Become a Mentor | iMentor

This is a great program mentoring high school kids. I participate in it and have had a great experience (and I also have a great mentee too!)

iMentor is specifically looking for 300 more male mentors (mentor pairings are same gender) and they start matching their students with their new mentors in two weeks so please volunteer. As I said, I'm in the program myself and in addition to being a great program with a great mission, the support from iMentor and the school makes it very easy to focus on mentoring while iMentor handles the logistical and administrative details.

Poverty And School Performance

Matt Yglesias has a great post at Think Progress about how parents' socioeconomic factors are a very large component in a child's educational success, as typified by this picture that is posted with the caption "This only works if mom can read."

This post is worth the time to read even if you're not a regular Matt Yglesias and/or Think Progress reader.

Better Government Doesn’t Mean Smaller or Bigger: Edward Glaeser - Bloomberg View

Great column on Bloomberg View by Harvard Economics Professor Edward Glaeser, who says the big government vs. small government debate in Washington is a red herring. As Prof. Glaeser says, the goal should be for a smart government. He even takes a quick jab against the Right:

"Republicans, who often pledge to reduce federal spending, don’t have a great track record shrinking the share of government to GDP. Federal outlays as a share of GDP rose under three of the last four Republican presidents, and it’s easy to understand why. Cutting taxes, which Republican administrations did regularly, is fun and popular, but doing so without lowering spending is just passing the buck to our children."

and later on against the Left:

"Cutting even 15 percent of [Government's GDP share] will be tough, given that advocates of liberal spending will argue that our government is already quite small relative to the size of the public sector in other developed countries, and cutting 15 percent would mean reducing government’s share of the economy by 1 percentage point."

$10 million prize in a national election lottery? I'd get out the vote in that election!

Matt Miller writes a very interesting and thoroughly detailed column in The Washington Post about the type of stump speech a pragmatic centrist third party candidate would make. Although I don't agree with his ideal notion of a third party, this column really puts some cold hard truths out there:

On Education:
"We’ve been tinkering at the edges when it comes to school improvement, because we’ve ignored the most important question: Who should teach? While the world’s highest-performing school systems — those in places like Singapore, Finland and South Korea — recruit their teachers from the top third of their graduating class, we recruit ours from the middle and bottom thirds, especially for schools in poor neighborhoods. This “strategy” isn’t working. Up through the 1970s, the quality of our teacher corps was in effect subsidized by discrimination, because women and minorities didn’t have many other job opportunities. All that’s changed, but as career options have multiplied for those who used to become teachers, salaries haven’t kept pace to attract top talent."

On Health Care:
"We need to make sure every person in America has basic health coverage that doesn’t break the bank. To achieve that, Democrats must accept a private insurance industry and Republicans must accept that some people can’t afford decent policies on their own. This “grand bargain” is about liberals agreeing that innovation shouldn’t be regulated out of U.S. health care and conservatives agreeing that justice has to be regulated into it. The 50 million uninsured may seem invisible, but today their ranks are equal to the combined populations of Oklahoma, Connecticut, Iowa, Mississippi, Kansas, Kentucky, Arkansas, Utah, Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, West Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming. Would America turn its back on these 25 states if they all lacked basic health coverage? That is what we’ve been doing for decades."

On the Financial Markets:
"The banking system is now more concentrated than it was before the financial crisis. There are two ways to avoid the “too big to fail” threat that still exists. We can limit the risks these big banks take — though regulators don’t have a great track record of getting this right. The most important thing we can do, therefore, is make sure big banks have enough capital to absorb any conceivable losses. Yet bank lobbyists are now swarming Washington to keep capital requirements low – in part because higher levels of capital reduce what top bankers can pay themselves. Their bonuses are often based on such metrics as a firm’s “return on equity,” which can be goosed by continually piling debt atop a tiny equity base. That’s Wall Street’s plan. Heads, I win; tails, taxpayers lose. Again."

His idea for turning the national election into a lottery with a $10 million grand prize is definitely out-of-the-box, as is the recommendation to lower the voting age to 15. All-in-all, it's definitely worth the time to read this article all the way through and see how far you actually are from these ideas, regardless of your political ideology.

Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete? : Education Next

If you are a parent, be sure to read this article and, if you get a chance, the full unabridged paper on where the United States stands in terms of education. Many education reform supporters are hoping this paper will be the wake-up call to get people outraged enough to act on this issue.

The reasons education is the backbone of a society...

I've always believed that education is the backbone of a society. David Leonhardt writes a great column about what Amherst College is doing to ensure as much as possible that the backbone remains strong:

"The United States no longer leads the world in educational attainment, partly because so few low-income students — and surprisingly few middle-income students — graduate from four-year colleges. Getting more of these students into the best colleges would make a difference. Many higher-income students would still graduate from college, even if they went to a less elite one. A more educated population, in turn, would probably lift economic growth."

This is definitely a column worth reading.

A Better Way to Teach Math - NYTimes.com

In a way this is where literacy really begins...

A Better Way to Teach Math - NYTimes.com

Great columns about education recently...

Lots of columnists writing about education of late:

1. Matt Miller picks apart the president's speech on education with a pointed critique of the difference between his words and his actions.

2. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan pens an excellent op-ed piece about the lack of commitment to education among the school's participating in the NCAA Basketball Tournament over the next three weeks. An excellent point from his column:

"If a team fails to graduate even half of its players, how serious are the institution and coach about preparing their student-athletes for life?"

3. Lastly, former NBA player and basketball analyst Jalen Rose writes about the reasons why college athletes should actually be paid to play for their schools. While it seems controversial on the surface, Rose makes some great points in the column, which is definitely worth reading.

Is there a reason the red line is so far north of the others?

A Wall Street Journal article today focuses on the White House initiative to boost Latino achievement in colleges. However, the report it cites states that Latino college-completion rates are depressed due to “language barriers and obstacles caused by immigration status”, which would also be the case with Asians too but the graph included in the article does not show that.

Now, in my lifetime I’ve known many people across every race, religion, and ethnic background and realized that intelligence is strictly an individual thing and nothing that can be attributed to a person’s race, background, upbringing, etc. In fact, the biggest factor I’ve seen is work ethic and it’s hard to argue that any particular group is inherently lazy or more likely to work harder and/or smarter than any other group. So what’s really happening here?

Yet another awesome Matt Miller column...

I have to admit, I'm becoming a huge fan of Washington Post columnist Matt Miller solely for his independence of thought. He is neither a cheerleader nor an antagonist like other Washington Post columnists on the left or the right, respectively. Today's column is another excellent piece about things that need to be better about the Obama administration's economic policies related to healthcare and education.