Women of the world

The New York Times Magazine has a really good article about how aid to women might help to reduce poverty and violence:
Our interviews and perusal of the data available suggest that the poorest families in the world spend approximately 10 times as much (20 percent of their incomes on average) on a combination of alcohol, [...]

Charter Schools

The Boston Globe had an article a few days ago talking about charter schools. It found that charter schools in Massachusetts:
But a Globe analysis shows that charter schools in cities targeted by the proposal tend to enroll few special education students or English language learners.
The article then asks if charter schools do better than regular [...]

Just a poem today

I’m trying to finish up my dissertation (supposedly I’m defending on June 18), so no pictures or random songs or 980 page story on the meaning of an encounter between Joe and Jane that almost caused the ant apocalypse.
Just a poem:
Pencil me in for Thursday
The time is right for fireworks
In never ascending order
Towards the rink [...]

Congrats NU grads

Today is graduation here at Northeastern (the undergrad’s was in the morning and the grad’s in the afternoon–the law school’s isn’t until May 22). I congratulate all of the graduates and wish them well even if they didn’t shake hands.

Tufts President: Unions are for others

The President of Tufts, Lawrence Bacow, seems to be a bit tone deaf. He has put a letter (via here) up about the attempt by the Tufts Employee Association to form a union for the administrative, technical, and clerical employees. He has also put up a ‘fact’ sheet, which is a typical anti-union letter: it will cost [...]

A couple older bits about unions and the CEOs that hate them

In the way of the web, I found a couple items that say something about something.
The first is from the Huffington Post in January detailing comments from conference calls last November (Marcus is a co-founder of Home Depot):
“This is the demise of a civilization,” said Marcus. “This is how a civilization disappears. I am sitting here as [...]

More Same Sex Classrooms

The New York Times has another article about same sex classrooms. I’ve had a few posts about this. My take-away is that any gender difference in learning is dwarfed by individual differences. And I’ve noticed that all the articles I’ve seen have comments like:
Michael Napolitano speaks to his fifth-grade class in the Morrisania section of [...]

The problem with schools and elitism

The Boston Globe has an article about the consolidation of schools. The idea of the governor is that larger schools will save money and give a better education, while the article tries to argue that neither is true. Besides the fact that I went to a consolidated school (ConVal in Peterborough, NH), I don’t know enough [...]

Sargent Camp to close

It seems that Boston University is going to close down Sargent Camp (now officially the Sargent Center for Outdoor Education). The reason I care is that I grew up next to Sargent Camp (our property in Peterborough, NH abutted it–officially there were a river and flood plains between them, but ignore that). I skiied there [...]

Silvergate and the Armenian Genocide

It seems that Harvey Silvergate is trying to be controversial:
At issue this time is a lawsuit he filed in 2005 that claims state education officials violated the First Amendment by removing material from a human-rights curriculum questioning whether the mass killings in the Ottoman Empire between 1915-1918 constituted genocide. (He filed the lawsuit on behalf [...]

Northeastern University to Help?

I’m not sure what to think about this:
Offering high school graduates an additional year of study before they enter college is not a new idea, but Northeastern’s program would stand apart because students would earn college credit for successfully completed courses.
Aoun said the earned credits should equate to a full-freshman year of college, enabling students [...]

Larry Summers

Since it seems that Larry Summers might be up for Treasury Secretary, there is again discussion on his talk about women in science. Here is his summation at the beginning:
There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference’s papers document and have been documented before with respect to [...]

University: How Expensive is Too Expensive?

Every once in awhile I write a post about the crazy state of college tuition. Today’s Boston Globe Magazine notes a milestone:
It costs $51,310 to go to BC this year, $51,100 to go to BU, including tuition, room, board, mandatory fees, and the estimated tab for books and other expenses. In both cases, and for [...]

Banned Book Week

I’m one of many, I hope, who mention that this is Banned Book Week. How does one celebrate? Why reading a book that people want to ban:
1) “And Tango Makes Three,” by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
Reasons: Anti-Ethnic, Sexism, Homosexuality, Anti-Family, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group
2) The Chocolate War,” by Robert Cormier
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, [...]

Tuition Crisis?

With the difficult economy and the continued rise in tuition, the problems with our higher educational system is coming to the fore:
Public colleges and universities in Massachusetts received nearly 15 percent more financial aid applications over the first half of 2008, compared to the same period last year, a striking jump that surpassed the expectations [...]

Gender Differences

Via Amanda, here’s a nice article in Slate about the difference in cognition between men and women. She argues that any difference found is tenuous and almost all of the differences found between genders are dwarfed by deviation within a gender (as I noted in this piece about same sex classrooms). And right on time, Kevin Drum links [...]

Better Students=Better University?

The NY Times has an article about improvement at UConn. This statement really annoys me:
“A decade ago, the university did not have the campus to support a great academic program,” said Dr. John W. Rowe, president of the university’s board of trustees. “The university has gone from being a safety school to much more selective. [...]

More Same Sex Classroom Stuff

The Boston Globe has an article talking about the expansion in the number of same sex classrooms in Massachusetts. It gives very little information–is there a difference before and after in the classrooms in terms of grades, … (with this they would also have to talk about the resources, class size, … before and after). [...]

Should the Rich Universities Pay Taxes?

There is a proposal in Massachusetts (it’s in the very early stages) to tax universities whose endowment is more than $1 billion. Here are the basic arguments for and against:
“The pileup of wealth doesn’t match their mission of serving the public good,” said Wick Sloane, a specialist on college finances and student access who teaches [...]

More Professor Massey

There is an article in the Northeastern News. It doesn’t have much information and the quote from President Aoun also says nothing:
“This decision was difficult to make,” President Aoun said in an open Q&A session. “I received a recommendation from the dean and the provost and there were real issues that we cannot discuss from [...]