From the New York Times front-page expose of for-profit trade schools over-charging students and leaving them with mountains of debt:
The Career Education Corporation e-mailed The New York Times names and contact information for four graduates “with whom we hope you’ll touch base for important perspective.” One came with a wrong number. A second had graduated 15 [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'New York Times'
Department of Incompetent Spin
Celebrating America’s Confederate Heroes
The New York Times reports that the Texas school board’s proposed changes to the state’s social studies textbook standards include the following:
References to Ralph Nader and Ross Perot are proposed to be removed, while Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general, is to be listed as a role model for effective leadership, and the ideas in Jefferson Davis’s inaugural [...]
Friedman: Only Huge Corporate Tax Cuts Can Save Us
One of life’s more vexing minor challenges is picking which sentences in a given Thomas Friedman column to mock. I’ll start here:
Businesses prefer to invest with the Jetsons more than the Flintstones, which brings me to the subject of this column.
Stuff like this elevates preemptive self-parody to high art. The facile Jetsons / Flintstones analogy [...]
The Times Still Doesn’t Quite Understand the Internet
I have no problem with the New York Times charging for Web content. They produce a great number of well-written, well-reported articles that are worth paying for (and since I already get the Sunday edition home-delivered it’s not going to cost me anything extra. ) But as the Times continues the inevitable long-term transition to [...]
Charter Schools and Unions—One Size Fits All??
Unionization of charter schools seems to be the hot topic these days. A recent NYT article raises the critical question:
“…whether unions will strengthen the charter movement by stabilizing its young, often transient teaching force, or weaken it by preventing administrators from firing ineffective teachers and imposing changes they say help raise achievement, like an extended [...]
Charter Schools and Unions
The New York Times reported yesterday on recent efforts to unionize charter schools and the ongoing debate over the impact unionization could have on the growth and performance of charters. It’s an important discussion, but no one knows where it will end – will unionized charter schools be a small part of the larger movement [...]
The Problem With Saving For College
A few weeks ago the New York Times “Education Life” section published a long piece about saving for college. The premise is that, if current trends continue, college will eventually become so expensive that parents need to to start socking money away from pretty much the moment their eyes first lock across a crowded restaurant. [...]
B.U.: Boo Hoo
Sunday’s New York Times had an article about the Boston University admissions and financial aid offices. We learn a lot about how these offices work, and it’s mostly unflattering. See if you can find what I mean in the passage below:
For example, last year, Boston University gave $43 million in institutional aid to incoming freshmen. [...]
The Rich Get Richer
Per Sam Dillon’s New York Times article about how education stimulus funds are being distributed through funding formulas that advantage rich states over poor states, it’s all true, there’s no excuse for it (note the lack of anyone offering a policy justification), for a more detailed (but not boring!) explanation see this from Marguerite Roza [...]
All Deliberate Speed
From a New York Times article about a small Lousiana high school that may soon cease to exist:
This tiny, rural town in Cajun country is struggling again to find its racial equilibrium. A 43-year-old desegregation case remained unresolved on Nov. 4 as voters narrowly rejected a property tax increase to build a new Ville Platte [...]
Losing Ground?
As I wrote a couple of days ago, there’s a lot to recommend in the new report about high school graduation rates from the Education Trust (where I used to work). But the media seems a little fixated on the first sentence: “The United States is the only industrialized country in the world in which [...]
Bailouts
A letter from Friday’s New York Times:
Dear Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson:
My student loans are too big and it is hurting the economy. Can I have a bailout, please? I need $92,000.
If the trouble in the finance industry means there are fewer high-paying jobs available for recent college grads, there may be a bit of [...]
A Great School Depression?
Not to be insensitive (okay, maybe a little), but color me skeptical of Sam Dillon’s new piece in the New York Times, “Hard Times Hitting Students and Schools,” which stitches together a variety of anecdotes and data points related to mortgage foreclosures, rising food and fuel prices and state budget shortfalls into a picture of [...]
Fact Check
The New York Times, April 20, 2008:
The number of low-income students at top institutions is still fairly low but is growing. The share of Harvard undergraduates receiving Pell grants rose to 13 percent this year, from 10 percent in 2003-4. At Amherst, over the same span, the number has risen to 18 percent from 15 [...]
Bogus Trends, Lawyer-Style
The Sunday Styles section in the Times today fronts a story about how law and medecine are allegedly becoming less desirable professions. Apparently, people are more and more attracted to creative professions and are thus less willing to enter into, or stick with, the medical and legal grinds.
In the grand tradition of bogus trend stories, [...]
More Good Education Labor News from NYC
It’s been a good month for education labor in New York City.
First there was the announcement of an important new merit pay plan supported by both the district administration and the United Federation of Teachers. Now, as reported in the New York Times, “In the largest successful organizing drive in New York City in half [...]
Death at an Early Age
I was in San Francisco the weekend before last, not at the big ETS teacher quality shindig with everyone else, but across town at an event sponsored by CFED (formerly, in a Kentucky-Fried-Chicken-to-KFC kind of way, the Corporation for Enterprise Development) focused on building assets for low-income families. The topic was school funding fairness, and [...]
Two Down, Five to Go
I wasn’t going to read Bob Herbert’s education column today, because Bob Herbert is boring, but then I thought of T.A. Frank’s excellent article on the Herbert boringness phenomenon, and decided to give it a shot. I’m glad I did! Instead of the standard establishment fare I was expecting, Herbert comes strong from the edu-reform [...]
College Rankings Fiesta
I’m back from Costa Rica after 10 blissfully email / Internet / news-of-the-outside-world-free days, and while I’d still much rather be there than here, it’s nice to be here.
Right to business: the annual U.S. News & World Report college rankings were released in my absence. The news cycle around this is funny, because there’s never [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/11/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on the rising costs of education in The Economist.
03/10/10 | Chad Aldeman's False Fronts paper is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on Federal Family Education Loan defaults on The Huffington Post.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on loan origination on the Firedog Lake blog.
03/07/10 | Kevin Carey calls for a Race to the Top in higher education in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.