Category: Education

More Boys Choose Math Fields Due to Their Weaker Verbal Skills

(p. C2) A key tenet of modern feminism is that women will have achieved equity only when they fill at least 50% of the positions once filled by men. In some fields, women have already surpassed that target–now comprising, for example, 50.7% of new American medical students, up from just 9% in 1965, and 80% of veterinary students. But the needle has hardly moved in many STEM fields–such as the physical sciences, technology, engineering and math, in which barely 20% of the students are female.
A new study suggests some surprising reasons for this enduring gap. Published last month in the journal Psychological Science, the study looked at nearly a half million adolescents from 67 countries who participated in the Program for International Student Assessment, the world’s largest educational survey. Every three years, PISA gauges the skills of 15-year-olds in science, reading and math reasoning. In each testing year, the survey focuses in depth on one of those categories.
. . .
Some fascinating gender differences surfaced. Girls were at least as strong in science and math as boys in 60% of the PISA countries, and they were capable of college-level STEM studies nearly everywhere the researchers looked. But when they examined individual students’ strengths more closely, they found that the girls, though successful in STEM, had even higher scores in reading. The boys’ strengths were more likely to be in STEM areas. The skills of the boys, in other words, were more lopsided–a finding that confirms several previous studies.

For the full commentary, see:
Susan Pinker. “Why Don’t More Women Choose STEM Careers?” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 3, 2018): C2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 1, 2018, and has the title “Why Aren’t There More Women in Science and Technology?”)

The print version of the Psychological Science article discussed above, is:
Stoet, Gijsbert, and David C. Geary. “The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education.” Psychological Science 29, no. 4 (April 2018): 581-93.

Bezos to Donate $2 Billion for “Montessori Inspired” Preschools

(p. A10) When Jeff Bezos announced last week that he and his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, would create and operate a national network of Montessori preschools, few were more surprised than Montessori organizations and leaders themselves.
In a statement released on Twitter, Mr. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon and the wealthiest person in the world, said the preschools would be “in underserved communities.” He continued, “We’ll use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession. The child will be the customer.”
News of the initiative, called the Bezos Day One Fund, came with an eye-popping commitment: $2 billion, some of which will support organizations that help homeless families.
. . .
Montessori’s unique combination of freedom and rigidity — a famously “child-centered” practice with a host of rules and restrictions — can make its classrooms look drastically different from traditional ones.
Students span a three-year age range, say, between 3 and 5. Dressing up or talking about fairies or superheroes is not allowed. Instead of a play kitchen, there may be a real one, where students might pour their own juice into a glass cup, not a plastic one, so that they will learn the lesson that a glass can break if they are careless.
And every day, students get three-hour blocks of unscheduled, uninterrupted “work” time — the word “play” is not used — in which they are free to choose their activities, whether finger-painting or sorting wooden pegs.
. . .
With little else to parse, Montessori leaders pored over Mr. Bezos’ brief statement, which described the planned schools as “Montessori-inspired.” The term “Montessori” is not copyrighted, and any school can choose to describe itself as such.
. . .
Mr. Bezos attended a Montessori preschool in Albuquerque in the 1960s and is one of several tech industry leaders with personal ties to the method. The Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have attributed some of their success to their Montessori educations. Dr. Montessori’s reframing of child’s play as “work,” driven by the child’s choices and interests, is, in many ways, a natural fit for Silicon Valley’s culture of founder-driven entrepreneurship and innovation.

For the full story, see:

Dana Goldstein. “‘Money, but Few Details, In Bezos Montessori Plan.” The New York Times (Saturday, Sept. 22, 2018): A10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 21, 2018, and has the title “‘Jeff Bezos Cites a Big Number, but Few Details, in Plan for Low-Income Montessori Preschools.”)

Uncredentialed Entrepreneur Innovated to Save Babies

(p. 1A) He showed up in Omaha 120 summers ago, another unknown showman hoping to make a name for himself at this city’s biggest-ever event, its world’s fair.

He gave his name as Martin Couney, or sometimes Martin Coney. It wasn’t, at least not yet.
He said he was a doctor, a European doctor, a protégé of the world’s finest doctors. He was none of these things.
And yet in Omaha, Dr. Couney set up shop in a little white building on the east midway, not far from the Wild West Show, the Middle Eastern dancers, the roaming fortune tellers and the Indian Congress starring a Native American chief named Geronimo.
The fair, officially known as the Trans-Mississippi and International (p. 2A) Exposition, showcased all manner of things seen as strange, exotic and otherworldly to the 2 million Nebraskans and visitors paying the 50-cent admission to have their minds blown in the summer of 1898.
Couney thought he had just the thing to blow their minds.

“Infant Incubators with Living Infants” read the sign above the entrance.

“A Wonderful Invention … Live Babies” said another.
. . .
Usually the experts are right. That’s why they are experts,” says Dawn Raffel, author of the “The Strange Case of Dr. Couney,” a new biography seeking to save this once-famed faux doctor from history’s trash bin. “But occasionally you get an outlier like this. Someone who is extraordinarily inventive. Who brings us something incredible.”
What Dr. Couney gave us, through decades of work and tireless promotion, was an understanding that we could save babies that since the beginning of time had died before they crawled. We could save them using a piece of equipment designed by a French engineer who realized that if an egg could be nurtured in an incubator, then so could a newborn.
. . .
Newspapers, including The World-Herald, largely ignored the exhibit, Raffel says. The public didn’t seem particularly bothered that a “doctor” had decided to house anonymous newborns on the fairgrounds and put them on public display.
They also didn’t seem particularly interested, either.
. . .
Raffel estimates that Couney and his doctors and nurses saved between 6,500 and 7,000 premature babies all on their own during decades of midway work. But they saved countless thousands more by raising the profile of premature babies. By raising the hope that they could grow into healthy, happy adults.
. . .
“I find him fascinating because he was such a complicated man,” Raffel says. “He deserves more credit.”

For the full story, see:
Hansen, Matthew. “Tech Costs Force Honda To Let Go of Engineering Legacy.” Omaha World-Herald (Friday, Aug. 3, 2018): 1A-2A.
(Note: ellipses between paragraphs, added; ellipsis internal to sentence, in original.)

The Raffel book on which the passages quoted are partially based, is:
Raffel, Dawn. The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies. New York: Blue Rider Press, 2018.

Strong Job Market Increases Opportunities for the Uncredentialed

(p. A1) Americans looking to land a first job or break into a dream career face their best odds of success in years.
Employers say they are abandoning preferences for college degrees and specific skill sets to speed up hiring and broaden the pool of job candidates. Many companies added requirements to job postings after the recession, when millions were out of work and human-resources departments were stacked with résumés.
Across incomes and industries, the lower bar to getting hired is helping self-taught programmers attain software engineering roles at Intel Corp. and GitHub Inc., the coding platform, and improving the odds for high-school graduates who aspire to be branch managers at Bank of America Corp. and Terminix pest control.

For the full story, see:

Kelsey Gee. “Help Wanted, Degree Not Needed.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, July 30, 2018): A1 & A6.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 29, 2018, and has the title “Employers Eager to Hire Try a New Policy: ‘No Experience Necessary’.”)

Technologies Can Offer “Extraordinary Learning” Where “Children’s Interests Turn to Passion”

(p. B1) The American Academy of Pediatrics once recommended parents simply limit children’s time on screens. The association changed those recommendations in 2016 to reflect profound differences in levels of interactivity between TV, on which most previous research was based, and the devices children use today.
Where previous guidelines described all screen time for (p. B4) young children in terms of “exposure,” as if screen time were a toxic substance, new guidance allows for up to an hour a day for children under 5 and distinguishes between different kinds of screen use–say, FaceTime with Grandma versus a show on YouTube.
. . .
Instead of enforcing time-based rules, parents should help children determine what they want to do–consume and create art, marvel at the universe–and make it a daily part of screen life, says Anya Kamenetz, a journalist and author of the coming book “The Art of Screen Time–How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life.”
In doing so, parents can offer “extraordinary learning” experiences that weren’t possible before such technology came along, says Mimi Ito, director of the Connected Learning Lab at the University of California, Irvine and a cultural anthropologist who has studied how children actually use technology for over two decades.
“Extraordinary learning” is what happens when children’s interests turn to passion, and a combination of tech and the internet provides a bottomless well of tools, knowledge and peers to help them pursue these passions with intensity characteristic of youth.
It’s about more than parents spending time with children. It includes steering them toward quality and letting them–with breaks for stretching and visual relief, of course–dive deep without a timer.
There are many examples of such learning, whether it is children teaching themselves to code with the videogame Minecraft or learning how to create music and shoot videos. Giving children this opportunity allows them to learn at their own, often-accelerated pace.

For the full commentary, see:
Christopher Mims. “KEYWORDS; Not All Screen Time Is Equal Screen Time Isn’t Toxic After All.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Jan. 22, 2018): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary was last updated Jan. 22, 2018, and has the title “KEYWORDS; What If Children Should Be Spending More Time With Screens?”)

The book mentioned above, is:
Kamenetz, Anya. The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life. New York: PublicAffairs, 2018.

Entrepreneur Was Frustrated by Patients’ Pill Confusion

(p. B2) TJ Parker grew up working the counter for his father’s pharmacy in Concord, N.H., where he became frustrated by how much customers struggled to keep track of their medications.
He went to pharmacy school but rather than take up the family business, he and a friend set out to change it. In 2013, they launched an online pharmacy from Manchester, N.H. On Thursday, the 32-year-old CEO said he sold his startup to Amazon.com Inc. It was a roughly $1 billion deal, according to people familiar with the deal. Mr. Parker is expected to stay involved after the deal, said a person familiar with the matter.
. . .
One of the company’s earliest investors, David Frankel of Boston-based Founders Collective, wrote in a post on the website Medium Thursday that the company showed promise with two founders that complement each other.
“TJ cherishes beautiful design but has the bearing of a doctor,” he wrote of Mr. Parker, while Mr. Cohen was able to master the technical challenges behind an “indispensable pill dispensing solution.”
. . .
While attending the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston, he started taking fashion-design classes at the nearby Massachusetts College of Art. “Pharmacy school was sooo boring,” he said in the interview.
His design-school stint was short-lived, but the expertise, he said, inspired PillPack’s concept of simplifying medication regimens by sorting pills into so-called “dose packets,” dispensed from a small box in baggies marked with the date and time they are to be taken.
It turned out to be a billion-dollar idea.

For the full story, see:
Eliot Brown and Sharon Terlep. “Frustrated Pharmacist Came Up With PillPack.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, June 29, 2018): B2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 28, 2018, and has the title “Behind PillPack’s $1 Billion Sale, a Frustrated 32-Year-Old Pharmacist.”)

Those Born Poor, Benefit Less from College Degree

(p. A23) It’s a cruel irony that a college degree is worth less to people who most need a boost: those born poor. This revelation was made by the economists Tim Bartik and Brad Hershbein. Using a body of data, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which includes 50 years of interviews with 18,000 Americans, they were able to follow the lives of children born into poor, middle-class and wealthy families.
They found that for Americans born into middle-class families, a college degree does appear to be a wise investment. Those in this group who received one earned 162 percent more over their careers than those who didn’t.
But for those born into poverty, the results were far less impressive. College graduates born poor earned on average only slightly more than did high school graduates born middle class. And over time, even this small “degree bonus” ebbed away, at least for men: By middle age, male college graduates raised in poverty were earning less than nondegree holders born into the middle class. The scholars conclude, “Individuals from poorer backgrounds may be encountering a glass ceiling that even a bachelor’s degree does not break.”
. . .
It shouldn’t here, either: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fewer than 20 percent of American jobs actually require a bachelor’s degree. By 2026, the bureau estimates that this proportion will rise, but only to 25 percent.
Why do employers demand a degree for jobs that don’t require them? Because they can.
What all this suggests is that the college-degree premium may really be a no-college-degree penalty.

For the full commentary, see:

Ellen Ruppel Shell. “College May Not Be Worth It Anymore.” The New York Times (Thursday, May 17, 2018): A23.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 16, 2018. The online version is substantially longer, and in some places has different wording, than the print version. Where the wording of a quoted passage differs, my quotation above follows the print version.)

The research by Tim Bartik and Brad Hershbein, mentioned above, is:
Bartik, Timothy J., and Brad J. Hershbein. “Degrees of Poverty: The Relationship between Family Income Background and the Returns to Education.” Upjohn Institute Working Paper 18-284, March 2018.

Shell’s commentary is related to her forthcoming book:
Shell, Ellen Ruppel. The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change. New York: Currency, 2018.

Hot Students Learn Less

More evidence on why air conditioning increases our mental acuity:

(p. A5) Hot weather makes it more difficult for high-school students to learn, a new study suggests.
. . .
The study was circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research as a working paper by Mr. Goodman and three other researchers.
They found that, on average, every increase of 1 degree Fahrenheit in the average temperature during the school year reduced learning by about 1%.

For the full story, see:
Ben Leubsdorf. “Heat Found to Hurt Studies.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, June 8, 2018): A5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 7, 2018, and has the title “American Students Don’t Learn Well When It’s Hot Outside.” The online version is substantially longer, and in some places has different wording, than the print version. Where the wording of a quoted passage differs, my quotation above follows the print version.)

The NBER paper, mentioned above, is:
Goodman, Joshua, Michael Hurwitz, Jisung Park, and Jonathan Smith. “Heat and Learning.” National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper Series, # 24639, May 2018.

Fewer Summer Jobs Filled by Teenagers

(p. D8) You can still find high school and college students boiling hot dogs and cleaning the fryer at the clam shacks, country clubs and state fairs that spring to life when the weather turns hot. But the food that fuels a summer vacation is now more likely being prepared by temporary workers from other countries or local adults trying to make the gig economy work for them.
. . .
Although youth employment in the United States still spikes in the warmer months, the number of teenagers in the summer labor force fell to 43 percent in 2016, from almost 72 percent at its peak in 1978, according to the most recent figures from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Pressure has come from several directions. School started stretching into summer. Employment laws became more restrictive. Scooping cones or running a dough-filled Hobart were no longer considered worthy résumé builders.
At the same time, demand for summer workers rose.

For the full story, see:
Kim Severson. “Where Have All the Teenagers Gone?” The New York Times (Wednesday, May 23, 2018): D8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 22, 2018, and has the title “That Summer Food-Stand Job Is No Longer Just for Teenagers.”)

For Homicides, School Is Safer Than Home or Neighborhood

(p. A13) While homicide is among the leading causes of death for young people, school is a relative haven compared with the home or the neighborhood. According to the most recent federal data, between 1992 and 2015, less than 3 percent of homicides of children 5 to 18 years old occurred at school, and less than 1 percent of suicides.
“Especially in the younger grades, school is the safest place they can be,” said Melissa Sickmund, director of the National Center for Juvenile Justice.
. . .
Chris Dorn, a senior analyst at Safe Havens International, said that after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, his organization saw an uptick in demand for its services, completing 1,000 school security assessments in one year. Interest is even greater now. By this fall, Safe Havens expects to have done 1,000 assessments just since the Parkland, Fla., shooting in February.
The group tells schools that the biggest safety risks have not changed, and are less likely to be mass shootings than “petty theft, assault, child abduction due to custody issues or sexual predators,” Mr. Dorn said.

For the full story, see:

Dana Goldstein. “Grim Tally Obscures Statistical Reality: Schools Are ‘Safest Place’ for Children.” The New York Times (Wednesday, May 23, 2018): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 22, 2018, and has the title “Why Campus Shootings Are So Shocking: School Is the ‘Safest Place’ for a Child.”)

“The Future Is Rich in Opportunity”

(p. A13) Ken Langone, 82, investor, philanthropist and founder of Home Depot, has written an autobiography that actually conveys the excitement of business–of starting an enterprise that creates a job that creates a family, of the joy of the deal and the place of imagination in the making of a career. Its hokey and ebullient name is “I Love Capitalism” which I think makes his stand clear.
. . .
Can capitalism win the future? “Yes, but we have to be more emphatic and forthright about what it is and its benefits. A rising tide does lift boats.”
Home Depot has changed lives. “We have 400,000 people who work there, and we’ve never once paid anybody minimum wage.” Three thousand employees “came to work for us fresh out of high school, didn’t go to college, pushing carts in the parking lot. All 3,000 are multimillionaires. Salary, stock, a stock savings plan.”
Mr. Langone came up in the middle of the 20th century–the golden age of American capitalism. Does his example still pertain to the 21st? Yes, he says emphatically: “The future is rich in opportunity.” To see it, look for it. For instance: “Look, people are living longer. They’re living more vibrant lives, more productive. This is an opportunity to accommodate the needs of older people. Better products, cheaper prices–help them get what they need!”
Mr. Langone grew up in blue-collar Long Island, N.Y. Neither parent finished high school. His father was a plumber who was poor at business; his mother worked in the school cafeteria. They lived paycheck to paycheck. He was a lousy student but he had one big thing going for him: “I loved making money.” He got his first job at 11 and often worked two at a time–paperboy, butcher-shop boy, caddie, lawn work, Bohack grocery clerk. He didn’t mind: “I wanted to be rich.”

For the full commentary, see:
Peggy Noonan. “DECLARATIONS; Wisdom of a Non-Idiot Billionaire.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, May 12, 2018): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 10, 2018.)

The book mentioned in the commentary, is:
Langone, Ken. I Love Capitalism!: An American Story. New York: Portfolio, 2018.