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Today's New York Times features an article on a new study on residential segregation by Edward Glaeser of Harvard, and Jacob Vigdor of Duke University.  I'd like to draw your attention to what the study actually finds, and how it's being pitched to the national audience. The study is produced by the Manhattan Institute' s  Center for State and Local Leadership. The Institute is widely recognized as a conservative research organization.  The title of the report, as written by its authors, reads: " The End of the Segregated Century." The NYT's headline reads: "Segregation Curtailed in U.S. Cities, Study Finds." The NYT's tweet reads: "Nation's Cities Almost Free of Segregation" So it seems, the study must tell us that segregation has ended, or is about to-- right? Nope.  What it tells us, points out Doug Massey of Princeton University , a nationally recognized expert on the topic, is that segregation has declined substantially i...

The following is a guest post from Robert Kelchen , doctoral candidate in Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Washington Post’s Campus Overload blog recently featured a guest post, “ Getting Rejected from Your Dream School(s) isn’t a Bad Thing ” by Eric Harris, a junior who attended the University of Maryland after being deferred by his first choice (Duke) and rejected by six of the other eight colleges to which he applied. (He was also accepted by Emory.) Eric’s story is hardly unique, as numerous blogs and websites feature stories of students who were rejected by their first choice college. Most of the popular media accounts of students rejected by their first choice college are from students like Eric—those who applied to a large number of highly selective (and very expensive) colleges and universities and still attended a prestigious institution. The kinds of students who are typically featured in the media are very likely to enjoy college and ...

Today President Obama unveiled his latest blueprint for the reform of higher education at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, a public institution with relatively high tuition and relatively advantaged students, and a place in the midst of a dispute over graduate student labor practices. It's just miles from Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, where on July 14, 2009, Obama released his American Graduation Initiative , a blueprint for transforming the nation's community colleges, which was essentially destroyed as it was caught up in political debates over the health care legislation. The blueprint responds to the groundswell of concern about the high and ever-expanding cost of college attendance, and the corresponding growth in the costs of financial aid. It resonates with efforts by the Occupy movement, and especially with the agendas of the Lumina and Gates foundation. It's also consonant with the work of many labor economists. On the one hand, there are many...

The following is a guest post by Bob Samuels , President of the University Council - AFT and a lecturer at UCLA. It is cross-posted from his blog , where you should go to find all of the original hyperlinks. I highly recommend also reading his November entry in the Huffington Post on why public higher education should be free . The UC Regents meeting had a little of everything this week: UCR students came up with a new way to fund the university, a long list of new salary increases was released, UCSF asked to quit the system, a retired professor was fired, protesters disrupted the meeting, Regents met behind closed doors, and police attacked protesters who were using books as shields. What does it all mean? Perhaps, it all adds up to the demise of the modern Western social contract. Without being too dramatic, we are seeing an attempt to resist the destruction of the central institutions of modernity: the university, the public commons, and the welfare state. Although it was once take...

Among my son's favorite books are the ones in Richard Scarry's Busytown series. In What Do People Do All Day? , Able Baker Charlie puts too much yeast in the dough, resulting in a gigantic, explosive loaf of bread that the bakers (and Lowly Worm) need to eat their way out of. The opposite problem -- a lack of yeast -- is present in Michelle Rhee's recent op-ed in Education Week . In it, she limits her call to "rethink" teaching policy to "how we assign , retain , evaluate , and pay educators" and to " teacher-layoff and teacher-tenure policies." (And she casts the issue of retention purely as one about so-called "last-in, first-out" employment policies rather than about school leadership, collaboration or working conditions.) The utter absence of any focus or mention of teacher development either in this op-ed or in her organization's ( StudentsFirst ) expansive policy agenda leaves me wondering if Rhee believes that teachers...

Tonight's Chronicle of Higher Education features a story of great policy relevance. Under the headline "Study Disputes Claims That Preferentially Admitted Students Catch Up," author Peter Schmidt describes the results of an unpublished paper by Duke researchers as calling "into question other studies that play down the academic difficulties initially experienced by the beneficiaries of race-conscious admissions." The paper, Schmidt says, has been marshaled by critics of affirmative action as they seek a Supreme Court ruling knocking the policy down. My own reading of the paper is that drawing such conclusions from this work, and highlighting them with such an inflammatory headline ("preferentially admitted students"?) is grossly inappropriate. While the authors document (1) racial/ethnic variation in the relationship between initial academic preparation and later major-switching and (2) that major-switching accounts for the diminishing racial/ethn...

In a blog over at the Washington Post today, Daniel de Vise raises an interesting question: Does the public want lower (or higher) tuition? He engages with this issue mainly in the context of private institutions, discussing anecdotal evidence from a recent meeting with college presidents. In a nutshell, here are the highlights of his findings: 1. There is some evidence that the public wants a deep discount on a more expensive product. In other words, families are happier when they get a lot of merit-based financial aid at a high-priced college. Some colleges have found that when they cut tuition, applications drop too, and families complain they aren't getting much aid. 2. There is also some evidence that the public embraces -- even demands-- lower tuition, even thought it means getting less aid. At Sewanee, The University of South, which de Vise highlights, cut its (very high) tuition by 10% and focused efforts on need-based aid, resulting in an increase in applications. de Vis...

In my first post on remaking academia, I recommended that authors disclose the funders of their research--as well as the costs of the work. The recommendation had twin aims: to expose any potential influences (positive or negative) on the research, and to allow others to make more accurate cost-benefit calculations when planning how to conduct their own research. Unless you know what good research really costs, it's hard to realistically plan for it-- and to fundraise to support it. If you know it'll be expensive, you have to seek outside support, and that will lead directly to the decisions you'll make that will eventually require that you name your funders. This week, the national association of economists adopted similar standards . Given the extent to which economics is alpha dog in social science research, capturing headlines and exerting disproportionate influence on public thinking, this is the right move-- just long overdue. Said one economist in the Chronicl...

The latest entry in a continuing series here at The Education Optimists Have you ever sought a job as a professor? Depending on your field and where you’ve applied, it goes something like this: (1) You send in a letter of interest, a CV, and some publications. Maybe some letters of reference too, or perhaps just contact information for those people. If it’s a teaching institution or a school of education, maybe you’ll also send in a statement of teaching philosophy and some student evaluations. (2) If the search committee likes what they see in the file, they get in touch. This typically means you’ve published a fair bit, demonstrated that you have some interesting ideas, come from a good graduate program, have very solid letters that say you’re among the very best, can attract grant funding, etc. (3) Then you either meet with the committee via phone or Skype, or at a conference, or more commonly go to campus. (Sometimes it’s a two-step or three-step sequence, sometimes you just go ri...

Rick Hess is an amusing guy-- witty banter, fun to have drinks with-- and always pushing buttons. I dig that, even though we rarely agree on policy issues. What I like most about him is that he takes seriously the idea that academics should bring their research to the public, and in an effort to prod that along, last year he began ranking us. He uses a set of metrics that even he admits are pretty darned flawed, but are at least an ATTEMPT in the right direction. I like it not because I'm ranked (ok, I like that too) but rather because Hess is a prominent guy doing whatever he can to provide incentives to professors to do more than what tenure requires of them. He wants us to use all 5 tools in our work--"disciplinary scholarship, policy analysis and popular writing, convening and quarterbacking collaborations, providing incisive media commentary, and speaking in the public square." And that I can appreciate. So here are the rankings this year. And here's the met...

What follows is a summary of a Twitter thread I started a few days ago. Feedback suggested it might be useful to compile it here. Here are 12 rough, off-the-cuff ideas about how we might collectively remake academia. Just to get the party started. Please throw yours in too! 1. Hey professor: Ask yourself "What new knowledge does this article contribute to the world? Does the method actually address the research question?" If the answer is no or it does not, for pete's sake please don't be so self-serving as to submit it for publication. 2. Publish for the sake of knowledge dissemination, not in the pursuit of tenure. There should be penalties for publishing bad work! 3. At least 1 out of every 5 publications should contribute a lesson for policy or practice at some level. 4. For every three articles placed in academic journals, write at least one executive summary for public dissemination. For those of you at UW, consider this part of the Wisconsin Idea. You could ask...

2011 was a terrific year in some ways, and a horrible one in others. Watching many national leaders attack the rights of working families was devastating, but watching those families fight back was awe-inspiring. What Time magazine called the year of the protestor, I'd call the year of the working class reawakening. Personally, 2011 was a critical turning point, as I finally earned tenure and thus the distinct privilege of having the freedom to speak my mind and keep my job. Wow. I can't tell you how GOOD that feels. Watch out world. My hope is that in 2012 we'll see many people bring fresh ideas to old problems, with a willingness to float trial balloons on thoughts they typically might've withheld for fear of reprisal. I've been endeavoring to do this a bit on Twitter, and at Liam's suggestion I'm next reposting my latest stream-- on Rethinking Academia. We are welcoming guest bloggers in 2012, following the remarkable success of Robin Rogers, and encou...