Here's a quick summary of the articles in the June 13 issue of Straight A's, the Alliance's biweekly newsletter.
Click on a title below to access the complete article or download a printer-friendly version of the entire newsletter at: http://www.all4ed.org/files/Volume11No12.pdf.
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A Time for Deeper Learning: Preparing Students for a Changing World from the Alliance for Excellent Education. This policy brief argues that deeper learning provides students with the deep content knowledge they need to succeed after high school and the critical thinking, collaboration, and communication skills that today’s jobs demand.
What’s It Worth? The Economic Value of College Majors from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. This report finds that different undergraduate majors result in very different earnings. At the low end, median earnings for Counseling Psychology majors are $29,000, while Petroleum Engineering majors see median earnings of $120,000.
Baseline Analyses of SIG Applications and SIG-Eligible and SIG-Awarded Schools by the Institute of Education Sciences. This paper finds that nationally, 74 percent of the more than 1,200 schools that receive school improvement grants are undertaking what many view as the most flexible of the four Education Department models – transformation.
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The story, Your Child Left Behind, by Amanda Ripley is about a recent study authored by Stanford economist Eric Hanushek and two of his colleagues. The report tests what the Hanushek calls the “diversity excuse” or the phenomenon of parents believing that although their public schools are in poor shape their kids are doing just fine. Here is an excerpt from the article:
These days, the theory Hanushek hears most often is what we might call the diversity excuse. When he runs into his neighbors at Palo Alto coffee shops, they lament the condition of public schools overall, but are quick to exempt the schools their own kids attend. “In the litany of excuses, one explanation is always, ‘We’re a very heterogeneous society—all these immigrants are dragging us down. But our kids are doing fine,’” Hanushek says. This latest study was designed, in part, to test the diversity excuse.
To do this, Hanushek, along with Paul Peterson at Harvard and Ludger Woessmann at the University of Munich, looked at the American kids performing at the top of the charts on an international math test. (Math tests are easier to normalize across countries, regardless of language barriers; and math skills tend to better predict future earnings than other skills taught in high school.)
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