1/ I wrote for
@TheAtlantic
about the myth of the unemployed college graduate, a story that the mainstream media have been getting wrong for nearly 50 years.
Wife: Why do you always know about all this weird stuff that's happening 45 minutes before I do?
Me: It bubbles up on Twitter.
Wife: Hmmm, maybe I should get on Tw
Me: [lunges across table, grabs phone, throws it in front of a moving car]
Senator Tuberville doesn't think the taxpayers should subsidize higher education.
He was a coach at:
Arkansas State (public)
Texas A&M (public)
Ole Miss (public)
Auburn (public)
Texas Tech (public)
Cincinnati (public)
Is he giving the money back?
Here's the one stat you need to understand the crisis in the academic labor market: Colleges hired over half a million new professors to teach the Millennial generation. 94 percent were off the tenure track.
Me: I have some concerns with the Warren higher ed plan.
Warren supporters: I see your point but respectfully disagree.
Me: Same concerns with the Sanders plan.
Bernie supporters: lol your a corporate stooge die of cancer idiot
I bought a PS4, played the Last of Us games back-to-back, and because my brain is weird I wrote 3,000 words on what I think
@Neil_Druckmann
and company were trying to accomplish and why it worked so well.
1/ Now that Virginia has officially closed public schools for the rest of the 2019-20 academic year, with other states sure to follow, it's worth taking stock of what an enormous challenge this will be for educational equity.
What are cruise ship companies even saying to passengers right now? Come aboard, we're expecting you, there's probably only a 30 percent chance, subject to change without notice, of getting stuck on a floating cauldron of viral death?
@GiladEdelman
“Poor financial planning” — didn’t get the 401k auto-debit right definitely a root cause of poverty, ask anyone in a homeless shelter and they’ll confirm
1/ A few years ago I wrote a book about technology and the future of higher education. I had hopes tech would make learning better, more accessible, and more affordable.
Today I published a long article about what happened next. It's not a happy story.
1/ Last week I wrote about 2U, a firm that semi-secretly helps run very expensive online graduate programs at elite universities, in exchange for 60% of tuition.
Today, 2U bought a company called Trilogy for $750 million.
Here’s why that matters.
1/ You may have read today that the University of Arizona "purchased" online for-profit Ashford University.
That's not actually what happened.
Let me explain why.
Something you can't un-see once you see it is that the whole apparatus of legally tax-exempt non-profit status in this country is a constant disaster of greed and exploitation and no one is ever held accountable.
8/ And it's hard not to remember that during the pilot Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell were strangers hired to pretend to be strangers hired to pretend to be husband and wife who then fell in love for real, who then fell in love for real and became husband and wife.
@mollyhc
@annehelen
So the argument is that because the USMNT is mediocre and thus less popular, creating space in the stands for their opponent's fans, who yell at them, they should be paid more?
How on earth does a "fiscal hawk" vote for a bill that costs $1,007 billion over the next ten years, when the economy is already very close to full employment and still running a deficit?
Exactly one year ago today I was emailing with
@DanaGoldstein
about how a CDC official had unexpectedly suggested schools might have to close for an extended period of time--like, a *month,* which seemed mind-boggling. "It sounds like the snow day that never ends," I wrote. Ha!
It's true, why just yesterday the giant financial conglomerate that bought my mortgage and bundled it into a CDO flew a representative down from New York City with a plate of warm cookies and said we know your wife is furloughed so send the check whenever, it's fine.
TRUMP on Wilber Ross's comments: "I think what Wilbur was probably trying to say is that [unpaid federal workers] will work along. I know banks are working along... The grocery store."
#WorkAlong
1/ This essay is what happens when someone of middling intellect with an axe to grind writes about a subject -- community colleges -- that they know absolutely nothing about. It's an embarrassment for the author and
@NRO
.
In which I explain why Jill Biden’s dissertation is so conceptually flawed her advisors should have told her to start over (part III of my essay on this idiotic term paper)
8/ It's incumbent on policymakers and school officials to ensure that students who are most vulnerable to educational disruption get the additional resources they need in the next few months.
"The imminent pandemic was so obvious that you can't prove insider trading but not obvious enough to warn the public about" will be an interesting needle to thread.
Happy to announce that
@NewAmericaEd
's
@claremccann
is now at the U.S. Department of Education in the office of the Under Secretary. A great choice for students everywhere.
1/ In
@DemJournal
I make the case against K-12 school districts.
School districts are tools of segregation and permanent inequality. To change that, we should adopt three policies:
1) Redistricting
2) National Funding
3) Decriminalization
1/ Remember that study from a couple weeks ago about how Ivy League schools favor the rich in admissions? Many public universities do the same thing. My latest from
@TheAtlantic
Shocked to learn that spending hundreds of millions of dollars on an unprofitable business run by a guy known for a lifelong series of spectacular financial disasters didn't work.
4/ There's a huge difference between financial literacy and "financial literacy," the latter being an enormous confidence scheme designed to blame people for their own exploitation. And now the grift is being integrated into our public schools. It's a scandal.
1/ Nobody should be surprised that
@BetsyDeVosED
doesn't intentionally visit low-performing schools; this has been her explicit policy and philosophy all along.
2/ It's well-established that "summer learning loss" affects students differently based on socioeconomic status.
Pandemic learning loss could be much worse, particularly since it will directly precede the summer.
1/ Pre-K is great. The federal government should give all families access to free public Pre-K.
But wait, wasn't there a big study recently that said otherwise?
No. At
@voxdotcom
I explain why the real problem is how we talk about education research.
My kid's music teacher is currently dancing the polka in his basement rec room on Microsoft Teams with 20 fifth graders and honestly I've never seen something so purely heroic. Bless educators everywhere right now.
A few years ago I moved to a seemingly quiet street in the near D.C. suburbs.
A few weeks after arriving, a neighbor said “Did they tell you about Halloween?”
1/ Today the
@washingtonpost
ran a new entry in its occasional ongoing series, "When Terrible Things Happen to Affluent White People in the DC Metro Area."
Vaccinated people are wearing masks in public because we're halfway through a mass vaccination process so nobody knows who has been vaccinated and who hasn't. It's polite and humane. Don't be weird about this.
I once sat naked in the diplomatic sauna beneath the Finnish embassy and listened to a nice man explain how his national defense assignment was to cross-country ski 60km to the Russian border with a surface-to-air missile strapped to his back.
Many people have wondered how the Finns defend Finland today, so here's a very short introduction to modern Finnish defence policy - and a brief synopsis of how the Finnish military would probably fight if any hostile country decided to invade. 1/
You don’t really appreciate the tropes and rhythms of a normal presidential speech until you don’t hear them for four long years. Feels so good. Feels like taking a full breath.
@jbouie
I went there with my parents *last month* and this is absolute bullshit -- the regular house tour is pretty much just as it always was; you have to specifically choose to go on the separate Slavery at Monticello tour. He's lying.
1/ I've gotten pretty jaded about this stuff but it's still remarkable how University of Arizona officials are unashamedly willing to making wholly contradictory statements about who, exactly, controls The University of Arizona Global Campus.
It doesn't matter what words run under the headline; publishing a Times profile with this kind of photograph legitimizes the subject and therefore the racism and homophobia he represents.
12/ The hierarchy of human value as expressed by
@washingtonpost
crime reporting is pretty clear:
White > Black
Rich > Poor
Families > Single People
The more you look like the people who own, make, and subscribe to the paper, the more your life and death matter.
Everyone's personal quarantine plan seems to involve food delivered by an army of anonymous gig workers who don't have health insurance and I have questions?
Salacious details aside, remember that everything about the Falwell Jr. affair -- yachts, luxury hotels, sweetheart land deals, the incentive to look the other way -- begins with a flood of federal student loan money for online courses. Without it, the rest doesn't happen.
3/ College-educated white-collar parents who can telework are home with their kids and can provide individualized instruction. (While working, I know, it's a huge challenge I'm personally living right now with a 4th grader, stay with me.)
7/ Also: everything about this is going to be a huge challenge for children with disabilities. Some can't access standard technology and media, others rely on specialized instruction and school-specific resources.
7/ Every society has stupid people and criminals and dumb teenagers and mental illness and all of those things. But only our society -- this one, America, right now -- is in the grip of a death cult that fetishes weapons of war.
@GeneralSnoop
@Noahpinion
Why do people think the president has responsibility for the government’s response to an enormous public health crisis? Is that your question?
5/ Parents who have to leave home to work, by contrast, will need to patch together ad hoc child care that may change day-to-day. Instability is the enemy of effective learning.
One of the cool things about being a "nonprofit" university is you can spin up a new business, pay taxes on nothing, sell the business to a publicly-traded corporation, pocket the $$$$, and still pay taxes on nothing.
People asking why these Hollywood actresses didn't just bribe their way into the Ivies like normal rich people aren't taking into account that the going market rate for legal graft is probably north of $10 million at this point whereas apparently they were paying like $15,000.
People say arming teachers will make schools like military bases, but I disagree. I live near a military base and go there frequently. You know what nobody is allowed to bring there, including active-duty soldiers? A gun.
The idea that Ivy League colleges discriminate against white people is certainly the most insane thing I've read today, and I would remind you that it's August 2020.
4/ One very notable exception among both public and private colleges: Almost uniformly, engineering schools don't favor the wealthy. Having real academic standards is a powerful counterbalance to the temptations of money.
1/ Let's talk about how wealthy businessman Jack Zhou is currently in the process of getting away with bribing his two sons into Harvard -- with crucial assistance from Harvard itself.
Are you planning to send your kids to college anytime soon? Read my new piece in
@Slate
about how much of the "financial aid" offered by colleges is an illusion, created by expensive consultants to squeeze as much $$$ out of families as possible.
@dylanmatt
When they become federal judges 20 years later there's always a mid-career section like "After leaving the Justice Department, Masterson returned to the law firm as a senior partner for eighteen months and was paid $27 million for having lunch with potential clients."
We're at the point where any news organization that simply accepts the "critical race theory" framing of educational debates is actively choosing to participate in a massive bad-faith propaganda campaign.
Virginia woman at a school board meeting last night threatens to bring “every single gun loaded” to shoot and kill her opponents if Page County Public Schools enforces a mask mandate.
#vagov
1/ Some thoughts on
@melissakorn
and
@anfuller
's excellent investigation of high-priced Ivy League master's degrees that leave students with enormous debts they can't repay.
First, while the focus is on elite schools, this dirty business is widespread.
As someone who was very good at standardized tests growing up I think they are a terrible measurement of anything other than whether you are good at the test. Certainly have nothing to do with human worth, character or virtue.
@JHWeissmann
@Patrick_Wyman
@HarrySteinDC
@TheAtlantic
"Come on down this weekend for a GREAT deal on a pre-owned Lincoln Navigator, our prices CAN'T BE BEAT and also after a few drinks or even if you just ask my politics are so nakedly reactionary that every word out of my mouth will literally melt your brain."
4/ They also have access to reliable high-speed Internet if and when districts are able to ramp up instruction from a distance in the coming weeks.
They also have comfortable housing in which this education can occur.