Friday, November 13, 2009

Links for 11/13/09

Chester E. Finn Jr. & Frederick M. Hess
Washington spent almost $68 billion more on education in fiscal 2009 than it otherwise would have…

What has all that extra money actually bought? The main answer… is jobs, jobs, jobs

Turning schools into a jobs program is a dubious way to tone them up for the 21st century.

And a tone-up — indeed, a makeover — is what they need…

Stanford economist Eric Hanushek estimate that substantial gains in pupil achievement would follow from (permanently) ridding K–12 education of the weakest 10 percent of today’s teachers — even if that means adding a few pupils to the classrooms of those who remain…
Al Roth
[UK] Students are increasingly looking across the Atlantic for university – but the application system can seem daunting.

"One of the main differences between the US and here is that there is no central body that handles the admissions, as Ucas does in the UK."
Sabine Hikel
This is kind of surprising -- money, the great panacea, not solving all our problems?
Felix Salmon on how not to be a charitable organization.
the Goldman Sachs Foundation… seems to be giving away only the bare minimum of the foundation’s assets each year: just 5%...

when Goldman Sachs trades with anybody, be it a client or the Goldman Sachs Foundation or anybody else, Goldman Sachs makes money.

Meanwhile, the foundation itself, as we’ve seen, has been losing money…

All in all, the single biggest beneficiary of the Goldman Sachs Foundation would seem to be Goldman Sachs itself, while the amount of money which trickles down from it to genuinely needy charitable cases is minuscule.

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