Links for 2/12/10

Kevin Carey

Overwhelming, charters have chosen to educate students who have been desperately underserved.

For this, Gary Orfield of the “UCLA Civil Rights Project” has branded charters as “apartheid schools” and “civil rights failures,” because their students are disproportionately–in many cases, overwhelmingly–non-white. If you’re waiting for the punch line, there isn’t one. Charters have created schools to which low-income and minority parents want to send their children, so much so that the annual lottery at my friend’s school is an emotional, high stakes affair. For this, Orfield denounces them by association with the murderous apartheid regime and America’s shameful history of institutionalized racism. If nothing else, this illustrates how powerful and totally bullet-proof major research university brand names have become: pair one of them with a righteous moniker like “Civil Rights Project” (it used to be at Harvard) and major national newspapers will cover even the most bewilderingly narrow-minded reports…

education policy is filled with examples of people who have been tripped up by over-allegiance to nominally worthwhile means. Define equity exclusively in terms of integration and you wind up making a fool out of yourself. Focus all your attention on ensuring that teachers have due process protections and you end up defending indefensible “rubber rooms.”…

Victor Lavy, Olmo Silva, and Felix Weinhardt

We show that a large fraction of ”bad” peers at school – as identified by students in the bottom 5% of the ability distribution – negatively and significantly affects the cognitive performance of other schoolmates…

On the other hand, we uncover little evidence that the average peer quality and the share of very ‘good’ peers – as identified by students in the top 5% of the ability distribution affect the educational outcomes of other pupils. But these findings mask a significant degree of heterogeneity along the gender dimension…

girls significantly benefit from interactions with very bright peers, whereas boys are negatively affected by a larger proportion of academically outstanding peers at school…

Al Roth on the gender imbalance on Chinese campuses.

With more than 120 boys born for every 100 girls in China, parents of boys know that their sons will face a competitive marriage market. Shang-Jin Wei of Columbia and Xiaobo Zhang of the International Food Policy Research Institute argue that this accounts for a substantial portion of the high savings rate in China, as parents anticiipate that wealthier sons will marry more successfully

Alex Tabarrok on the gender imbalance on US campuses. And here.

The sex ratio on many U.S. campuses is around 60/40 and rising. The NYTimes has an excellent piece on the predictable consequences for dating: “Needless to say, this puts guys in a position to play the field, and tends to mean that even the ones willing to make a commitment come with storied romantic histories.”