Obama’s Schoolchildren Speech

President Obama is set to address the nation's schoolchildren next week, presumably to propagandize them into his evil agenda of turning the country into Communist Russia (pronounced "roo-shuh") and offing granny to save money on health care just as they do in his native Kenya. There are even instruction manuals to enlist the support of the teachers unions in brainwashing ...

College Rankings

Washington Monthly has put out its annual answer to the US News college rankings, even going so far as to launch a new blog devoted to the subject. Steve Benen highlights some of the findings: * Only one of the U.S. News top ten universities -- Stanford -- makes the Washington Monthly's top ten, while high profile institutions such as Princeton, Duke ...

SAT Scores and Family Income

A debate is raging in the blogosphere about this graph, which shows that "Generally speaking, the wealthier a student’s family is, the higher the SAT score." Alex Tabarrok gets us up to speed on the debate thus far: Greg Mankiw pointed out that the effect is unlikely to be purely causal because there may be an omitted variable bias, IQ for example. ...

Financing the Life of the Mind

Russell Jacoby laments that it has become almost impossible for intellectuals to sustain themselves without institutional backing: Yes, a few souls manage to hustle and do quite nicely, for instance, Christopher Hitchens. Yes, a few magazines like the “New Yorker” pay a living wage, but for most to survive, if not flourish, requires a working (and willing) spouse, family money or ...

Professor Sarah Palin

Doug J draws our attention to a new Fox poll suggesting career options for Sarah Palin: About a third of Americans think the best job for Palin is homemaker (32 percent), while nearly one in five see her as a television talk show host (17 percent). Vice president of the United States comes in third (14 percent), followed closely by college ...

DoD Schools as Reform Model?

Tim Harwood looks at a recent National Center of Education Statistics report [PDF] titled "Achievement Gaps: How Black and White Students in Public Schools Perform in Mathematics and Reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress."  In particular, he highlights the fact that "Black students at the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) have consistently scored at the top or ...

Sextortion in High School

GQ has a rather weird piece about something that may or may not be a trend:  High school kids using the Internet to extort sexual favors.  This one has a twist, which I'll lot Conor Friedersdorf summarize: Tony Stancl, an 18 year old high school senior who created a fake female identity on Facebook, flirted with male classmates by Internet chat, ...

Meritocracy’s Limits

Stacy McCain, who along with myself is among the most notable graduates of Jacksonville State University*, laments the sense of superiority that comes with the increasingly meritocratic nature of American higher education.  Essentially, because the Ivy Leagues are now more open to the most intellectually gifted students, its graduates believe they must therefore be the best and the brightest and ...

Studying the Booty Call

Perhaps apropos yesterday's post musing over whether "dating" is the appropriate way to describe an adulterous relationship, Michael Munger points us to a forthcoming article in the Journal of Sex Research entitled "The '"Booty Call': A Compromise Between Men's and Women's Ideal Mating Strategies." I render no judgment on the value of the research of Jonason et alia but find their ...

Science Editor Quits After Hoax

Yet another bogus paper was accepted for publication in an academic journal: The editor-in-chief of an academic journal has resigned after his publication accepted a hoax article. The Open Information Science Journal failed to spot that the incomprehensible computer-generated paper was a fake. This was despite heavy hints from its authors, who claimed they were from the Centre for Research in Applied ...

Will Teach for Food

Reacting to news that "more than 120" professors at Tehran University have "collectively resigned in protest to the killings of students by suppressive forces," Thoreau responds in a way quite familiar to many of us: The important question for any postdoc (or any untenured professor at a school in a budget crisis, *cough*) is, with 120 faculty jobs empty, are they ...

Top U.S. High Schools

Newsweek ranks the Top 1500 U.S. high schools by a rather odd formula "the number of Advanced Placement, Intl. Baccalaureate and/or Cambridge tests taken by all students at a school in 2008 divided by the number of graduating seniors."  Aside from taking of tests -- and not, say, scores on said tests -- is the sole criteria strikes me as ...

Teenager Expelled For Possession of Grooming Tool

Taylor Ray Jetter, a fifteen-year-old middle school student, has been expelled from school for possession of a "tool capable of inflicting bodily harm" -- an eyebrow shaver. The Penn Hills school board decided Tuesday night to uphold a 15-year-old student's expulsion for showing up at school with an eyebrow shaver in her handbag. A Linton Middle School teenager was expelled after a ...

Texas Limits ‘10%’ Admissions

Texas has modified its revolutionary "10 percent" program for higher education admissions after university administrators complained that they were "going to lose control over our class." The "10 percent" plan in Texas has been one of the most successful experiments ever tried to get more minority students into top public universities with race-neutral criteria. It spawned similar (if less ambitious) programs ...

Citing Professor X

Eugene Volokh's post "Professor X Says" has, as best I can tell, nothing to do with the leader of a certain band of uncanny Marvel mutants.   It does, however, provide seemingly obvious but oft-missed advice on how one should handle arguments in academic writing: If you want to endorse Professor X's view, be clear and candid about it; say "As Professor ...