Category: Education

Hot Students Learn Less

More evidence on why air conditioning increases our mental acuity:

(p. A5) Hot weather makes it more difficult for high-school students to learn, a new study suggests.
. . .
The study was circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research as a working paper by Mr. Goodman and three other researchers.
They found that, on average, every increase of 1 degree Fahrenheit in the average temperature during the school year reduced learning by about 1%.

For the full story, see:
Ben Leubsdorf. “Heat Found to Hurt Studies.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, June 8, 2018): A5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 7, 2018, and has the title “American Students Don’t Learn Well When It’s Hot Outside.” The online version is substantially longer, and in some places has different wording, than the print version. Where the wording of a quoted passage differs, my quotation above follows the print version.)

The NBER paper, mentioned above, is:
Goodman, Joshua, Michael Hurwitz, Jisung Park, and Jonathan Smith. “Heat and Learning.” National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper Series, # 24639, May 2018.

Fewer Summer Jobs Filled by Teenagers

(p. D8) You can still find high school and college students boiling hot dogs and cleaning the fryer at the clam shacks, country clubs and state fairs that spring to life when the weather turns hot. But the food that fuels a summer vacation is now more likely being prepared by temporary workers from other countries or local adults trying to make the gig economy work for them.
. . .
Although youth employment in the United States still spikes in the warmer months, the number of teenagers in the summer labor force fell to 43 percent in 2016, from almost 72 percent at its peak in 1978, according to the most recent figures from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Pressure has come from several directions. School started stretching into summer. Employment laws became more restrictive. Scooping cones or running a dough-filled Hobart were no longer considered worthy résumé builders.
At the same time, demand for summer workers rose.

For the full story, see:
Kim Severson. “Where Have All the Teenagers Gone?” The New York Times (Wednesday, May 23, 2018): D8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 22, 2018, and has the title “That Summer Food-Stand Job Is No Longer Just for Teenagers.”)

For Homicides, School Is Safer Than Home or Neighborhood

(p. A13) While homicide is among the leading causes of death for young people, school is a relative haven compared with the home or the neighborhood. According to the most recent federal data, between 1992 and 2015, less than 3 percent of homicides of children 5 to 18 years old occurred at school, and less than 1 percent of suicides.
“Especially in the younger grades, school is the safest place they can be,” said Melissa Sickmund, director of the National Center for Juvenile Justice.
. . .
Chris Dorn, a senior analyst at Safe Havens International, said that after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, his organization saw an uptick in demand for its services, completing 1,000 school security assessments in one year. Interest is even greater now. By this fall, Safe Havens expects to have done 1,000 assessments just since the Parkland, Fla., shooting in February.
The group tells schools that the biggest safety risks have not changed, and are less likely to be mass shootings than “petty theft, assault, child abduction due to custody issues or sexual predators,” Mr. Dorn said.

For the full story, see:

Dana Goldstein. “Grim Tally Obscures Statistical Reality: Schools Are ‘Safest Place’ for Children.” The New York Times (Wednesday, May 23, 2018): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 22, 2018, and has the title “Why Campus Shootings Are So Shocking: School Is the ‘Safest Place’ for a Child.”)

“The Future Is Rich in Opportunity”

(p. A13) Ken Langone, 82, investor, philanthropist and founder of Home Depot, has written an autobiography that actually conveys the excitement of business–of starting an enterprise that creates a job that creates a family, of the joy of the deal and the place of imagination in the making of a career. Its hokey and ebullient name is “I Love Capitalism” which I think makes his stand clear.
. . .
Can capitalism win the future? “Yes, but we have to be more emphatic and forthright about what it is and its benefits. A rising tide does lift boats.”
Home Depot has changed lives. “We have 400,000 people who work there, and we’ve never once paid anybody minimum wage.” Three thousand employees “came to work for us fresh out of high school, didn’t go to college, pushing carts in the parking lot. All 3,000 are multimillionaires. Salary, stock, a stock savings plan.”
Mr. Langone came up in the middle of the 20th century–the golden age of American capitalism. Does his example still pertain to the 21st? Yes, he says emphatically: “The future is rich in opportunity.” To see it, look for it. For instance: “Look, people are living longer. They’re living more vibrant lives, more productive. This is an opportunity to accommodate the needs of older people. Better products, cheaper prices–help them get what they need!”
Mr. Langone grew up in blue-collar Long Island, N.Y. Neither parent finished high school. His father was a plumber who was poor at business; his mother worked in the school cafeteria. They lived paycheck to paycheck. He was a lousy student but he had one big thing going for him: “I loved making money.” He got his first job at 11 and often worked two at a time–paperboy, butcher-shop boy, caddie, lawn work, Bohack grocery clerk. He didn’t mind: “I wanted to be rich.”

For the full commentary, see:
Peggy Noonan. “DECLARATIONS; Wisdom of a Non-Idiot Billionaire.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, May 12, 2018): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 10, 2018.)

The book mentioned in the commentary, is:
Langone, Ken. I Love Capitalism!: An American Story. New York: Portfolio, 2018.

More Firms Educate In-House

(p. B5) . . . Atlanta-based aluminum-products maker Novelis started a school within the company to impart lessons pulled from the factory floor with a faculty and nine “deans” to oversee it.
Federal policy for decades has pushed more people to go to four-year colleges, promoting a college-preparatory high-school curriculum and easing access to student loans. But technology is changing faster than colleges can keep up and employers say too many schools aren’t teaching students the skills they need–or even basic critical thinking.
With the labor market the tightest it has been in a generation, this misalignment is causing big–and expensive–headaches for employers. So companies are increasingly taking matters into their own hands. Major employers like CVS Health Corp., Novelis, International Business Machines Corp., Aon PLC and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are hiring workers because of what they can do, or what the company believes they can teach them, instead of the degrees they hold.

For the full story, see:
Douglas Belkin. “‘Education Is Moving to the Factory Floor.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, March 23, 2018): B5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 22, 2018.)

“A Litigious, Protective Culture Has Gone Too Far”

(p. A1) SHOEBURYNESS, England — Educators in Britain, after decades spent in a collective effort to minimize risk, are now, cautiously, getting into the business of providing it.
. . .
Limited risks are increasingly cast by experts as an experience essential to childhood development, useful in building resilience and grit.
Outside the Princess Diana Playground in Kensington Gardens in London, which attracts more than a million visitors a year, a placard informs parents that risks have been “intentionally provided, so that your child can develop an appreciation of risk in a controlled play environment rather than taking similar risks in an uncontrolled and unregulated wider world.”
This view is tinged with nostalgia for an earlier Britain, in which children were tougher and more self-reliant. It resonates both with right-wing tabloids, which see it as a corrective to the cosseting of a liberal nanny state; and with progressives, drawn to a freer and more natural childhood.
. . .
(p. A12) Britain is one of a number of countries where educators and regulators say a litigious, protective culture has gone too far, leaching healthy risks out of childhood. Guidelines on play from the government agency that oversees health and safety issues in Britain state that “the goal is not to eliminate risk.”

For the full story, see:
ELLEN BARRY. “In Britain, Learning to Accept Risk, and the Occasional ‘Owie’.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, March 11, 2018): A1 & A12.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 10, 2018, and has the title “In Britain’s Playgrounds, ‘Bringing in Risk’ to Build Resilience.”)

Labor-Intensive Tinkering Can Advance Science

(p. A24) When John E. Sulston was 5 years old and growing up in Britain, the son of an Anglican priest, his parents sent him to a private school. There, he discovered, sports were his nemesis.
“I absolutely loathed games,” he said. “I was hopeless.”
When it came to schoolwork, he said, he was “not a books person.”
He had only one consuming interest: science. He liked to tinker, to figure out how things were put together.
. . .
The Nobel he received, shared with two other scientists, recognized the good data he amassed in his work on the tiny transparent roundworm C. elegans in an effort to better understand how organisms develop.
. . .
At the time, it was widely believed that the 558 cells the worm had when it hatched were all it would ever have. But Dr. Sulston noticed that, in fact, the worm kept gaining cells as it developed. And by tracing the patterns of divisions that gave rise to those new cells, he found, surprisingly, that the worm also lost cells in a predictable way. Certain cells were destined to die at a specific time, digesting their own DNA.
Dr. Sulston’s next major project was to trace the fate of every single cell in a worm. It was a task so demanding and labor-intensive that other scientists still shake their heads in amazement that he got it done.
Each day, bending over his microscope for eight or more hours, he would start with a worm embryo and choose one of its cells. He would then watch the cell as it divided and follow each of its progeny cells as, together, they grew and formed the organism. This went on for a total of 18 months.
In the end, he had a complete map of every one of the worm’s 959 cells (not counting sperm and egg cells).

For the full obituary, see:
GINA KOLATA. “John Sulston, 75; Tiny Worm Guided Him to Nobel.” The New York Times (Friday, March 16, 2018): A24.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date MARCH 15, 2018, and has the title “John E. Sulston, 75, Dies; Found Clues to Genes in a Worm.”)

“Science Didn’t Lie”

(p. 22) In the words of The Saturday Evening Post: “If America doesn’t keep out the queer, alien, mongrelized people of Southern and Eastern Europe, her crop of citizens will eventually be dwarfed and mongrelized in turn.”
According to Thomas C. Leonard, who teaches at Princeton, the driving force behind this and other such laws came from progressives in the halls of academia — people who combined “extravagant faith in science and the state with an outsized confidence in their own expertise.” “Illiberal Reformers” is the perfect title for this slim but vital account of the perils of intellectual arrogance in dealing with explosive social issues. Put simply, Leonard says, elite progressives gave respectable cover to the worst prejudices of the era — not to rabble-rouse, but because they believed them to be true. Science didn’t lie.
But barring undesirables was only half the battle; the herd also had to be culled from within. In 1907, Indiana became the first state to legalize forced sterilization, starting a landslide endorsed by progressive icons like Theodore Roosevelt and the birth control champion Margaret Sanger.

For the full review, see:
DAVID OSHINSKY. “No Justice for the Weak.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, March 20, 2018): 1 & 22-23.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 14, 2018, and has the title “‘Imbeciles’ and ‘Illiberal Reformers’.”)

The book under review, is:
Leonard, Thomas C. Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Debt-Free, Focused Year of Tech Ed Yields Good Jobs for High School Grads

(p. A3) As a high-school senior in Hampton, Va., Aidan Cary applied last year to prestigious universities like Dartmouth, Vanderbilt and the University of Virginia.
Then he clicked on the website for a one-year-old school called MissionU and quickly decided that’s where he wanted to go.
Mr. Cary, 19 years old, is enrolled in a one-year, data-science program. He studies between 40 and 50 hours a week, visits high-tech, Bay Area companies as part of his education, and will pay the San Francisco-based school a percentage of his income for three years after he graduates.
This new type of postsecondary education is proving a hit: The school says it has received more than 10,000 applications for 50 spots.
“I think people feel backed into a corner by the cost of college,” Mr. Cary said. “They’ve been waiting for something like this so when it finally came around they could instantly see the value proposition.”
MissionU, which enrolled its first class in September [2017], is part of new breed of institutions that bill themselves as college alternatives for the digital age. The schools–whose admission rates hover in the single digits–comparable to the Ivy League, according to the schools–offer a debt-free way to attain skills in hot areas and guaranteed apprenticeships with high-tech companies. Together those create a pipeline to well-paying high-tech jobs.

For the full story, see:
Douglas Belkin. “One-Year Alternatives to College Pop Up.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, April 10, 2018): A3.
(Note: bracketed year added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 9, 2018, and has the title “One Year of ‘College’ With No Degree, But No Debt And a Job at the End.” In the penultimate paragraph quoted above, the print version has “value” where the online version has “value proposition.” I use the online version.)

Blacks Hurt by Increase in Irrelevant Degree Requirements for Jobs

(p. A15) Some 61% of employers have rejected applicants with the requisite skills and experience simply because they didn’t have a college degree, according to a 2017 Harvard Business School study. If current trends continue, the authors found, “as many as 6.2 million workers could be affected by degree inflation–meaning their lack of a bachelor’s degree could preclude them from qualifying for the same job with another employer.”
The pernicious effects of degree inflation are obvious, as tuition and student debt rise and qualified workers arbitrarily lose employment opportunities. But the practice also flouts federal law.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. In Griggs v. Duke Power (1971) the Supreme Court unanimously interpreted this to mean that when minority groups are disproportionately affected–or suffer a “disparate impact”–from the selection process, employers must show that any requirements are directly job-related and an accurate predictor of job performance.
. . .
. . . degree inflation has obvious disparate-impact implications. The Harvard report found that groups with college graduation rates below the national average are disproportionately harmed by the practice.
. . .
Employers also fail the Griggs test by demanding college degrees without evidence they are necessary for the job. In a 2014 survey, Burning Glass Technologies found that employers are increasingly requiring bachelor’s degrees for positions whose current workers do not have one. For example, 65% of job postings for executive assistant and secretary positions call for a degree even though only 19% of people currently employed in such roles hold a degree.

For the full commentary, see:
Frederick M. Hess and Grant Addison. “Degree Inflation and Discrimination; Could civil-rights laws and ‘disparate impact’ protect job applicants who haven’t finished college?” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, April 3, 2018): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 2, 2018.)

The Harvard Business School study mentioned above, is:
Fuller, Joseph B., and Manjari Raman. “Dismissed by Degrees: How Degree Inflation Is Undermining U.S. Competitiveness and Hurting America’s Middle Class.” Accenture, Grads of Life, and Harvard Business School, Oct. 2017.