links 3-16-12

public domain image via WikipediaCondoleezza Rice on her Childhood Homeschooling « Homeschooling Research Notes: 

"Condoleezza Rice was Secretary of State from 2005-2009 under president George W. Bush and is currently a professor of political science at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Her 2010 memoir, Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family, is a fine account of her life, including lots of great information about her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1950s and 60s, especially (for us) her year as a homeschooler." 

Sleep deprivation and teens: ‘Walking zombies’ - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post:

"If it was just a matter of early-morning fogginess this wouldn’t be a big deal, but sleep deprivation in teens has been linked to lower levels of Human Growth Hormone, which is integral to a teenager’s physical growth, brain development, and maturation of their immune system, as well as higher rates of anxiety disorders and depression. A 2010 study in the journal Sleep found that teenagers who go to bed after midnight are 24 percent more likely to suffer from depression and 20 percent more likely to consider harming themselves than those who go to bed before 10:00 p.m."

Note: Allowing families to customize schedules to maximize their health and family resources is a vital part of school change.

Student Group Calls For Changes To CPS Disciplinary Policies « CBS Chicago:

"CHICAGO (CBS) – A busload of Chicago Public Schools students set up shop outside the Cook County Juvenile Center on Monday, to suggest that’s where they’ll end up, unless CPS eases its disciplinary policies. 

WBBM Newsradio’s John Cody reports a group called Voices of Youth In Chicago Education (VOYCE) organized the rally by 75 CPS students and provided them with statistics saying students lost 306,000 class days last school year, due to suspensions." (listen to audio clip at link)

“Which College Majors Screw Over Women the Least?” Yay for IT! « Computing Education Blog:

"A rather provocative title from the Jezebel site leads to some interesting statistics. If you follow the link to the NYTimes site, you find that CS still has men paid 2% more than women. IT is the winner, where women make more than men. What I find it interesting that few women choose IT for a career, despite the obvious economic advantages: Lots of jobs, high-paying jobs, and jobs where women get paid better than men. That suggests that decision away from IT is not an economic one — there are other factors at play." (The NYT article/data is here.)

Saying Goodbye to Testing Trauma & Data Disorder | Lisa Nalbone: 

"Making our transition from the classroom to the world of unschooling was a huge step for his traditionally schooled parents -school teacher and engineer. Engineer dad was not really comfortable with this learning freedom idea. So, Dad wanted us to continue to have Dale participate annual testing to measure his learning. Dad needed data."

On Privatization and Brutalizing Campuses – The New Inquiry: 

As a closer look at the events around the November 9th strike reveal, moreover, the connection between the force meted out on student bodies on campus and long-developed plans to chart new directions for the university — in China and as an online university — are not simply conceptually related. The Chancellor’s physical absence from campus on Nov. 9th and the way his place was quite literally taken by the physical violence of the police speaks to the very concrete retreat from actual university space, what they call the “bricks and mortar” campus, that gives “privatization” a tangible form. 

To understand what privatization is, let us look to the Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park, whose website describes its intention to “progressively replace the life cycle of traditional industries” as a way to “represent the revolutionary transformation trend of China’s economic development pattern.” In one sense, this is simply business-speak for the kind of state-run economic development such parks represent, replacing “traditional” industrial development. Yet this is also a rather stunningly literal statement: re-vamping the “life-cycle” of technological innovation also means absorbing as much of the entirety of the human life cycle into the contoured confines of the 25 square km Hi-Tech Park as possible; everything from government research, multi-national corporations, residential units for workers, eating spaces, a few well-regulated parks, and now, even education, are to be laid out into the neat grid of Zhangjiang’s campus.

Proceed with caution | The Chronicle:

"This isn’t simply a Duke method. A whopping 18 percent of the freshmen class at the University of Washington comes from abroad, most of them from China. These international students pay three times as much for tuition as in-state students. Paying international students let low-income Washington students—who make up more than 25 percent of the freshman class—receive financial aid scholarships. When schools are slashing budgets and in need of creative methods to make ends meet, accepting more students who can pay the maximum helps soften the blow of more people attending without the means to pay. It’s a game of averages.

If you receive financial aid, chances are an international student is helping subsidize your Duke experience. 

And that’s a positive of the increases of international students—notably those from China. State colleges are able to sustain themselves and accept quality students who otherwise could not afford to come. Duke (or another top-tier university like Duke) is able to create a delicate balance between financial aid recipients and those who pay full price while also diversifying the undergraduate student body."