10 Years On, High-school Social Skills Predict Better Earnings Than Test Scores:
Ten years after graduation, high-school students who had been rated as conscientious and cooperative by their teachers were earning more than classmates who had similar test scores but fewer social skills, said a new University of Illinois study.
The study’s findings challenge the idea that racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic gaps in educational attainment and earnings can be narrowed solely by emphasizing cognitive skills, said Christy Lleras, a University of Illinois assistant professor of human and community development.
“It’s important to note that good schools do more than teach reading, writing, and math. They socialize students and provide the kinds of learning opportunities that help them to become good citizens and to be successful in the labor market,” she said.
You may say you’re a dreamer, but you’re not the only one. Here’s how other visionaries turned their big, crazy ideas into reality
By E.B. BoydFor every real-life maverick out there, there are a thousand dreamers, people with great ideas about how to make the world a better place but unsure of whether they should try to make them real. If only there were a handbook to show them the way. Now there is. Would-be world-changer: Meet your very own “How-To” guide.
How To Know If You’re The One
So you have an idea. You’ve tossed it around at parties. Your friends think you’re brilliant. (And, of course, you are.) But do you have what it takes to be a successful maverick?
The first thing to ask yourself, says career coach and “Have Fun • Do Good” blogger Britt Bravo (havefundogood.blogspot.com) is: Are you obsessed? Does your idea keep you up at night? Has it grabbed hold of you and won’t let you go? Your answer has to be a resounding yes. The life of a maverick is filled with overwhelming obstacles and roadblocks. You need extraordinary stamina and passion to keep going when it looks like the odds are against you.
Next, ask yourself: How much are you willing to give up for your idea? A few years back, journalist Cristi Hegranes struggled to understand the story of a Nepalese woman she was interviewing. In desperation, Hegranes gave the woman her notebook and asked her to write her own story. What came back was an eloquent piece of journalism. The young writer realized that local people could probably tell their own stories as well or better than foreign correspondents. She created the Press Institute for Women in the Developing World (piwdw.org) to create journalism training programs in Nepal and Mexico. Another institute opens in Rwanda this year.
How Academic Guilds Police Higher Education:
Academia is a self-certified guild that is funded mainly by tax money. Each year, something in the range of $350 billion goes into higher education in the United States. This figure keeps rising. So, the stakes are high.
As with any guild, it must limit entry in order to preserve above-market salaries. It does so primarily by academic licensing.
The primary licensing restriction is university accreditation, which is a system run by half a dozen regional agencies. To get degree-granting status, a college or university must be certified by one of these agencies. They certify very few.
The next screening device is the Ph.D. degree. This system was imposed on academia nationally by John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board, beginning in 1903, when Congress chartered it. He gave money to colleges, but only if they put people with Ph.D. degrees on their faculties.
Next comes faculty tenure. After about six or seven years of teaching mainly lower division classes that senior professors refuse to teach, an assistant professor comes up for tenure. If he gets it, he can never be fired except for moral infractions far worse than adultery committed with female students. Very few assistant professors are granted tenure. The Ph.D. glut then consigns the losers to part-time work in community colleges for wages in the range of what apprentice plumbers receive. I have written about this glut elsewhere.
ACADEMIC JOURNALS
To get tenure at a major research university, you must publish in the main academic journals in the field. This is limited to about a dozen journals in each field. They publish quarterly. They run perhaps eight articles per issue. Most of these are written by well-known men in the field who are already tenured. The average Ph.D. holder publishes one article, which summarizes his Ph.D. dissertation. This article is unlikely to make it into one of the top dozen journals.
Almost no one ever wins a Nobel Prize who is not on the faculty of one of these universities. He must also have published repeatedly in the dozen top academic journals. His articles must be cited widely by other authors in these journals. If an article is not widely cited within five years of publication, it is doomed.
In short, journal editors control access into the top rank of academia, who in turn assign manuscripts to be screened by teams of unnamed faculty members. Almost no one knows who these people are.
Local Heroes: Seattle Teacher Suspended for Refusing to Give Standardized Test
PARENT EMPOWERMENT NETWORK Carl Chew, a 6th grade science teacher at Nathan Eckstein Middle School in the Seattle School District, last week defied federal, state, and district regulations that require teachers to administer the Washington Assessment of Student Learning to students.
“I have let my administration know that I will no longer give the WASL to my students. I have done this because of the personal moral and ethical conviction that the WASL is harmful to students, teachers, schools, and families,” wrote Chew in an email to national supporters.
School District response to Mr. Chew’s refusal was immediate. After administrative attempts to dissuade his act of civil disobedience had failed, at the start of school on the first day of WASL testing, April 15, Mr. Chew was escorted from the school by the building principal and a district supervisor. Mr. Chew was told to report to the district Science Materials Center where he was put to work preparing student science kits while district administration and attorneys consulted on an appropriate penalty for what was labeled, “gross insubordination.”
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS7CZIJVxFY[/youtube]
The Fibonacci Sequence in Tool’s ‘Lateralus’.
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