Links for 7/30/10

DAVID LEONHARDT

the Tennessee experiment found that some teachers were able to help students learn vastly more than other teachers. And just as in other studies, the effect largely disappeared by junior high, based on test scores. Yet when Mr. Chetty and his colleagues took another look at the students in adulthood, they discovered that the legacy of kindergarten had re-emerged.
Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.

All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten…

Ben Gose

Cary Nelson, a tenured professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and president of the American Association of University Professors, believes it is no longer ethical to recommend Ph.D. programs to promising undergraduates. "It's a ticket to exploitation and semi-starvation," he says.

Mike Mandel

Since the first half of 2007, the number of employed engineers is down 12%, while the number of employed scientists is up 3%. Perhaps a sign that we are keeping the R in R&D, while losing the D…

Kerry Ann Rockquemore

once I sink into the writing, my inner critic comes out with a vengeance. She articulates a wide range of ugliness including (but not limited to) a litany of my shortcomings, questions about my competence, doubts about the importance of the work I’m doing, speculations about how dumb people will think I am once they read my writing, detailed descriptions of how ill-chosen each word I’m putting on the page is, exhortations to delete and change them right away, or better yet, persistent pleas to stop writing immediately before I embarrass myself further.