physical CD: MusicTank compares the energy consumption of various ways to listen to music. “The Dark Side of the Tunes” report by MusicTank, at the University of Winchester. According to the Record Industry Association of America, digital music accounted for nearly 60 percent of the total US market last year (by dollar value), after crossing the 50 percent mark for the first time in 2011. At the same time, the physical CD market has declined in value, from $3.4 billion in 2011 to $2.8 billion in 2012, according to RIAA numbers. It’s not only iTunes—which says it is the world’s most popular music store—but also the rise of streaming services like Pandora and Spotify, which last year accounted for 15 percent of the industry, compared to 3 percent just five years before. As album sales (distinct from singles sales) declined in the first nine months of this year compared to the same period in 2012, thedigital proportion of those sales went up, according to Neilsen figures reported by Billboard. Research shows that this shift to digital is a net win for the planet. According to the EPA, 100,000 pounds of CDs “become obsolete“—either outdated, useless or unwanted—every month. CDs are made from polycarbonate plastics and a layer of a reflective metal like silver or gold, and can be recycled by companies that crush and blend them into other plastics. (Rules on whether you can put them in your recycling bin vary from place to place.) Purchasing “Beyoncé” on iTunes instead of as a CD could result in a greenhouse-gas-emissions savings of between 40 and 80 percent, according to a 2009 study for Intel and Microsoft by researchers from a group drawn from Carnegie Mellon University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Stanford. The lower end of that estimate assumes users finally burn their music to CDs; the upper end is pure downloads. One of the researchers, Jonathan Koomey, a research fellow at Stanford University, told me that while the carbon footprint of CD production has largely stayed the same since 2009, when the study was published, online music has gotten greener. “A CD is still a CD and it’s pretty likely that the delivery of that CD is not very different from three or four years ago,” he says. “But typically the internet doubles in efficiency every couple of years, and so the picture is even better for downloads now than it was a few years ago.” Another 2009 study found the average compact disc sold in the UK produces around 2.2 pounds of greenhouse gases across its lifecycle: recording, manufacturing, packaging, distribution, transport and promotion. Packaging accounted for more than a third of these emissions. (Beyoncé’s record and its videos were produced around the globe in Australia, the US, France and Brazil; we’re still waiting for some enterprising climate mathematician to calculate the total carbon miles spent.) And let’s not forget Beyoncé’s complete lack of pre-promotion for the album. Every year, tens of thousands of embargoed CD singles are shipped to radio stations to set the hype machine in motion. (I used to work at a radio station and can attest to the teetering towers of plastic that haunted staff members tasked with health and safety.) A UK report from data collected in 2009 for the British Music Recorded Music Industry and the Association of Independent Music (UK), shows the current emissions from promo CDs from the indie music sector alone is around 1,700 metric tons—equivalent to more than three times the annual energy, water and waste emissions from a single music arena. By completely switching to digital delivery of these releases, the independent music sector could save 1,525 metric tons of CO2 annually. That’s a reduction of 86 percent. One caveat: While streaming once is, by far, better than buying a physical CD, streaming multiple times begins to wrack up energy consumption. (Server farms and your internet connection use energy to deliver you that product.) A report by MusicTank—an a business development organization based at University of Westminster, UK—shows that streaming an album of 12 tracks just 27 times by one user would, in energy terms, “equate to the production and shipping of one physical 12-track CD album.” Another potential downside: Streaming and downloading doesn’t pull in as much revenue for the artists. Beyoncé raps on “Haunted,” somewhat audaciously for a woman swimming in cash: “Probably won’t make no money off this, oh well.” Oh well, indeed. More: How Beyoncé Is Saving the Planet With Her New Album ; ;Related ArticlesNewly Discovered Greenhouse Gas ’7,000 Times More Powerful Than CO2′CHART: How Much Do Exxon and Google Charge Themselves for Climate Pollution?Why Congress Needs to Extend the Wind Energy Tax Credit ;

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How Beyoncé Is Saving the Planet With Her New Album

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The Ethicist: The First Amendment Right to Nonpolitical Homework

by Myrna Posted on December 13, 2013

Giving points for climate-change activism. View article: The Ethicist: The First Amendment Right to Nonpolitical Homework ; ;Related ArticlesDot Earth Blog: Engineering the Climate – Colbert’s ‘All-Chocolate Dinner’Energy Department to Give $226 Million to Support Nuclear Reactor DesignQueens Site May Be Added to Superfund List ;

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The Ethicist: The First Amendment Right to Nonpolitical Homework

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Report: Most Tax-Based College Aid Goes to the Least Needy Families

by Merv Carlson Posted on December 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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The federal government helps to make college affordable in a number of ways, from low-interest student loans to grants for low-income students. It also offers a host of lesser known subsidies for higher education through the tax code, by way of such things as 529 tax-free college savings plans and exemptions for loan interest and college expenses—expenditures that don’t show up as a budget line item the same way Pell Grants do. A new report from the Consortium of Higher Education Tax Reform suggests these tax credits aren’t doing much to increase the number of low-income families who send kids to college. Instead, they’re subsidies to the 20 percent of American households making more than $100,000 a year—people who would send their kids to college even without a 529 plan.

The nation spends $34 billion annually on Pell Grants, which allow lower-income kids to go to college and leave without owing major debt. Meanwhile, the US spends $35 billion on higher education tax breaks, most of which go to people who need them the least. Tax credits in general are poorly targeted at those most in need, but some are worse than others. Take the Exemption for Dependent Students, which allows families to reduce their taxable income by up to $3,900 if they have a dependent student between the ages of 19 and 23. More than half of all these exemptions go to people making over $100,000 a year. Also regressive: the deduction for tuition and fees, half of which goes every year to families making over $100,000. The median income of a family with a 529 college savings plan is $120,000.

One reason tax credits don’t benefit lower-income families as much as they should is the fact that they aren’t refundable, so the money generally isn’t available to families when the college bills are due, only when they file their taxes. The consortium also points out that federal tax breaks are still available to colleges and universities that are doing a poor job of enrolling and graduating low-income students, noting that more than 100 institutions getting federal tax breaks have graduation rates under 20 percent—a serious problem that can leave low-income kids both saddled with college debt and without a degree that might help them earn enough to repay it.

Research shows that financial aid can make a huge difference in whether a low-income kid decides to go to college. It has a miniscule impact on the college attendance rate of upper class kids, who are seven times more likely than low-income students to complete a bachelor’s degree by the age of 24. The consortium recommends some big cuts in higher ed tax breaks for the affluent and a shift in focus to directing aid to where it can do the most good. Among its proposals: ending taxation of Pell Grants; allowing people with drug convictions to access the American Opportunity Tax Credit, one of the few refundable higher ed tax credits; and imposing income limits on college savings plans. All of these things seem reasonable and something both parties ought to be able to get behind, but it’s hard to see middle-class families giving up all this aid without a huge fight.

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Report: Most Tax-Based College Aid Goes to the Least Needy Families

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Brief Daily Tests Might Be a Godsend for Low-Income College Students

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on December 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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Via Joanne Jacobs, here’s an interesting research tidbit—highly preliminary and tentative, but still interesting. A couple of psychology professors at the University of Texas started giving students in their intro lecture course a brief online quiz in every single class session. They found that average grades went up modestly, both in their class and in other classes, though this was tricky to assess since previous classes had used different grading curves. However, the daily quizzes did unquestionably improve the relative performance of students from low-income homes:

There’s really not enough data from this one study to figure out why the delta between high and low-SES groups compressed with daily testing, but the researchers’ best guess is that the low-SES students benefited more from the daily, immediate feedback:

In our view, the patterns of improved performance across three outcomes (in Introductory Psychology, in other Fall classes, and in subsequent Spring classes) most plausibly reflect changes in students’ self-regulated learning — their ability to study and learn more effectively….In particular, students had to adopt reading, note-taking, and study habits that allowed them to keep up with the material. In talking with students, many noted how they had learned to set aside specific times to prepare for each class–something that they did not initially feel they needed to do for other classes. The repeated testing also broke the material into segments that required students to focus their attention on the relevant content and the immediate feedback after each quiz provided students with a constant and objective means with which to engage in productive self-evaluation. The daily quizzes also encouraged students to attend classes at higher rates.

In other words, the high-SES students had better average study habits to begin with, so the daily testing affected them only modestly. The low-SES students had poor study habits, and the daily testing made them face up to this early in their college careers and do something about it before it spiraled out of control. This affected not just their performance in the psychology class itself, but in the rest of their classes as well.

There are obviously a ton of confounding factors that could be at play here, but it’s an interesting result, well worth following up on.

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Brief Daily Tests Might Be a Godsend for Low-Income College Students

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Australia Must Cut Emissions 40% by 2020 to Avoid “Dramatic Climatic Shifts”

by Myrna Posted on December 2, 2013

Leading scientists and economists say a world on track for 4C warming will put Australia “under assault”. Australian Bureau of Meteorology Australia must drastically increase its emissions reduction target to 40% by 2020 to avoid “almost unimaginable social, economic and ecological consequences” from climate change, a new book penned by leading scientists and economists, including Ross Garnaut, has warned. The book, Four Degrees of Global Warming: Australia in a Hot World, sets out a series of stark scenarios facing the country should global temperatures rise by 4C above the pre-industrial average. By 2100, annual rainfall in southern Australia is likely to fall by 50%, the sea level is set to rise by 1.1m and snow cover will fall “to zero in most alpine regions”, the book warns. With temperatures rising by 3-5C in coastal areas and 4-6C in inland areas, Australia’s future will be a “disturbing and bleak vision of a continent under assault”, according to the book, which was compiled following two years of original research by its authors. Read the whole story at The Guardian. Visit source: Australia Must Cut Emissions 40% by 2020 to Avoid “Dramatic Climatic Shifts” ; ;Related ArticlesHow Do Meteorologists Fit into the 97% Global Warming Consensus?Why Climate Change Skeptics and Evolution Deniers Joined ForcesPolar Bear Numbers in Hudson Bay of Canada on Verge of Collapse ;

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Australia Must Cut Emissions 40% by 2020 to Avoid “Dramatic Climatic Shifts”

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7 Reasons Why It’s Easier for Humans to Believe in God Than Evolution

by EsmeraldaYarnol Posted on November 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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Late last week, the Texas Board of Education failed to approve a leading high school biology textbook—whose authors include the Roman Catholic biologist Kenneth Miller of Brown University—because of its treatment of evolution. According to The New York Times, critiques from a textbook reviewer identified as a “Darwin Skeptic” were a principal cause.

Yet even as creationists keep trying to undermine modern science, modern science is beginning to explain creationism scientifically. And it looks like evolution—the scientifically uncontested explanation for the diversity and interrelatedness of life on Earth, emphatically including human life—will be a major part of the story. Our brains are a stunning product of evolution; and yet ironically, they may naturally pre-dispose us against its acceptance.

1871 satirical image depicting Charles Darwin as an ape. The Hornet/Wikimedia Commons

“I don’t think there’s any question that a variety of our mental dispositions are ones that discourage us from taking evolutionary theory as seriously as it should be taken,” explains Robert N. McCauley, director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture at Emory University and author of the book Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not.

So what can science tell us about our not-so-scientific minds? Here’s a list of cognitive traits, thinking styles, and psychological factors identified in recent research that seem to thwart evolution acceptance:

Biological Essentialism. First, we seem to have a deep tendency to think about biology in a way that is “essentialist”—in other words, assuming that each separate kind of animal species has a fundamental, unique nature that unites all members of that species, and that is inviolate. Fish have gills, birds have wings, fish make more fish, birds make more birds, and that’s how it all works. Essentialist thinking has been demonstrated in young children. “Little kids as young as my 2 and a half year old granddaughter are quite clear that puppies don’t have ponies for mommies and daddies,” explains McCauley.

If essentialism is a default style of thinking, as much research suggests, then that puts evolution at a major disadvantage. Charles Darwin and his many scientific disciples have shown that essentialism is just plain wrong: Given enough time, biological kinds are not fixed but actually change. Species are connected through intermediate types to other species—and all are ultimately related to one another.

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7 Reasons Why It’s Easier for Humans to Believe in God Than Evolution

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The Quality of American Teachers Seems to be Getting Better

by Bart Jameson Posted on November 19, 2013

Mother Jones

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In the current issue of Education Next, Dan Goldhaber and Joe Walch report that the quality of new teachers has improved over the past decade:

We find that more academically competent individuals are being drawn into the teaching profession….driven mainly by the proportion of teachers with SAT scores that fall in the top quartile of the distribution. This finding of increasing academic competence for newer entrants to the teacher labor market also shows up when we use undergraduate GPA as our indicator of academic competency, though research by Cory Koedel indicates that inconsistent grading standards across academic majors may render this measure less meaningful.

G&W’s research suggests that schools are drawing fewer teachers from the bottom quartile of SAT scores and more teachers from the top quartile. You can see this in the thick red line in the chart on the right (taken from the original paper), which shows the number of teachers from the class of 2008 with different SAT scores: compared to 1993 and 2000, there are fewer from the lower ranks, about the same number from the middle ranks, and more from the higher ranks. Megan McArdle suggests this is mainly due to the Great Recession:

As insecurity in the private-sector labor market increases, the value of public-sector job protections effectively increases, meaning that candidates will be willing to accept lower pay in exchange for the guarantee that it will be nearly impossible to fire them….It’s also possible that a lot of college students suddenly and for no apparent reason decided they wanted to be teachers around the same time that the job market became massively more insecure. But I’m betting it’s no coincidence. Bad news for the graduating seniors, but good news for the nation’s schools.

This is reasonable sounding. However, the most recent data is for teachers hired in 2008, which predates the big spike in unemployment starting in 2009. So I’m not quite convinced. I’d like to see data through 2013 to confirm what’s going on. Given the steep rise in private-sector unemployment and the preciptous decline in private-sector job security over the past five years, we should expect to see schools becoming even more selective about who they’re willing to hire. If the recession story is true, the data should show at least another 5 percentile point increase in the SAT scores of new teachers.

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The Quality of American Teachers Seems to be Getting Better

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New NAEP Scores Show Continued Improvement in American Schools

by DonnieaBlevins Posted on November 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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Good news, ed geeks! The 2013 NAEP scores for reading and math are out today. Here’s the executive summary: math scores are up 1 point since 2011 for both 4th and 8th graders. Reading scores are up 2 points for 8th graders and are flat for 4th graders.

I’ll probably dig into this in more detail later, but for now here’s a quick taste. The table below shows the 8th grade math results for all states. It’s sorted by black scores, so you can see which states seem to do the best job of educating their black students. If you want to know how or why some states do better than others, I have no answers for you right now. This is just raw data. Enjoy.

UPDATE: Sorry, I screwed up and posted 4th grade scores instead of 8th grade scores. It’s been corrected now.

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New NAEP Scores Show Continued Improvement in American Schools

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Who’s Really Behind Campbell Brown’s Sneaky Education Outfit?

by ErvinMcGuinness Posted on October 29, 2013

Mother Jones

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Early one morning in July, former CNN anchor Campbell Brown appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, pen in hand, notes fanned out in front of her. Viewers might have mistaken her as a fill-in host, but Brown had swung by 30 Rock in her new role as a self-styled education reformer, a crusader against sexual deviants in New York City public schools and the backward unions and bureaucrats getting in the way of firing them. “In many cases, we have teachers who were found guilty of inappropriate touching, sexual banter with kids, who weren’t fired from their jobs, who were given very light sentences and sent back to the classroom,” Brown, the mother of two young sons, explained.

Brown was there to plug her new venture, the Parents’ Transparency Project, a nonprofit “watchdog group” that “favors no party, candidate, or incumbent.” Though its larger aim is to “bring transparency” to how contracts are negotiated with teachers’ unions, PTP’s most prominent campaign is to fix how New York City handles cases of sexual misconduct involving teachers and school employees—namely by giving the city’s schools chancellor, a political appointee, ultimate authority in the process.

Shortly after it was launched in June, PTP trained its sights on the New York mayoral race, asking the candidates to pledge to change the firing process for school employees accused of sexual misconduct. When several Democratic candidates declined, perhaps fearing they’d upset organized labor, PTP spent $100,000 on a television attack ad questioning whether six candidates, including Republican Joe Lhota and Democrats Bill de Blasio and Anthony Weiner, had “the guts to stand up to the teachers’ unions.” The spot stated that there had been 128 cases of sexual misconduct by school employees in the past five years, suggesting that nothing had been done in response. “It’s a scandal,” the ad’s narrator intoned. “And the candidates are silent.”

Before founding PTP, Brown raised this issue in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in July 2012. But what she failed to disclose was that her husband, Dan Senor, sits on the board of the New York affiliate of StudentsFirst, an education lobbying group founded by Michelle Rhee, the controversial former Washington, DC, chancellor. Rhee made a name for herself as public enemy No. 1 of the teachers’ unions and has become the torchbearer of the charter school movement. In 2012, her “bipartisan grassroots organization” backed 105 candidates in state races, 88 percent of them Republicans. (Senor was also the spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority following the invasion of Iraq and served as a foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney in 2012.)

Writing in Slate, Brown, a veteran journalist, confessed to being naive about the standards for revealing a potential conflict of interest: “If you live in the overlapping world of politics and media, as I am learning, anything less than full transparency can potentially do you in.” She still managed to get in a few digs at the unions. “I failed to disclose,” she wrote, “because I stupidly did not connect the teachers’ unions’ opposition to charter schools to their support for a system that protects teachers who engage in sexual misconduct.”

But there is much more about PTP that is less than transparent, including its sources of funding and its overall agenda. As a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, PTP may keep its donors’ identities secret and spend money in electoral campaigns, so long as political activity doesn’t consume the majority of its time and money.

Despite its nonpartisan billing, Brown’s nonprofit used Revolution Agency, a Republican consulting firm, to produce the mayoral attack ad. Its partners include Mike Murphy, a well-known pundit and former Romney strategist; Mark Dion, former chief of staff to Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.); and Evan Kozlow, former deputy director of the National Republican Congressional Committee. The domain name for PTP’s website was registered by two Revolution employees: Jeff Bechdel, Mitt Romney’s former Florida spokesman, and Matt Leonardo, who describes himself as “happily in self-imposed exile from advising Republican candidates.”

Another consulting firm working with Brown’s group is Tusk Strategies, which helped launch Rhee’s StudentsFirst. Advertising disclosure forms filed by PTP list Tusk’s phone number, and a copy of PTP’s sexual-misconduct pledge—since scrubbed from its website—identified its author as a Tusk employee. (Tusk and Revolution declined to comment. Brown referred all questions to her PR firm—the same one used by StudentsFirst.)

What about Brown’s allegation that the New York schools did nothing about 128 cases of sexual misconduct? It turns out that in 33 of those cases, the employee in question had been fired, the New York Times reported. Many of the others were disciplined.

Brown’s group paints the unions as the main obstacles to a crackdown on predators. Yet Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, says that the union’s New York City chapter already has a zero-tolerance policy in its contract, and that AFT only protects its members against “false allegations.” New York state law also mandates that any teacher convicted of a sex crime be automatically fired. It is the law, not union contracts, that requires that an independent arbitrator hear and mete out punishment in cases of sexual misconduct that fall outside criminal law. The quickest route to changing that policy may be lobbying lawmakers in Albany, not hammering teachers and their unions.

Before Brown left CNN three years ago, her evening news show carried a memorable tagline: “No bias. No bull.” She can’t say the same for her foray into the education wars.

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Who’s Really Behind Campbell Brown’s Sneaky Education Outfit?

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How Smart Are American Kids? Amanda Ripley Responds

by hucmzfbl Posted on October 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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Yesterday I wrote a post that was critical of Amanda Ripley’s exclusive focus on the PISA test in her new book, The Smartest Kids in the World. There are other international tests that American kids do better on, after all, so looking solely at PISA makes our educational outcomes look worse than they probably are. Ripley emailed me the following response:

First of all, I am excited whenever anyone is interested in a debate about TIMSS versus PISA! I geeked out on this debate for many months while working on the book, and it was a pretty lonely existence—so I am happy to have an excuse to talk about it.

I agree it is critical to be skeptical of PISA—or any test or metric. All have their flaws. Which is why I spent a long time learning about all the various international tests—studying sample questions, reading about their strengths and weaknesses and analyzing their results over time.

In fact, I used many different data points to decide which countries to feature in the book, including high school graduation rates, college attainment rates, spending per pupil, rankings of national competitiveness and other economic indicators, as well as test data from TIMSS, PIRLS and NAEP.

As it turns out, international test data is strongly correlated from one test to another. (The correlation between TIMSS 2007 and PISA 2007 was 0.93.) But as you note, there are some differences between PISA and TIMSS findings. In the end, I made a very conscious decision to prioritize PISA findings for two main reasons:

  1. PISA is a test administered to 15-year-olds, which means it catches kids closer to the end of their compulsory schooling. TIMSS is given to 4th and 8th graders, which is useful, too, but I was most interested in the cumulative effects of countries’ education systems, rather than the midpoint.
  2. Unlike TIMSS, PISA was designed to test students’ abilities to apply knowledge to solve real-world problems and think for themselves. (TIMSS is a test of school curriculum.) I was most interested in those higher-order thinking skills, since they are increasingly valuable in the modern economy. To see if the hype on PISA was true, I took the test myself, and I found it to be a remarkably sophisticated test.

You are right that American kids do better on TIMSS, especially in reading. And you are right that many people exaggerate our failings relative to other countries. It drives me nuts. Which is why I went to great lengths throughout the book to avoid such hyperbole.

I feel weird quoting myself, but just in case you don’t believe me, this is from p. 4: “The vast majority of countries did not manage to educate all their kids to high levels, not even all of their better-off kids. Compared to most countries, the United States was typical, not much better nor much worse…Our elementary students did fine on international tests, thank you very much, especially in reading. The problems arose in math and science, and they became most obvious when our kids grew into teenagers….”

Anyway, this is a healthy debate to be having, but some things are fairly clear. We now have a lower high-school graduation rate than about 20 other countries. Our young adults perform far below young adults in many other countries, including Finland, especially in numeracy, according to the results of the new PIAAC test (yet another ridiculous acronym!).

There is no need for alarmism, but there is need for concern. Even our wealthiest teenagers, those in the top quartile of the country based on socioeconomic background, perform 18th in the world on the PISA math test compared to wealthy kids worldwide. And those kids have highly educated parents and attend some of the best resourced school in the world.

We could do better. We could do worse. Whatever we do, I am grateful for the chance to debate these complicated matters in an open-minded and civil way.

For now, I’ll let Ripley have the last word on this. But I’ve put The Smartest Kids in the World on my reading list, and I may have more to say after I’ve made my way through it.

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How Smart Are American Kids? Amanda Ripley Responds

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