Quick Links – Weaker teachers assigned to struggling students; all jobs are temporary; average students should skip college

Study finds that “high-achieving students tend to get the most experienced teachers”.

From an analysis of ’teacher assignments in the nation’s fourth-largest school district, Miami-Dade County Public Schools’

Even within the same school, lower-achieving students often are taught by less-experienced teachers, as well as by teachers who received their degrees from less-competitive colleges, according to a new study by researchers from the Stanford Graduate School of Education and the World Bank. The study, using data from one of the nation’s largest school districts, also shows that student class assignments vary within schools by a teacher’s gender and race….

Previous research indicates that high-quality teachers can significantly improve education outcomes for students.  However, not all students have equal access to the best teachers.

The assignment of teachers to students is the result of a complex process, involving school leaders, teachers and parents. While principals are constrained by teachers’ qualifications – not all high school teachers, for instance, can teach physics – they also may use their authority to reward certain teachers with the more desirable assignments or to appease teachers who are instrumental to school operations.

Teachers with more power, due to experience or other factors, may be able to choose their preferred classes. Parents, particularly those with more resources, also may try to intervene in the process to ensure that their children are taught by certain teachers….

… certain teachers – those with less experience, those from less-competitive colleges, female teachers, and black and Hispanic teachers – are more likely to work with lower-achieving students than are other teachers in the same school.

Do AP teachers need to be the most knowledgeable?

 … Teachers from more competitive colleges may have deeper subject knowledge than their colleagues from less-competitive colleges, leading principals to assign them to more advanced courses, the researchers said.

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‘There is no longer such a thing as a linear career path.’

Bloomberg Businessweek gives us the The New Rules for the Modern Workplace.  New college graduates probably understand these new rules better than older workers do.

The current state of our economy has transformed the workplace and how we manage our careers. There is no longer such a thing as a linear career path. A college degree doesn’t magically turn into a job and an MBA doesn’t mean you’ll automatically get a promotion. Even if you get a job, it’s not stable and you won’t be staying with the same employer for life….

Rule No. 1: Your job is temporary. Where you start isn’t where you’ll end up. Your job, company, and profession may completely change because of mergers and acquisitions, layoffs, outsourcing, automation, and various other factors that are outside your control. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average American will have about nine jobs from the age of 18 to 32. The job you’re in now is just a stepping stone along your path.

***

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg says average students should skip college.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has some advice for high-school students who are mediocre students: skip college and become plumbers. Bloomberg said on Friday that teenagers who aren’t in the upper echelon should learn how to be plumbers rather that envision a career starting at a prestigious university and obtaining a college degree:

“The people who are going to have the biggest problem are college graduates who aren’t rocket scientists, if you will, not at the top of their class. Compare a plumber to going to Harvard College — being a plumber, actually for the average person, probably would be a better deal. You don’t spend … four years spending $40,000, $50,000 in tuition without earning income.”

Mark Kantrowitz disagrees, believing that most students should attend college and pointing out that many colleges cost less than $50,000.

Quick Links – College grade inflation; understating federal cost of student loans; trends in physical education

College grade inflation

Forty years ago, only 10 percent of grades awarded by Yale College were in the A-range. Last spring, that percentage was 62.

Yale is reviewing its grading policy.

“If B-plus is being kept for bad work, and virtually everyone is getting A or A-minus, this eliminates any genuine feedback,” Kagan said. “I’ve always thought this is a disservice to undergraduates.”

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The federal government systematically undercounts the cost of student loans by ignoring market risk.

… the federal government’s accounting practices systematically understate the cost of student loans by failing to account for market risk. A superior method called “fair value accounting,” which is the strong preference of academic economists and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), would show considerably greater costs due to the risk associated with expecting loan repayments….

However, almost all economists believe that the way the federal government accounts for student loan costs is simply wrong. Under the principles of “fair value” accounting, which the CBO endorses, the discount rate applied to the revenue from students’ repayments should be much higher than the rate on U.S. Treasuries. A higher discount rate would reduce the present value of those repayments, thus increasing the cost of the student loan program to the government.

The reason the discount rate is higher is because it incorporates the price of market risk into cost estimates, while current accounting practices ignore that risk. Students might pay back what the government predicts they will, but taxpayers must cover the full cost of the loan regardless. Since defaults tend to occur when the economy is weak, taxpayers face the risk of losing expected funds at a time when budgets are least flexible.

Thus, the government’s budgetary estimate reflects only part of the fair value cost of offering a student loan. Additional cost comes from the risk that loan repayments will be lower than expected.[6] The federal government should use a higher discount rate to reflect the risk that expected loan repayments will not materialize.[7]

This reminds me of how state governments consistently underfund pension obligations, inflating discount rates to hide true taxpayer liability.

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High school PE classes focus more on activities that will continue through to adulthood, including work-outs at fitness centers.

High schools are installing gyms for PE.

Forget dodge ball, squat thrusts and being picked last for the team. Today’s high-schoolers are more likely to get a workout in what’s becoming a must-have tool in physical education: a state-of-the-art fitness center.

Less focus on team sports and more emphasis on developing fitness habits that will last a lifetime

“There’s a lot of people who aren’t on the Scarsdale High School football team, and yet they want to be healthy,” he said. “I would anticipate using the treadmill and the machines for gaining muscles.”

There’s a new crop of physical education teachers coming out of college who are preparing to reach students, such as Gale, who don’t just want to learn to play a sport, said Robert Schmidlein, a professor of physical education at Manhattanville College.

“It’s a paradigm shift,” Schmidlein said. “People don’t play team sports when they get older. Less than 1 percent of the adult population plays team sports. Seventy percent of kids drop out of youth sports by age 13. No one should be teaching team sports at the high school.”

“Fit for Life”
Our local high school offers PE students a choice between two options for each class unit, with one usually involving a team sport and the other involving a fitness activity like yoga or running.  While we don’t have a Scarsdale-level fitness center, we do have a small selection of treadmills and elliptical machines.

Quick Links – Best and worst areas for job growth; women have a duty to keep working; Cooper Union will charge tuition

Best and worst metropolitan areas for 2012 job growth

The South seems to be enjoying better job growth.

Top five metro areas for job growth, showing number of jobs:

Bottom five:

Check out the complete list.

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‘Female Ivy League graduates have a duty to stay in the workforce‘

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a full-time mother, but you don’t need an elite degree to do it

I am not someone who believes that every woman should be made to feel as though they must choose between being committed to their children or committed to the sisterhood of women’s advancement. But I do consider any Harvard Law School degree obtained by a woman who then chooses not to use it in any sort of professional capacity throughout most of her life a wasted opportunity. That degree could have gone to a woman who does want to spend her entire life using it to advance the cause of women – or others in need of advancement – not simply advancing the lives of her own family at home, which is a noble cause, but not one requiring an elite degree….

… There’s nothing wrong with someone saying that her dream is to become a full-time mother by 30. That is an admirable goal. What is not admirable is for her to take a slot at Yale Law School that could have gone to a young woman whose dream is to be in the Senate by age 40 and in the White House by age 50.

The author of this commentary is Keli Goff, a 33-year-old political commentator and former Democratic strategist.

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‘Cooper Union to Start Charging Tuition in Fall 2014‘

Cooper Union only admits 7% of applicants, but that low admission rate may rise after it starts charging tuition.

Cooper Union said Tuesday it could no longer afford to foot the tuition bills for its entire student body, closing a wrenching year-and-a-half-long debate about how to balance economic woes against the school’s core mission to provide a top-notch higher education to talented students, no matter the cost.

The entering class of 2014 will be offered half scholarships to enroll in its prestigious program, putting the price of attendance at just under $20,000 a year….

Cooper Union — named after founder and industrialist Peter Cooper — was established in 1859 as a school for low-income students, offering access to the higher education necessary to participate in shaping public life. Since then, the promise of free education has been as central to the school’s identity as its rigorous programs in architecture, engineering, and the arts, as well as its motley collection of academic buildings — architectural marvels suggestive of the talent of the students inside.

But, like colleges and universities across the country, the college has hit hard financial times in recent years. While the school has relied largely on rent income from land beneath the Chrysler Building to fund its scholarships, that source has not kept pace with inflation rates, Epstein said in his statement.

Quick Links – Online learning similar to charter schools; financial literacy instruction doesn’t help much; high school grads avoiding college

‘ Online learning faces many of the same obstacles that charter schools do.’

… It also has to overcome the same legitimate concerns about how to assess quality of a product offered by largely untested companies. Skeptics are right to note that many, perhaps most, of the online education providers out there won’t survive the decade—competition is intense, the technologies are new and changing rapidly, and not everyone can be a winner. Someone will be the Pets.com of the ed-tech boom. That prospect is alarming to the traditional school bureaucracy, which tends to make contracts with vendors that span years or decades. They’re not set up to contract with firms offering services for a monthly fee that can be canceled at any time. And parents are rightly concerned about the long-term value of a degree from Pets.edu.

In a perfect world, both online learning and charter schools would only be imposed on our children after rigorous testing and screening to be assured of their efficacy.  But in the real world, repeated unproven “innovations” are inflicted on students – No Child Left Behind being one of the latest examples.  So it is inevitable that some lucky students will continue to reap the benefits from the best of education’s innovations (think Amazon) and some unfortunate ones will suffer from the worst (think Pets.com).

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Financial literacy education doesn’t seem to work.

U.S. students who’d taken personal finance or money management courses weren’t more financially savvy than those who hadn’t, according to a study by the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy.

Maybe innumeracy is part of the problem, and schools should focus more on better math education.

New York State requires some personal finance instruction as part of its Economics, the Enterprise System, and Finance, a half-semester high school course taken senior year.  It uses course content from the Jumpstart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy.

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‘Smaller Share of High School Grads Going to College‘

The college enrollment rate — the share of recent U.S. high-school graduates enrolling in college or a university in the same year — dropped in 2012 to 66.2%, the lowest level since 2006, the Labor Department said in a report on Wednesday. For 2012 graduates, the rate dropped for both men and women, to 61.3% from 64.6% in 2011, and 71.3% from 72.3%, respectively.

The findings suggest some high-school graduates are becoming more confident about their job prospects after years of hiding out by going to college. When the economy sank into recession between 2007 and 2009, the college enrollment rate rose steadily to a record high of 70.1%. The implosion of America’s construction industry, for example, meant fewer jobs for young men looking for work right out of high school. Now it appears some of these young graduates are going on the job market again.

Of course, finding a job isn’t that much easier. America’s job-market recovery remains uneven: The unemployment rate is still unusually high at 7.6%, and the economy added only 88,000 jobs last month — the weakest job gains since June 2012.

Perhaps the rising cost of higher education is a factor.

Quick Links – Women avoid science careers; electronic portfolios; Wisconsin’s ‘post-union era’

‘Women With Both High Math and Verbal Ability Appear Less Likely to Choose Science Careers Because Their Dual Skills Confer More Career Options’ (University of Pittsburgh)

Study also finds that women with high math skills and only moderate verbal ability are the ones who appear more likely to choose STEM careers

Why are women with more options turning away from STEM careers?  Are they being steered away from these careers, or are they making choices based on their own interests?

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Electronic portfolios are becoming more accepted by employers.

Job seekers are increasingly using electronic portfolios as a way to:

• showcase achievement
• demonstrate learning and experience
• give and receive peer feedback (privately or publicly)
• achieve promotion, and much more.

Some universities host e-portfolios for their students, or other sites and resources can be used.  Clemson University has an ePortfolio Program with a gallery of  examples.

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In a ‘post-union era’, Wisconsin aims to reward ‘hard-working, high-achieving, and outstanding’ state employees.

After the “virtual elimination of collective bargaining and automatic dues collections” invalidated union contracts for Wisconsin state employees, the compensation system has changed from one that mandated automatic pay raises for all employees.

Bigger raises for fewer people

Under the discretionary merit pay program, fewer  employees received raises compared to the old collective bargaining agreement; the average raise was more money.

Quick Links – College tuition rises while state subsidies increase; teachers are all above average; attracting top students to teaching

◊◊◊  Sometimes tuition hikes occurred even while state subsidies were increasing.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Pace of college tuition hikes outpacing incomes. “Georgia’s public colleges and universities say they have raised tuition to make up for the Georgia Legislature holding back on taxpayer funds. But even in years when the legislature has fully funded the University System of Georgia’s requests, the Board of Regents still boosts tuition.”

Related: UNH tuition: It’s about costs, not subsidies. “University of New Hampshire President Mark Huddleston last week blamed UNH’s rising tuition costs on declining state subsidies. That is the party line within the entire University System of New Hampshire. If it were true, then tuition would have been declining in the years before the last budget, the years when state subsidies to the university system were going up. Tuition then did not decline; it rose.”

◊◊◊  Teachers All Above Average, Students Still Failing (Via Meadia)

In Florida, 97 percent of teachers were deemed effective or highly effective in the most recent evaluations. In Tennessee, 98 percent of teachers were judged to be “at expectations.”

In Michigan, 98 percent of teachers were rated effective or better.

Advocates of education reform concede that such rosy numbers, after many millions of dollars developing the new systems and thousands of hours of training, are worrisome.

Setting test score bars too low and questionable management by principals seem to be issues in evaluations that produce dubious teacher evaluation outcomes.

Grover J. Whitehurst, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, said variations in teacher quality had been proven to affect student academic growth. If an evaluation system is not finding a wider distribution of effectiveness, “it is flawed,” he said.

“It would be an unusual profession that at least 5 percent are not deemed ineffective,” he added.

◊◊◊  McKinsey teacher report on ‘Attracting and retaining top third graduates to a career in teaching’

What would it take to systematically attract and retain top students to a teaching career in the United States?

Improving teacher effectiveness to lift student achievement has become a major theme in U.S. education. Most efforts focus on improving the effectiveness of teachers already in the classroom or on retaining the best performers and dismissing the least effective. Attracting more young people with stronger academic backgrounds to teaching has received comparatively little attention.

McKinsey’s experience with school systems in more than 50 countries suggests that this is an important gap in the U.S. debate. In a new report, “Closing the Talent Gap: Attracting and Retaining Top-Third Graduates to Careers in Teaching ,” we review the experiences of the top-performing systems in the world—Singapore, Finland, and South Korea. These countries recruit, develop, and retain the leading academic talent as one of their central education strategies, and they have achieved extraordinary results. In the United States, by contrast, only 23 percent of new teachers come from the top third, and just 14 percent in high poverty schools, where the difficulty of attracting and retaining talented teachers is particularly acute. The report asks what it would take to emulate nations that pursue this strategy if the United States decided it was worthwhile.

The paper explores several “cost-effective” strategies that are not “necessarily inexpensive”.

In one scenario, for example, the U.S. could more than doubled the portion of top-third+ new hires in high-need schools, from 14% today to 34%, without raising teacher salaries.  In this scenario, the teachers would not pay for their initial training; high-need schools would have  effective principals and offer ongoing training comparable to the best professional institutions; districts would improve shabby and sometimes unsafe working conditions; the highest-performing teachers would receive performance bonuses of 20%; and the district or state would benefit from a marketing campaign promoting teaching as a profession….

Simply raising all teacher salaries is not the solution.

Quick Links – College recommended but not marriage; record student loan write-off; minimal sequester effects; plus more

◊◊◊  Why Do Economists Urge College, But Not Marriage? (The Daily Beast)

Megan McArdle:

Both are good for you. Only one is viewed as a proper aim of society.

College improves your earning prospects.  So does marriage.  Education makes you more likely to live longer.  So does marriage.  Yet while many economist vocally support initiatives to move more people into college, very few of them vocally favor initiatives to get more people married.  Why is that, asks Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry? His answer:

Meanwhile, economists’ “cosmopolitan perspective” (as Cowen puts it) makes them not feel good at the idea of public policy that would interfere with personal choices (allowing for a second that getting married is a “personal choice” in a way that going to college isn’t). Most economists think that government should not interfere or have a stance one way or another with decisions that feel intimate to people. That is a complete value judgement. And it’s a completely defensible one.

But at the level of the economics profession, this leads to bias: much more ink is spilled on, and thought given to the college wage premium than the marriage wage premium. One is mostly praised and interpreted in a certain way, while the other is mostly ignored. And, of course, the thing that academic economics focuses on has an effect on elite debate and public policy, especially when the socially liberal, pro-higher ed biases of economists line up well with those of the rest of the elite.

Another reason suggested by McArdle is that economists have typically been very successful in college, but perhaps not so successful in marriage.

◊◊◊  Banks wrote off $3 billion of student loan debt in the first two months of 2013 (Chicago Tribune)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Banks wrote off $3 billion of student loan debt in the first two months of 2013, up more than 36 percent from the year-ago period, as many graduates remain jobless, underemployed or cash-strapped in a slow U.S. economic recovery, an Equifax study showed.

◊◊◊ The sequester happened and the sky didn’t fall.

Report: Most Colleges Not Hit Hard by Sequester

Most universities will face only minimal effects from the automatic budget cuts that went into effect at the beginning of the month, according to a report released Thursday by Moody’s Investors Service. The report looked at the projected financial effect of the 5 percent cuts to domestic discretionary spending, known as sequestration, and found that only 1 percent of colleges and not-for-profits stood to lose more than 3 percent of their annual revenue as the result of the cuts.

Research universities were most likely to be hit hard by the cuts because federal funding for scientific research is one of the areas affected. While some financial aid programs — particularly federal work-study and the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant — will also be cut, the Pell Grant, bedrock of need-based financial aid programs, is safe for the 2013-14 academic year.

◊◊◊  1 in 5 high school-age boys are diagnosed with ADHD, double the rate for girls.

Fifteen percent of school-age boys have received an A.D.H.D. diagnosis, the data showed; the rate for girls was 7 percent. Diagnoses among those of high-school age — 14 to 17 — were particularly high, 10 percent for girls and 19 percent for boys. About one in 10 high-school boys currently takes A.D.H.D. medication, the data showed.

It makes me wonder if just “being a boy” is considered a disease.  Schools, pressure to succeed in academics  and the pharmaceutical industry are all getting blamed for what may be an over-diagnosis problem.

Quick Links – Middle school mess; hypergamy and single-parent families; bipartisan cuts to higher ed; and more

◊◊◊  The middle school debate

Various views on the middle school model were presented in the New York Times last year.

You don’t have to have to read all the studies to know that the ages between 10 and 13 are socially awkward ones. But they are also important ones academically, crucial in determining college and career outcomes. Would these preteens be better off staying in an elementary school that covers kindergarten through eighth grade? Or is there a reason why this age group needs to be sectioned off into a separate middle school?

Another observation on the Middle School Mess:

American middle schools have become the places “where academic achievement goes to die.”  – Cheri Pierson Yecke

◊◊◊  Fewer college-educated men are reason for rise in single parent families?

The effects of a low sex ratio

As this column has repeatedly noted, women are hypergamous, which means that their instinct is to be attracted to men of higher status than themselves. When the societywide status of women increases relative to men, the effect is to diminish the pool of suitable men for any given woman. If most women reject most men as not good enough for them, the effect is no different from that of a low sex ratio. High-status men, being in short supply, set the terms of relationships, resulting in libertine sexual mores and higher illegitimacy.

I rarely see the term “illegitimacy” used these days.

◊◊◊  ‘Bipartisan Support for Cutting Higher-Ed‘

The national trend is marked: between 2009 and 2012, 47 states cut higher education spending per FTE. The median (mean) reduction was just over 23 percent (22 percent). Just three states saw increases: Illinois (unified Democratic government), North Dakota (unified Republican government), and Rhode Island (divided government with Republican governor).

When they have had unified government, both Democrats and Republicans have cut higher education funding. If we look at the seven states with unified Democratic control over this period, six reduced funding. Those six (excluding Illinois’s 2.8 percent increase) reduced funding by between 19 and 31 percent (West Virginia and Washington respectively) for an average reduction of 22.9 percent.

Of the nine states under unified Republican control, eight reduced funding by an average of 25.2 percent, ranging from a 0.2 percent decline in South Dakota to 42.8 percent reduction in Idaho. Texas, one of Leonard’s great villains, reduced funding by 9.2 percent (less than any of the Democratically-controlled states). Florida cut funding by 27 percent, which outranked all but one unified Democratic state. So while Republican-controlled states did cut higher education spending, they were not alone; unified Democratic governments more than held their own. (Of the 17 states with divided government, 16 reduced higher ed spending by an average of 25 percent during the period)….

These data suggest a bipartisan national trend, not a conservative conspiracy. The vast majority of states–whether controlled by Republicans or Democrats–have cut higher education funding in response to budget deficits.

◊◊◊  Grandparents’ contribution make up about 9.5 percent of the total 529 assets

By all accounts, Grandma and Grandpa are more active than ever in funding their grandkids’ educations, including sinking money into 529 college savings plans….

By the end of 2012, American families had a record $190.7 billion socked away in 529 college savings plans, according to a March 13 report from the College Savings Plans Network. …

Parents still contribute the lion’s share of funds invested in 529 accounts. But contributions from grandparents now make up about 9.5 percent of the total, according to the most recent data from the Financial Research Corp, which tracks 529 investments. It was a substantial enough increase that FRC started keeping track of which types of relatives were funding 529s for the first time last year.

Quick Links – Title IX for boys; digital learning works better for some; higher funding does not equate with higher graduation rates; more

◊◊◊  Glenn Reynolds suggests we should consider ‘Title IX for our boys’

… If schoolteachers were overwhelmingly male and girls were suffering as a result, there would be a national outcry and Title IX-style gender equity legislation would be touted. Why should we do less when boys are the ones suffering?

◊◊◊  ‘For older students, women and high achievers, the difference between online learning and face-to-face learning is small.’

Digital learning is expanding access to higher education, but may be widening the  achievement gap. Students who have trouble learning in a traditional classroom have even more trouble learning online, concludes a study of community college students in Washington state. For older students, women and high achievers, the difference between online learning and face-to-face learning is small.

Online courses can widen learning gap (Joanne Jacobs)

◊◊◊  Texas comes out looking good in latest Department of Education of Education report.

The Department of Education has just released its first state-by-state comparison of education statistics, and the report has a few surprises. Texas performed extremely well, tying five other states for the third-best graduation rate in the country, at 86 percent.

And Texas isn’t the only high-performing red state: Indiana, Nebraska, North Dakota and Tennessee all place within the top ten as well. Meanwhile, New York, Rhode Island, and California, all of which take a traditional, high-spending, blue model approach to education, are closer to the middle of the pack , with graduation rates in the mid-70s.

This is convincing evidence against the popular notion that we can fix the public education system if only we are willing to spend more money. Not only does Texas do a better job of graduating its students than its blue state competition; it does so at a fraction of the cost per student.

Education reformers should pay close attention to how Texas achieved these results. Clearly, it’s doing something right.

The Texas Education Miracle (Via Media)

◊◊◊  The 10 Colleges Most Likely to Make You a Billionaire (Harvard Is #1) (The Atlantic)

In news that will shock no-one, earning a Crimson pedigree may be the surest-fire way to amass greenbacks. Almost 3,000 graduates of Harvard University are worth more than $30 million (each), according to rankings compiled by market research firm Wealth-X seen by Quartz, and most of them earned the money themselves. That’s more than twice the number of what Wealth-X calls ”ultra-high-net-worth individuals” (UHNWIs) produced by any other institution in the world….

• Of course, the top of the list is rather dense with Ivy. But even among top schools, wealth varies greatly: while the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University graduated a combined 2,390 UHNWIs, Yale, Princeton and Cornell count among them only 1,604, in total.

• Of the US schools in Wealth-X’s Global top 20, just three are public: University of Virginia, the University of Michigan and University of California, Berkeley.

• At least in the US, having a business school probably helps. The top five on the global list–Harvard, Penn, Stanford University, Columbia and New York University, in that order–all have top-flight MBA programs. Of the top 15, only Princeton lacks a B-school. On the non-US list, meanwhile, France’s Insead and LBS are both exclusively graduate business schools.

Quick Links – Why women talk more than men; only 1 in 5 passed AP tests; most think accuracy in textbooks is secondary to political correctness

◊◊◊  Why Women Talk More Than Men: Language Protein Uncovered (Science World Report)

You know all the times that men complain about women talking too much? Apparently there’s a biological explanation for the reason why women are chattier than men. Scientists have discovered that women possess higher levels of a “language protein” in their brains, which could explain why females are so talkative.

Previous research has shown that women talk almost three times as much as men. In fact, an average woman notches up 20,000 words in a day, which is about 13,000 more than the average man. In addition, women generally speak more quickly and devote more brainpower to speaking. Yet before now, researchers haven’t been able to biologically explain why this is the case.

Now, they can. New findings conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and published in The Journal of Neuroscience show that a certain protein may be the culprit.

◊◊◊  1 in 5 Passed Advanced Placement Tests (New York Times)

Nearly a third of the nation’s 2012 public high school graduates took at least one of the College Board’s Advanced Placement tests, according to the program’s annual report on Wednesday. Nearly one in five got a passing score — three or more, out of five — on one of the 34 subject exams. Last year was the first time in a decade that the average exam score increased from the previous year. The share of students earning at least a 3 also rose for the first time in that period, and the 14.2 percent earning a top score of five was also the highest in the decade.

This is not good news.  Schools are using precious resources to teach classes where only 20% of students get passing grades.  Apparently the course work is too demanding (or instruction is inadequate) for 80% of these students.  The other side to this argument is that it is a good thing to expose more students to the rigorous AP curriculum.

CORRECTION:  I misinterpreted the AP test article, which actually reports that 1 in 5 of all high school students (not just those who took the AP tests) got a passing score.  Thanks to the commenter who pointed this out!

◊◊◊  59% Think Most School Textbooks Put Political Correctness Ahead of Accuracy

Voters continue to believe that political correctness trumps accuracy in most school textbooks. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 16% of Likely U.S. Voters think most school textbooks are more concerned about accurately providing information. That’s down from 27% in March 2010. Fifty-nine percent (59%) think most textbooks are chiefly concerned with presenting information in a politically correct manner, consistent with attitudes for the past three years. Twenty-five percent (25%) are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Count me among that 59%.