Education and Schools

Have you seen Brooklyn Castle yet? If not, head out and see it ASAP. It’s an incredibly uplifting story of the chess team at I.S. 318 in Brooklyn, New York – a team that started in the 1990s and, 20 years later, is one of the most feared teams in the world of competitive chess.

The movie tells the stories of five members of the team, against the back story of a year in the life of the team amidst continual budget cuts to New York City schools. The film depicts how the cutbacks affect kids -- not only on the chess team, but throughout the school. It’ll inspire you and make you walk through Chinatown at 10 PM on a Friday ranting about the importance of extracurricular activities. Read more »

On Wednesday, October 10, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on the constitutionality of UT Austin’s undergraduate affirmative-action admissions program. The vast majority of students are admitted under the state’s Top Ten Percent Plan, which requires UT Austin to admit all Texas residents who rank in the top ten percent of their high-school graduating classes. The University also admits a small percentage of its students through a separate process that involves careful, holistic review of all aspects of an applicant’s qualifications, including such things as leadership experience, special talents, work experience, community service, languages spoken at home, family responsibilities, extracurricular activities, and race. It is this modest consideration of race as part of a holistic review that is before the Supreme Court.

Less than ten years ago, in its review of the University of Michigan Law School’s admissions plan, the Supreme Court outlined the many benefits of diversity in higher education. The Court recognized that racially diverse educational environments reduce stereotypes by exposing students to diverse individuals. That diversity helps students encounter a wide range of ideas and experiences, which improve the quality of the education that they receive and help prepare them to be leaders in an increasingly diverse society. Historically, affirmative-action policies have promoted not only racial but also gender diversity, helping eliminate barriers to women’s entrance into historically male-dominated fields such as engineering and computer science. And many educational institutions, and many state universities in particular, have come to value the benefits of diversity as being critical to the educational mission of cultivating civic, government and business leaders. Read more »

In honor of Labor Day, here’s a snapshot of how working women are faring in today’s economy, by the numbers.

• Percentage of college graduates earning bachelor’s degrees who are women: 57.
• Percentage of students earning master’s degrees who are women: 60.
• Years of college that a man must attend, on average, to earn approximately the same as a woman with a four-year degree: 2.
• The typical number of cents paid to a full-time, year-round woman worker for every dollar paid to her male counterpart: 77.
• The typical number of cents paid to an African-American full-time, year-round woman worker for every dollar paid to a white, non-Hispanic man: 62.
• The typical number of cents paid to a Latina full-time, year-round woman worker for every dollar paid to a white, non-Hispanic man: 54.

Math is important. It seeps into our everyday lives in ways we don’t even think about. We all – well, some of us - know the important feeling of triumph after successfully creating and sticking with a budget (when that happens, I personally feel like draping a flag over my shoulders and doing a victory jog around my neighborhood), or decoding important statistics on our own. Not to mention that science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers are relatively well-paid, and more women in STEM fields could help close the wage gap between men and women – women make only 77 cents to every dollar men make.

Too many girls steer clear of STEM courses, beginning at an early age. Even though women make up a majority of college and graduate students, only 19% of physics bachelor’s degrees and 16% of master’s degrees in engineering and engineering technologies have gone to women. Girls are presented with a stereotype that girls won’t do well in math from an early age, and 57% believe that they would have to work harder in a STEM career to be taken seriously. Popular chains among teenage girls create t-shirts that advertise that the wearer is “Allergic to Algebra”. Even teachers have bought the hype. High school math teachers tend to rate female students’ math abilities lower than those of their male peers, even when test scores are comparable. In universities, women face blatant sexism and uncomfortably pervasive objectification of women in their departments.

So how do we fix this? Well, for a start, we need more female role models and mentors. In 2005, women made up only 19% of all full-time math faculty! Which is why I’m thanking god for Winnie Cooper. Read more »

Since we’re smack dab in the middle of back-to-school season, I thought I’d talk about a couple of STEM-related things this week. In case you’re wondering what STEM is, it stands for science, technology engineering and math, and it’s no secret that women are under-represented in those fields. I want to start with a story I caught on Monday – it’s a blog post from Jezebel on Danica McKellar, also known as Winnie Cooper from the TV show The Wonder Years. After The Wonder Years went off the air, McKellar studied mathematics at UCLA and published four math books aimed specifically at girls.

With titles like Kiss My Math: Showing Pre-Algebra Who's Boss and Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail, the books can initially come off as a little too ditzy for some. I’ve read some blog comments about people wondering whether this is the way we want to try to get girls involved in mathematics and STEM fields, by taking the conversation to a very stereotypically girly place. In McKellar’s latest book, Girls Get Curves, which tackles geometry, she describes some real-world uses of geometry as such:

“Geometry is responsible for the shape of the house you live in, the cars on the road, the shoes on your feet, and even the book in your hands. Diamond rings wouldn't be nearly so sparkly without the study of angles, and your favorite dress wouldn't fit nearly as well without the science of curves.”

When I was studying geometry, I couldn’t have cared less about diamond rings. But, I also had terrible math anxiety and always fell behind most of my classmates in every math class I took. Read more »

Amber and her daughter

This week on High School Moms, the focus of the show was the Florence Crittenton School’s first-ever prom. It was completely planned by the students with some help from the community, including hundreds of donated prom dresses and free hair, nails, and make-up services donated by a local beauty school. The young moms (and moms-to-be) were so excited about it.

In this episode we met Carla Garcia, a 19-year old mom of a 3-year old boy, and Amber Martinez, a 17-year old mom of a 2-year old girl. When Amber introduced herself she said that her mom was a teen mom, as was her grandmother,  and she said, “I am going to stop the cycle.” I believe she will, not just because she is so self-aware and is quite the go-getter, which she appears to be based on her leadership role in the prom planning, but also because thankfully, she attends a school where she is encouraged to see graduation as a reality and college as a possibility worth pursuing. Read more »

It’s back to school time, and with the return to school comes anxiety on the part of students and parents about bullying. Bullying and harassment is especially a problem for girls, students who do not conform to gender norms, and LGBT students. While it is of course important to educate students and parents about effective techniques for avoiding and standing up to students who bully, most articles and lists about the best ways to avoid bullying are woefully one-sided. These lists address targets of bullying, rather than the students who bully, and can therefore tend towards victim-blaming. Instead of placing responsibility only on targets and bystanders of bullying, we need to charge students who bully with changing their attitudes. Here is a handy guide – for bullies – on how to avoid bullying:

• If you see someone you don’t like, simply leave them alone. Don’t make disparaging remarks or tease them.
• Don’t use slurs like “slut” and “whore” to describe classmates or peers, and don’t forward “sexts” or explicit emails.

Yesterday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee issued a searing indictment of for-profit colleges. The report, “For Profit Higher Education: The Failure to Safeguard the Federal Investment and Ensure Student Success,” was the result of Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa)’s two-year investigation into the growing for-profit higher education sector.

The report found that although for-profit colleges, in theory, have an important role to play in higher education and should be well-equipped to meet the needs of non-traditional students—such as older students and single parents—the reality is quite different.

For-profit education is a big money-making industry that puts profits ahead of student success. More widgets = more profit. Except for that the widgets in this case are students. So it’s no surprise that companies that the report examined spent $4.2 billion (with a capital “B”) on marketing and recruiting, equivalent to 22.7% of all revenue.

This incentive structure has led to aggressive, misleading, and deceptive recruiting practices that look a lot like a sales process. For example, training materials from some for-profits showed that recruiters were taught to locate and manipulate prospective students’ fears.

And it’s working! These schools sink incredible amounts of money on marketing and recruiting, and are reaping incredible profits. In 2009, publicly traded companies operating for-profit colleges had an average profit margin of nearly 20% (and paid their CEOs an average of $7.2 million). Read more »

That's me, right behind the President. Told you it was insane.

Screen cap from whitehouse.gov/live.

Yesterday, I got to meet President Obama. It was insane.

I attended a lobby day a few weeks ago to encourage Congress to find a solution to prevent the doubling of federal student loan interest rates, set to kick in July 1.

I showed up to the event, organized by Campus Progress, not knowing much about the debate except that the interest increase from 3.4% to 6.8% would mean $2,400 added on to my loan bill. Since then, I have kept working on this issue and tried to stay on top of it in the media. Then, three days ago, as the result of continued involvement with Campus Progress, I received a message in my inbox I never expected: I was invited to attend an event at the White House on student loans with President Obama.

I came to DC this summer to intern for NWLC and learn more about policies that impact women and families. Yesterday, while staring at the back of the Presidents head as he gave his speech about the importance of keeping student loan interest rates down, in a semi-existential moment, everything connected—and I realized that I was learning about a women’s issue at that very moment. Read more »

Growing up in a post Title IX era, I did not think about discrimination on the basis of my gender in school. I played sports when and where I wanted to and participated in many accelerated courses in high school. As a humanities major and now a law student, I’ve mostly been in courses where women were equally represented, if not the majority of students.

The same is not true for my sister, Jessica, who is a nuclear engineer. In her time at Berkeley she was often the only woman in her classes and continues to be one of few women in her field. I asked her to about her thoughts on what Title IX and equality in STEM education means to her. Here’s what she told me:

“I have always been interested in how things work. I realized at an early age that math and science were my strong suits, so in high school I opted for advanced courses in these disciplines rather than in the humanities. When I was applying to college choosing a major was easy: I was going to be an engineer. Not only did I embody the characteristics that make a good engineering student, it was fun. Up until this point I was aware that people considered boys to be more interested, or even better, in math and science, but this was not apparent during my educational experiences.

Once I enrolled in Berkeley the dichotomy was obvious.