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What We're Reading: New Thinking on Financial Aid

Welcome to another new miniseries of the Education Optimists. Once in awhile we get a chance to sit and read-- it's rare, but when it happens it's crazy fun. Here's a taste of what we've liked lately. For those pondering the reform of financial aid programs, I want to draw your attention to two papers--one very new, and one a year old. In Postmortem for the Current Era: Change in American Higher Education, 1980-2010 , Penn State historian Roger Geiger cogently tackles the many dismal trends of the last several decades. Among my most favorite of his observations is the following: "The four vectors of the current era—-the financial aid revolution, selectivity sweepstakes, vocationalism, and research intensification—all bear an underlying signature by invoking private, as opposed to public or social, interests. They do not necessarily contradict public interests. On the contrary, to significant degrees, financial aid has allowed students with limited means to pursu...
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GOP Spending Cuts Follow Tax Cuts For The Rich

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Just as I said . Republicans now controlling the House promised Thursday to slash domestic agencies' budgets by almost 20 percent for the coming year , the first salvo in what's sure to be a bruising battle over their drive to cut spending to where it was before President Barack Obama took office. "Washington's spending spree is over," declared Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman who announced the plan. The White House says the GOP effort could cause widespread furloughs of federal employees, force vulnerable people off subsidized housing, reduce services in national parks and mean less aid to schools and police and fire departments. Popular programs such as health research and federal aid to school districts appear likely to take a hit when lawmakers write the spending bill for the departments of Education, Labor and Health and Human Services. Tax cuts for the rich prioritized over all else. I note that former Labor Secretary and current Ber...
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Fear and Loathing in Calcville: Who Makes Kids Anxious About Math?

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Recently, another study ( Researchers Probe Causes of Math Anxiety : It's more than just disliking math , according to scholars) has appeared proposing to explain the causes of mathematics anxiety. It shows up as part of a book called CHOKE: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To, by Sian Beilock. If what's in the article is an accurate depiction of what the study has to tell us, there's not much new to see.  On my view, math anxiety is obviously not something many people, if any, are born with: for the most part, we catch it from others. However, it is worth noting that there are many carriers who are not themselves suffering from the disease. Contemptuous, arrogant math ematics teachers can readily drive someone into math anxiety , and frequently do, I strongly suspect. So can rigidity about what doing and being "good at" math ematics entails. Given how most US teachers present the subject in K-12, math is only or ...
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