Each dollar spent on a high-quality early childhood program in the Chicago Public Schools yields $4 to $11 in benefits to the economy, according to a new cost-benefit analysis. (Full disclosure: Barbara Bowman, Chicago’s Chief Early Childhood Education Officer, who oversees the program, was a key advisor on our early childhood education report.)
According to a press release from the National Institutes of Health, which funded the study, researchers evaluated the effectiveness of the federally funded Chicago Child-Parent Centers (CPC) by surveying former students and their parents, and analyzing students’ education, employment, criminal justice and child welfare records for the participants through age 26. Since the program was first established in 1967, researchers have been able to follow the effects of the intervention over time. Their work includes a previous study, which found that “children who had been enrolled in CPCs were more likely to go to college, get a full-time job and have health insurance. The same students were less likely to go to prison and less likely to suffer from depressive symptoms.”
“Our findings provide strong evidence that sustained high-quality early childhood programs can contribute to well-being for individuals and society,” said Arthur Reynolds, director of the Chicago Longitudinal Study and co-director of the Human Capital Research Collaborative at the University of Minnesota. “The large-scale CPC program has one of the highest economic returns of any social program for young people. As public institutions are being pressed to cut costs, our findings suggest that increasing access to high-quality programs starting in preschool and continuing into the early grades is an efficient use of public resources.”
Yale University will soon end two prestigious teacher training programs due to lack of interest, according to the January/February alumni magazine.
The first, a traditional teacher preparation program, offered education courses and teacher certification to undergraduates. The second, Yale’s five-year-old Urban Teaching Initiative, offered a tuition-free 14-month master’s in education program to those willing to commit to teaching in New Haven’s urban public school system.
“At the same time a record 18 percent of Yale seniors applied to Teach for America last year…”
The New Year brings sad word of the passing of Szeto Wah, celebrated Hong Kong democracy activist, legislator, and teacher union leader. He died on January 2 at the age of 79.
Once recognized by Time Magazine as one of the 25 most influential people in Hong Kong, and known by millions as “Uncle Wah,” Szeto came to prominence in the 1970s as the firebrand founder of the Hong Kong Professional Teachers Union (PTU), which he led from 1974 to 1990. He was also a founder and leader of the Hong Kong Democratic Party, served in the Hong Kong legislature from 1985 to 2004, and was the founder and chairman of the Hong Kong Alliance in support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China. The alliance was the leading organization offering support to the pro-democracy movement in Mainland China, which organized yearly protests on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
While condolences flow in from all over the world, the political question of the day in Hong Kong is whether or not the Chinese authorities will allow exiled democracy activists back into Hong Kong to attend Szeto’s funeral. Wang Dan, one of the most prominent of the Tiananmen Square democracy leaders, said that, for him, the loss is personal: “Uncle Wah has always been my personal mentor and a leader in the democratic movement. The greatest achievement he has made has been to pass on his beliefs before he left us. The younger generation now remembers June 4,” he said.
We at the Shanker Institute also feel this as a personal loss. We met Szeto in 2002, when he travelled to Washington D.C. to deliver the Institute’s Albert Shanker Lecture. In it, he credited Al Shanker with helping to shape his political and organizational perspective: Read More »
If (like me) you’re not a regular viewer of The Simpsons show, you will have missed a controversial new opening sequence created by British graffiti artist Banksy, which aired this past weekend. The segment, which mocks the show for outsourcing much of its animation work through a South Korean company, began to go viral until yesterday, when Fox asking for the video to be pulled from YouTube and other venues (see here).
The scene begins much like the regular opening, but with “Banksy” scrawled strategically across the town of Springfield. Bart is seen writing punishment lines on the school blackboard, as usual, but this time “I must not write all over the walls” covers every wall of the classroom. The sequence continues almost as usual until we see the family is seated on their couch.
Suddenly, we shift to a dark, cavernous space where row upon row of sweatshop workers are seen to be laboring hard to produce this image. A small child ferries the film over to a vat of dangerous chemicals. We glimpse kittens being thrown into a woodchipper to make stuffing for Bart Simpson dolls. A shackled panda hauls a wagon loaded with the finished dolls, while a depleted unicorn is used to punch holes in the center of DVDs. The skeletons of expired workers litter the scene. It ends with a shot of the 20th Century Fox logo surrounded by barbed wire. Read More »
The new Albert Shanker Institute-supported report, The Global State of Workers’ Rights: Free Labor in a Hostile World, released on Labor Day by the human rights organization Freedom House, has received some notable attention in the press, both here and around the world. One photo essay in Foreign Policy, titled “Labor Day in Hell,” illustrates 14 of the worst-offending nations, among them Belarus, North Korea, and Sudan (see the screenshot below).
Indeed, the report, which examined the state of labor rights in the world for the year 2009, found serious violations of workers’ freedoms in all parts of the world except Western Europe. Countries were ranked on a five-category scale of Free, Mostly Free, Partly Free, Repressive, and Very Repressive.
The United States was rated as Mostly Free—the same rank accorded to Bolivia, Mongolia, Romania, and Zambia—less free than all of Western Europe and such nations as Australia, Canada, Chile, South Africa, and South Korea. As the report notes, although American law recognizes core labor rights, the U.S. political environment is “distinctly hostile to unions, collective bargaining, and labor protest.” So not Hell, but not Heaven either. Read More »
Do the words we use frame the thoughts that we have? And, if so, does the language we speak affect how we think?
It turns out that linguists and cognitive scientists have been going back and forth on this issue for years. There is a fascinating article on the subject in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine (which I’m only now getting around to reading). It’s a piece by Guy Deutscher, an honorary research fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester, and author of a forthcoming book, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.
First popularized in the 1940s, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity “seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.” The lack of a future and past tense in a given language, for example, was supposed to limit some speakers’ ability to comprehend the concepts of future and past.
Although such ethnocentric and romantic aspects of the theory have been totally discredited, new research does suggest that language can have an effect on both thought and perception. For example, it has recently “been demonstrated in a series of ingenious experiments that we even perceive colors through the lens of our mother tongue.” As it turns out, different languages “carve up the spectrum of visible light” in different ways, with, for instance, many languages considering blue and green to be variations of the same color. And, astonishingly, “our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language.” So, “as strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue.” Read More »
Ever get the feeling that we are having the same old educational debate, over and over? A glance through the archives of the Atlantic Monthly helps to cement the notion.
One writer describes schools as “society’s dumping ground,…a vast refuse heap for any and every unwanted service or task that other social or governmental institutions and agencies find too tough to handle. The community, the home, and to some extent even the church have used the public schools to relieve their consciences of feelings of guilt by passing on unfinished business which they have found [too] difficult …or just burdensome.” That was 1959.
Another pleads for “education reform,” while admitting that the term has been so overused as to become virtually meaningless. “America has been oversold on pedagogical gadgets which never perform up to expectations,” he says. But, since “standards in American public education are deplorably and inexcusably low,” something must be done. In a democracy, he writes, every citizen deserves “an education… [grounded] in learning, in mastery, in growing insight, in standards which really operate – and not just in going to school. So when multitudes of young people accumulate credits, pass courses, carry off elegant [diplomas], and come out knowing little or nothing, it is simply intolerable.” That was 1939. Read More »
Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews recently sparked some interesting online chatter about why students aren’t better prepared for college-level writing, and what can be done about it.
In a first article, Mathews introduces us to high school history teacher Doris Burton, who asserts that state and district course requirements leave “no room” for the assignment of serious research papers of 3000 words (10-12 pages) or more. According to Mathews, “We are beginning to see, in the howls of exasperation from college introductory course professors and their students, how high a price we are paying for this.” Read More »
Can “doing the right thing” sell as well as “Just Do It”?
That’s the premise of a recent New York Times story, which describes the Knights Apparel company’s efforts to pay a living wage to unionized workers at a model factory in the Dominican Republic (hat tip to Jeff Ballinger). Knight’s Alta Gracia factory will pay factory workers $2.83 an hour to make college-label clothing for the U.S. market. This is enough to support a Dominican family of four, and nearly three and a half times the prevailing minimum wage paid by other factories making products bound for the U.S. Read More »
