Search Results for: education

One Path to Better Jobs: More Density in Cities

Longreads Pick

When it comes to economic growth and the creation of jobs, the denser the city the better. How great are the benefits of density? Economists studying cities routinely find that after controlling for other variables, workers in denser places earn higher wages and are more productive. Some studies suggest that doubling density raises productivity by around 6 percent while others peg the impact at up to 28 percent. Some economists have concluded that more than half the variation in output per worker across the United States can be explained by density alone; density explains more of the productivity gap across states than education levels or industry concentrations or tax policies.

Author: Ryan Avent
Published: Sep 5, 2011
Length: 6 minutes (1,726 words)

The Girl from Trails End

Longreads Pick

In a small, rough-edged town not far from Houston, nineteen men and boys await trial for unspeakable acts—the repeated gang rape of an 11-year-old girl. Good god, you think: How could so many men treat a child so brutally? And how could so many people leap to their defense? “Seven of the adults had criminal records or charges pending. … The weight of their individual experiences—sexually, criminally, even their high school education and their work experience, fatherhood, lives already on the skid or in frustrating limbo—all of this put these men years and years ahead of a sixth grader. Compared to her, they had a terrible gravity.”

Source: GQ
Published: Sep 6, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,657 words)

How the Other Half Tests

Longreads Pick

Most Americans think of the SAT as the ultimate high-stakes college admissions test, but the Accuplacer has more real claim to the title. (As it happens, the same company, the Education Testing Service, produces both exams.) When students apply to selective colleges, they’re evaluated based on high school transcripts, extracurricular pursuits, teacher recommendations, and other factors alongside their SAT scores. In open admissions colleges, placement tests typically trump everything else. If you bomb the SAT, the worst thing that can happen is you can’t go to the college of your choice. If you bomb the Accuplacer, you effectively can’t go to college at all. The remedial placement process is ground zero for college non-completion in America.

Published: Aug 29, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,417 words)

Why Software Is Eating The World

Longreads Pick

Still, we face several challenges. First of all, every new company today is being built in the face of massive economic headwinds, making the challenge far greater than it was in the relatively benign ’90s. The good news about building a company during times like this is that the companies that do succeed are going to be extremely strong and resilient. And when the economy finally stabilizes, look out—the best of the new companies will grow even faster. Secondly, many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent.

Published: Aug 20, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,358 words)

Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful?

Longreads Pick

This tale of a single rescued child hints at some of the reasons for the tiny Nordic nation’s staggering record of education success, a phenomenon that has inspired, baffled and even irked many of America’s parents and educators. Finnish schooling became an unlikely hot topic after the 2010 documentary film Waiting for “Superman” contrasted it with America’s troubled public schools. “Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education. Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student. If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else.

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Aug 18, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,515 words)

‘Can You Learn Anything From a Void?’

Longreads Pick

For American Jews, the problem of the “ordinary German” is especially troubling, because it brings us directly to the darkest and most unassuageable suspicions about Jewish vulnerability. The most controversial books about the Holocaust, from Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, have been the ones that try to explain how the Germans—citizens of an advanced society, famous for its culture and education—could be led in the space of a few years to commit a genocide of the Jews. For if this people could do it, the strong implication is that under the right (or, better, the wrong) circumstances, any people could do it. And the history of the world since 1945 seems to bear out this implication. Cambodians, Serbs, and Rwandans have all shown that people do not have to be Nazis, or anti-Semites, in order to slaughter their neighbors.

Published: Aug 2, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,451 words)

Muslim Activist in Minnesota Struggles as One-Man Counter Against Lure of Terrorism

Longreads Pick

Officially, Abdirizak Bihi is the director of the Somali Education and Special Advocacy Center, but in truth he is the center, aided only by a Samsung cellphone and a donated desk in the offices of Mo’s Building Maintenance. His program is part of an emerging movement that Washington officials refer to as “CVE,” or “countering violent extremism.” The idea is simple: Inoculate young Muslims against the risks of radicalization by making them feel entrenched and happy in their communities. The execution is much more complex.

Author: Eli Saslow
Source: Washington Post
Published: Jul 4, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,685 words)

Diane Ravitch, the Anti-Rhee

Longreads Pick

In the month of April, Diane Ravitch, the 72-year-old preeminent historian of American education, sent 1,747 tweets, an average of about 58 messages per day, many between the hours of 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. On May 20 alone, Ravitch tweeted 99 times to her 13,000 followers. Linking to the news of a D.C. Public Schools investigation into test tampering under former chancellor Michelle Rhee, she asked: “How can teachers be evaluated by student test scores, when the scores are so often manipulated and inaccurate?”

Published: Jun 22, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,901 words)

Plasticize Me

Longreads Pick

“Bodies… The Exhibition” is a for-profit traveling display of human cadavers that have been treated with a process that plasticizes tissue, allowing them to be manipulated and viewed in various states of artful dismemberment. Ostensibly the exhibition is scientific and educational in character, but given that there are no longer many mysteries within human anatomy, the most pressing questions it raises are ethical: Is posing a dead man with a tennis racket wrong? Is a failure to make specific provisions for the treatment of one’s remains the same as giving one’s body to science?

Published: Mar 3, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,549 words)

How Billionaires Rule Our Schools

Longreads Pick

Hundreds of private philanthropies together spend almost $4 billion annually to support or transform K–12 education, most of it directed to schools that serve low-income children. But three funders—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—working in sync, command the field. Whatever nuances differentiate the motivations of the Big Three, their market-based goals for overhauling public education coincide: choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making.

Source: Dissent
Published: Jan 18, 2011
Length: 21 minutes (5,496 words)