Should you borrow to pay for college? How much will you be able to repay? To estimate their return on investment, students should listen to investors in bonds backed by student loans, suggests the Wall Street Journal. It’s a $242 billion market.

Hedge fund manager Daniel Ades of Kawa Capital… Read full post »

Quest to Learn is organized specifically around the idea

… Read full post »

While IQ scores rise over time, creativity scores are declining in the U.S., write Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in Newsweek. It’s not clear why, though Bronson and Merryman think passive TV watching and video game playing may be crowding out creative play.

Other nations are trying… Read full post »

Will We Ever Learn? ask Robert Lerman of the Urban Institue and Arnold Packer of SCANS in Education Week. That is, will we ever learn to stop forcing a one-size-fits-all college-prep curriculum on all students.

Many high schools require Algebra 2, they write, but “Northeastern University… Read full post »

Must kids prep for ‘risk-taking’? asks USA Today in a a story on the “right-brain future” spiel of Patrick Bassett, president of the National Association of Independent Schools (private schools).

Here’s the Cliff Notes version: As traditional jobs in the left-brain

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Philadelphia’s high-tech School of the Future (SOF), designed with help from Microsoft, was supposed to revolutionize education, writes Meris Stansbury on eSchool News. So far, we’ve seen the future and it doesn’t work very well. (I had doubts when the school opened in 2006.)

It wou

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Sandra Tsing Loh is getting divorced after 20 years of marriage and two children, she writes in The Atlantic. In Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off, she suggests that most of us should give up on lifelong marriage too.  Keeping romance alive is too much work for the modern woman.

Given

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Let’s make our own low-cost, healthy pizza, San Jose Unified officials thought in 2003. We’ll buy a $720,000 Pizzamatic, spend $2.2 million to build space for it in the central kitchen and then call Domino’s for pizza. It turns out that $3 million doesn’t buy a… Read full post »

In hearing arguments on the strip search of an eighth-grader suspected of carrying ibuprofen, the Supreme Court takes failing to get it to a new level, writes Dahlia Lithwick in Slate. The male justices saw the strip search — conducted without informing Savanna Redding’s parents — a… Read full post »

San Jose State is pushing “super seniors” — credit-rich students who’ve taken classes for more than six years — to finish a degree and go away, making room for new students. About 1,500 students have been seniors for three or more years; 35 have been enrolled for a decad… Read full post »

“Social and emotional knowledge” can be taught in school “just like trigonometry or French grammar,” some psychologists believe. From the Boston Globe:

. . .  a typical teaching unit might include a role-playing exercise, or a set of diagrams breaking down the components

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Pitzer admissions director Angel Perez writes in the LA Times about the agony of rejecting well-qualified students. Pitzer received received 4,079 applications for 245 spots in the freshman class. (The college accepts 22 percent of applicants; most who are accepted choose to go elsewhere.)… Read full post »

University of California’s new admissions policy will increase the number of whites, reduce Asian enrollment and give a very small boost to Hispanics and blacks. The university no longer will require applicants to take three SAT II subject tests. From the San Jose Mercury News:

“It&rsquo

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In Illinois, teachers are trying to get parents to stop doing their kids’ homework. But some assignments seem designed for adults. From the Chicago Tribune:

Vernon Hills parent Barb Rosenstock admitted that she once helped her son build a project for a school assignment. In her defense, she sa

… Read full post »

In a letter in the New York Times, a former teacher, principal and superintendent from Portland, Oregon urges President Obama to improve schools by ignoring “achievement” and “rigor.”

Finally, I’d tell him to lose the words “achievement” and “rigor,&rd

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The Columbine killers and most other school shooters are severely mentally ill, concludes psychologist Peter Langman in Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters.

Released just before the 10th anniversary of Columbine, the book is all too timely as Germans try to figure out why 17-year-old T… Read full post »

Vaccines don’t cause autism federal special masters have ruled. Families claiming a link have sought compensation. From the Washington Post:

Yesterday’s ruling involved three separate cases, each of which explored a different mechanism by which vaccines might cause autism. Working indepe

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he British doctor who started the scare over a link between the MMR vaccine and autism “changed and misreported results in his research,” charges a Times of London investigation.

Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipula

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Libraries and bookstores could be forced to take kids’ books off the shelves unless the Consumer Product Safety Commission delays enforcement of a law designed to protect children from toys, clothing or other products tainted with dangerous chemicals.  The law takes effect Feb. 10, reports… Read full post »

Now that Barack Obama is president, novels that use “the N-word,” such as Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men should be dumped from high school reading lists, argues an English teacher in Washington state.

He’d encourage students to read these classics, but w… Read full post »

Scarred by acid, Afghan girls have returned to school in Kandahar, defying terrorists who attacked students and teachers two months ago, reports the New York Times.

. . .  if the acid attack against Shamsia and 14 others — students and teachers — was meant to terrorize the girls int

… Read full post »