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Mismatch and STEM underenrollment

One of the contentions of the “Mismatch” critique of affirmative action is that, by moving students who benefit from racial preferences in admissions into more highly selective colleges than they would...

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The Problem of Meritocracy in One Graph

This is the relationship between an individual student’s performance on two  study-administered math exams in 9th and 10th grade and their family income when they were in 10th and 11th grade.   Data...

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Too Rich or Too Thin

An obvious and discouraging aspect of American inequality is the increasing association between obesity and low income, including among children. Here, for example, is median income by BMI and mean BMI...

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Constrained Optimization

There is a well-known paper by the economist David Romer that claims that professional football teams (at least as of the mid-2000s) behaved predictably irrationally, if their actual goals were to win...

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Low-income women were most likely to be celibate in 2018

A couple weeks ago, I shared on Twitter some new data from the General Social Survey suggesting that the portion of young Americans who reported no sexual activity rose rapidly in 2018. Chris Ingraham...

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13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip (Kindle book and Paperback)

A fuller-length, revised version of my book about teaching, 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip, is available on Amazon on Kindle for 99 cents or in paperback for $4.44. The Amazon site gives you a fairly...

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Spotted Toad Radio Hour, Episode 5

Here’s Part 1, 2, 3, and 4 and here’s the book. Reviews: National Review (Titus Techera) American Conservative (Will Collins) Takimag (Steve Sailer)  

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Upon the King

I had an enjoyable conversation with Titus Techera on his American Cinema Foundation podcast  about American public education and 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip, focusing on the tensions between...

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“The House of Government”

One time, in college, my best friend threw a gently mocking party for a freshman on his dorm hall to celebrate the anniversary of the young man’s arrival in the United States from Russia. Dima proudly...

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The Generation X Origin Story

Freud, in the only book of his I’ve read, The Interpretation of Dreams, argues that every dream, no matter how unpleasant, represents an unarticulated desire. This has always struck me as more...

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Off the Streets

Following up on yesterday’s post, I’ll note that EdWeek has been collecting data on district reopening plans for Fall 2020-2021. Although they only have data for 760 something districts, they are most...

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School Privilege

Continuing from Wednesday, I looked at how the choice of remote-only related to student composition of the district, as drawn from the NCES. At least among the EdWeek sample of districts (which is...

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Moving the Goalposts

One of the most frustrating aspects of the school opening situation is that a number of ultra-respectable policy organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatricians, strongly recommended...

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Halls of Mirrors

Recently, a senior administrator at one of our largest urban school districts took it upon herself to teach a lesson personally, enabled by technology. Charged to lead the School District of...

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Opening the Trapdoor

There are a number of forces pushing against the persistence of public education as a unifying institution, some new and some old: the collapse of birthrates,tottering local and state budgets the...

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“Small Men on the Wrong Side of History”

Ed West’s Small Men on the Wrong Side of History is a gentle but ambitious political autobiography and set of meditations on politics from the British journalist and writer of several excellent books...

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Cutting Off Your Nose to Spite Your Face

ProPublica, the liberal investigative journalism outlet, has published an excellent essay by Alec MacGillis about the costs of the remote learning phenomenon, largely from the perspective of one poor,...

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Shadows on the Grass

Hell, like life, is mostly other people. The dilemma of the current moment is not in the end that it presents problems beyond the capacity of human ingenuity to solve: it is that it presents multiple...

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Breathing the Free Air

When I was a kid, ten or eleven or even younger, my friends and I used to walk the two miles from our Madison, Wisconsin residential neighborhood (“Sector One” as one or other of us named it) to the...

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Groundhog Day

My best friend died of alcoholic liver failure in early 2019. His body and mind had been shutting down for at least five years before then, since he had lost hearing in one ear and a couple days...

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