But I’ll risk microaggressing you to note that the student government at Ithaca College in upstate New York has just passed a mind-blowing bill that will allow students to anonymously report offensive statements such as “Where are you really from?” and “You don’t look disabled.” The system will include “demographics” about the aggressor and the...
11 Atlanta educators convicted of racketeering
Diane Buckner-Webb (Dunbar Elementary School teacher) * Guilty of racketeering * Guilty of two counts of false statements Donald Bullock (Usher Collier Heights elementary testing) * Guilty of racketeering * Guilty of two counts of false statements * Guilty of one count of false swearing * Acquitted of one count of false statements Pamela Cleveland (Dunbar ES teacher) * Guilty of racketeering *...
One-third of people with student loans are delinquent
Yikes! About one-third of borrowers with federal student loans owned by the U.S. Department of Education are late on their payments, according to new federal data. The figures, released by the Education Department on Thursday, are the first comprehensive look at the delinquency plaguing those who hold federal student loans. By the new metric, which the department has never used before, roughly 33...
Artist helps scientists visualize data
For the past year or so genetic scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York have been collaborating with a specialist from another universe: Daniel Kohn, a Brooklyn-based painter and conceptual artist. Mr. Kohn has no training in computers or genetics, and he’s not there to conduct art therapy classes. His role is to help the scientists with a signature 21st-century problem:...
School suspends student for taping her bullying teacher!
Hard to believe, but true – what’s extraordinary is the reason: An 11-year-old Florida girl was suspended from school after she recorded her fifth-grade teacher threatening and bullying other students. The evidence Brianna Cooper recorded was enough to get the teacher fired from Samuel Gaines Academy in Fort Pierce, about two hours north of Miami. But administrators say it was also...
Zakaria on the bullshit of STEM
In truth, though, the United States has never done well on international tests, and they are not good predictors of our national success. Since 1964, when the first such exam was administered to 13-year-olds in 12 countries, America has lagged behind its peers, rarely rising above the middle of the pack and doing particularly poorly in science and math. And yet over these past five decades, that...
Parental selection effects in education, India edition
Earlier this week, a father in the city of Mathura was caught strapping his 8-year old daughter to a motorcycle after she refused to attend school to take her assessment. Tied with a multi-strand rope to the back of a bike, onlookers captured images of the trussed girl, her bare feet hanging low, scraping the asphalt. According to local police officials, the girl’s parents offered her...
Amazing data about cement
China used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the U.S. used in the entire 20th Century. It’s a statistic so mind-blowing that it stunned Bill Gates and inspired haiku. But can it be true, and, if so, how? Yes, China’s economy has grown at an extraordinary rate, and it has more than four times as many people as the United States. But the 1900s were America’s great period of expansion, the...
What parents in India will do for good grades
Images of parents and family members clambering up school buildings and clinging on window ledges to pass cheat sheets to their children have left authorities in despair.
The incident took place on Wednesday in the state of Bihar, where students were writing their year-end grade 10 examinations.
Statisticians react to journal’s p-value ban
As you might suspect, a range of reactions: