Links for 12/13/10

Troy Camplin

The reason I am staying home with my children has nothing to do with ideology or worry about their education—rather, it has to do with the financial realities of being a Ph.D. in the humanities without a tenure-track position…

I was working three jobs just to get by. And none of them required a Ph.D.—my M.A. in English was sufficient for the community college classes…

I hate to use such a Marxist term as “exploitation,” but for someone with as much education as I and many others who work as adjuncts in community colleges have, how else can one describe the pay? The community colleges take advantage of the overproduction of English and humanities Ph.D.s by paying extremely low salaries…

Antonio Villaraigosa

there has been one, unwavering roadblock to reform: teacher union leadership…

It's not easy for me to say this. I started out as an organizer for UTLA (United Teachers Los Angeles), and I don't have an anti-union bone in my body. The teachers unions aren't the biggest or the only problem facing our schools, but for many years now, they have been the most consistent, most powerful defenders of the unacceptable status quo…

Russell K. Nieli

at Caltech, there are no dumb jocks, dumb legacies, or dumb affirmative action students… this beacon of pure meritocracy…

Joseph G. Altonji, Ching-I Huang, Christopher R. Taber

We develop a framework that may be used to determine the degree to which a school choice program may harm public school stayers by luring the best students to other schools. This framework results in a simple formula showing that the “cream-skimming” effect… We find that the cream skimming effect is negative but small…