Newmark's Door

"Top 5 problem-solving mistakes by MBA's"

By Vanderbilt's Luke Froeb.

Luckily, I teach at NCSU, where such problems are all but unknown.

:-)

One reason I no longer necessarily accept an obit notice as an excuse for missing a test

"Pa. Man Fakes Mom's Obit to Get Time Off".

"College essay questions get weird"

One more bit of evidence that college admissions--particularly at the so-called selective schools--are very badly in need of reform.

A small window into American education in 2012

"Brooklyn elementary school restricting bathroom use".

It’s a no-pissing contest.

Parents at a Brooklyn elementary school are hopping mad after staffers set bladder-bursting limits on fifth-graders’ potty privileges — even going so far as to offer prizes to students who go to the can the least.

With the apparent OK of her principal, PS 90 teacher Stephanie Warner began restricting kids earlier this month to just three toilet trips per week in an attempt to reduce classroom disruptions.

The teacher set three, short “windows of opportunity” when kids could take leave for the loo and distributed strips that resemble award ribbons reading “This coupon entitles [student name] to bathroom.”

“She gave us these vouchers and told us we only had three per week — and if we crumbled, broke or lost one, we’d never get them back,” said 10-year-old Jordan Leon. “She told us that we kept going to the bathroom a lot and we weren’t allowed to.”

"Head Start A 50 Year Flop? Say It Ain’t So, Joe"

Walter Russell Mead "speaks truth to power":

These days, defenders of Head Start say less about what it does for kids (essentially nothing) but about the jobs it creates in poor neighborhoods.  This is blue liberal thinking at its most self-parodic: we can’t develop social programs that will accomplish something worthwhile, but we can at least use the illusion that such programs work to create jobs for people who will then vote for the politicians who give them make work jobs. . . .

It isn’t the just the Tea Party and Ayn Rand acolytes saying these things. It’s President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services. It’s Time magazine.

A paradigm is falling apart.

"Making It in America"

Very interesting article on the status of unskilled and skilled labor in the U.S. manufacturing.

The article also has some interesting detail on the manufacturing of after-market car parts. I learned that part of a fuel injector "has to be machined to a tolerance of a quarter micron, or 10 millionths of an inch, about the size of a virus." I also learned that operators of some of the machines that manufacture those fuel injectors need to know calculus and computer programming. (Time reports that manufacturing "precision toolmaker" is one of the "nine jobs of the (near) future".)

And the article concludes far more sensibly than many such articles.

It’s hard to imagine what set of circumstances would reverse recent trends and bring large numbers of jobs for unskilled laborers back to the U.S. Our efforts might be more fruitfully focused on getting Maddie the education she needs for a better shot at a decent living in the years to come.

Two on educational costs

"College for today’s newborns could cost as much as $422K [in today's dollars]". Can I bet against this?  This has about as much chance as a widespread revival of vinyl records. 

"A Look Inside A $32,000-A-Year-Elementary School In New York's East Village". What do you get for this almost unbelievable money?

But with that price tag comes state-of-the-art classrooms, all of which are equipped with SMART Boards, teachers trained in the United Kingdom, a library filled with thousands of titles, and a full music program.

They forgot to add--classmates from really wealthy families. But laugh or cry--you choose.

That's three

My older daughter's third professional publication is now available. Gated version of "Social-Emotional Effects of Early Childhood Education Programs in Tulsa". Ungated working paper.

"Charter School Research"

"One often sees the claim that there is no evidence that charter schools are particularly effective. Some studies, to be sure, do show that charter schools look pretty similar to other public schools (see RAND 2009). 

"But there are many recent well-designed studies that give the advantage to charter schools."

Read Stuart Buck's blog post for the details.

Related: "By 2030, K-12 education in America will be completely privatized."

"TCF's Top Outrageously Dumb Campus Moments of 2011"

Pretty outrageous, pretty funny.

2). Government may require sex and relationship training for students. First Amendment groups criticized the law for violating free speech. Others wondered whether a group of people that once included the likes of Anthony Weiner, Larry Craig, and John Edwards should be tasked with writing laws that establish campus etiquette for sex and dating.