1. College: pay if you pass the course

“In the new Global Freshman Academy, each credit will cost $200, but students will not have to pay until they pass the courses, which will be offered on the edX platform as MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses… ‘Leave your G.P.A., your SATs, your recommendations at home,’ said Anant Agarwal, the chief executive of edX. ‘If you have the will to learn, just bring your Internet connection and yourself, and you can get a year of college credit.'”

2. College: for the masses

“Yet the new research is a reminder that the country also underinvests in enrolling students in four-year colleges — and making sure they graduate. Millions of people with the ability to earn a bachelor’s degree are not doing so, and many would benefit greatly from it.”

3. College: for the barista

“The most revolutionary part of the program had nothing to do with tuition and got far less media attention. In their announcement, Starbucks and Arizona State also committed themselves to providing all enrolled employees with individualized guidance—the kind of thing affluent American parents and elite universities provide for their students as a matter of course. Starbucks students would each be assigned an enrollment counselor, a financial-aid adviser, an academic adviser, and a ‘success coach’—a veritable pit crew of helpers. Like a growing number of innovative colleges around the country, Starbucks and Arizona State were promising to prioritize the needs of real-life students over the traditions of academia.”

1. On Finland

“The education system did not improve as a result of some commitment to a general sense of ‘school autonomy’ – rather it improved at a time when a consensus had been carefully developed, around a very tightly defined common set of ideas and practices…. In the late 1960s they recognized the need to enhance human capital and did something about it, through common and systemic education reform, driven and monitored from the centre.”

2. On the education wars

K-12 education is an exhausted, bloodsoaked battlefield. It’s Agincourt, the day after. So a suggestion: Refocus some reformist passions on early childhood.

3. On pre-k data

1. 1.5 million missing black men

2. Problems with No Child Left Behind legislation

“The bill still doesn’t include student growth. While everyone in education talksabout student growth, our policies continue to ignore it.”

3. Justine Musk on Elon Musk 

“But if you’re extreme, you must be what you are, which means that happiness is more or less beside the point. These people tend to be freaks and misfits who were forced to experience the world in an unusually challenging way. They developed strategies to survive, and as they grow older they find ways to apply these strategies to other things, and create for themselves a distinct and powerful advantage.”

4.11 images that capture the vastness of space

5. The problem with satisfied patients 

“In fact, a national study revealed that patients who reported being most satisfied with their doctors actually had higher healthcare and prescription costs and were more likely to be hospitalized than patients who were not as satisfied. Worse, the most satisfied patients were significantly more likely to die in the next four years.”

1. Reinventing governance

“No major constitutional overhaul of governance has been accomplished since the early 20th century, so the ideas in this book deserve serious consideration.”

Note: I sometime wonder how much of chartering is about entrepreneurship and how much is about governance – which begs the question, what gains would you get from what, at the outset, is really a governance strategy?

2. Do intelligent people worry more?

“This interpretation of anxiety, though, contradicts other studies showing a negative link between intelligence and anxiety.”

3. Can you scale mindset interventions?

“Among students at risk of dropping out of high school (one third of the sample), each intervention raised students’ semester grade point averages in core academic courses and increased the rate at which students performed satisfactorily in core courses by 6.4 percentage points.”

4. Prof, no one is reading you 

“We estimate that an average paper in a peer-reviewed journal is read completely by no more than 10 people.”

5. Is neighborhood based education liberal?

“No.”

6. Why is there an inverse relationship between inequality rates and desire for transfers? 

“Hence, emphasizing the severity of a social or economic problem appears to undercut respondents’ willingness to trust the government to fix it — the existence of the problem could act as evidence of the government’s limited capacity to improve outcomes.”

1. David Brooks

He is less enthusiastic about politics in general, though, in keeping with the new book’s inward turn. “I just find talking to politicians less interesting than I used to,” he says. “I used to find it fascinating, what all the little subterfuges going on in the construction of the immigration bill were. But I just can’t get my interest up any more. There’s a lot more action sociologically, psychologically, morally than politically, these days.”

2. Journalism

If you split the news into three basic baskets — the “what”, the “so what” and the “now what” … the mainstream media has since, well, forever, spent most of its time, money and brainpower on the “what”. This happened, here’s what people say about it. The “so what” (why does this matter) and the “now what” (what comes next) have tended to be the sort of thing that columnists dealt with … we didn’t prize the “so what” and the “now what” baskets nearly as much as the “what.”

3. Unequal yet happy

All of the wage gains since the downturn ended in 2009 have essentially gone to the top 1 percent, yet the proportion of Americans who say they are “thriving” has actually increased… Money may not buy happiness in the long run, but consumer choice has gone a long way in keeping most Americans reasonably content, even if they shouldn’t be.

4. Clinton listens to Chetty 

The research Chetty and his team have done shows that children who grow up in parts of the country with less segregation, less income inequality, stronger schools, more social capital, and stable families are more likely to improve their social standing as adults. He and his colleagues are preparing to release policy prescriptions in coming months.

Note: Chetty’s most famous edu study links value-add scores to life outcomes.

1. Middle class families choosing charters

“What’s happening here raises a compelling question: could an influx of middle-class parents into charter schools emerge as a political game changer?”

2.

“The Times is a relatively good newspaper.  But to reach the elite level of papers like The Economist, they need to become familiar with good economic research.  And that means figuring out what economics is capable of telling us about the world, and what it cannot. Economists don’t know how to solve very many problems.  But one of the very few we do know how to solve is the California water shortage.”

3. Success Academy works for my kid

“But I can’t help but feel that there is an implicit assumption in education debates that parents whose children are primarily served by charter schools like Success—who tend to be low-income students of color—aren’t capable of making those choices, or have somehow been duped into buying into these schools’ philosophies. As though those parents, of those children, don’t understand the kind of schools they’re subjecting their children to.”

4. College preparedness vs. college enrollment

“To repeat: The ‘college preparation gap’ is larger now than in 1992 even though the college preparedness rate has remained relatively flat, due to the fact that the proportion of recent high school graduates enrolling in college rose sharply between 1994 and 2009—from 61 percent to 70 percent—before easing back down to 66 percent in 2013.”

5.

“Someone is waiting on who you are becoming.”

6. Tips for dealing with college rejection

“In the real world, nobody actually cares where you went to college except employers, your parents, potential romantic partners, and you.”

7. How to be emotionally intelligent

“Mr. Goleman…shares his short list of the competencies.”

1. Letter grades work all over the world

“A randomly selected half of the sample villages (markets) received report cards. This increased test scores by 0.11 standard deviations, decreased private school fees by 17 percent, and increased primary enrollment by 4.5 percent. Heterogeneity in the treatment impact by initial school quality is consistent with canonical models of asymmetric information. Information provision facilitates better comparisons across providers, improves market efficiency and raises child welfare through higher test scores, higher enrollment, and lower fees. ”

HT Joe S.

2. What correlates with charter success?

“Brookings and CREDO are positively correlated; the more choice and competition a city has, the higher-performing its charter sector.”

3. The myth of AI

“For instance, if the theory is that you’re getting big data by observing a lot of people who make choices, and then you’re doing correlations to make suggestions to yet more people, if the preponderance of those people have grown up in the system and are responding to whatever choices it gave them, there’s not enough new data coming into it for even the most ideal or intelligent recommendation engine to do anything meaningful.”

4. Why the world is getting weirder

“As we find more rules to fix more things we are encountering tail events. We fixed all the main reasons aircraft crash a long time ago. Sometimes a long, long time ago. So, we are left with the less and less probable events.”

5.

“Now, just because something new is fucked up, doesn’t mean I’m unhappy. Quite the opposite – I’m usually happy, although when the pile of fuckedupness gets high enough I get tired.”