New study finds recent immigrants’ children outperform native-born children in top science competitions

The San Jose Mercury News reports:

a new analysis shows the majority of America’s top high school science competitors are the children of new immigrants.

The report, released Monday by the nonpartisan National Foundation for American Policy, found that about two-thirds of the finalists at the Intel Science Talent Search — the Nobel Prize of high school science — were born to parents who hailed from either China or India.

Only 12 of 40 finalists at this year’s competition — a national contest based on solutions to scientific problems — had parents who were born in America.

The National Foundation for American Policy study is available online here (PDF).

When it comes to lifetime earnings, your college major matters more than your degree

The Huffington Post reports:

According to a new report, a college degree is well worth it in terms of lifetime earnings. But, the study’s authors noted, not all degrees are worth the same amount: A student’s chosen major has critical, far-reaching consequences.

“The core finding here is that going to college and getting a degree is important, but what you major in can be three or four times more important.” said Anthony P. Carnevale, who co-authored the study and directs Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “The difference in earnings is more than 300 percent…”

Titled “What’s It Worth? The Economic Value of College Majors,” the study indicates that the earnings disparity between different college majors is substantial. In terms of yearly earnings, petroleum engineers reported making $120,000, while college counselors and psychologists earned an average of $29,000. Over the course of a lifetime, this translated into petroleum engineers making $5 million, while counselors and psychologists earned approximately $2 million.

Tea Party group faces scrutiny amid Constitution Week in U.S. schools

The Associated Press (via CBS News) reports:

[The Georgia-based] Tea Party Patriots [group is] instructing members to remind teachers that a 2004 federal law requires public schools to teach Constitution lessons the week of Sept. 17, commemorating the day the document was signed. And they’d like the teachers to use material from the Malta, Idaho-based National Center for Constitutional Studies, which promotes the Constitution as a divinely-inspired document.

The center’s founder, W. Cleon Skousen, once called Jamestown’s original settlers communists, wrote end-of-days prophecy and suggested Russians stole Sputnik from the United States. In 1987, one of his books was criticized for suggesting American slave children were freer than white non-slaves.

New research into college students’ in-class laptop computer use

Inside Higher Ed reports:

College students might sometimes feel they are getting mixed messages about laptops. Many receive them for free or at a discount from their colleges, only to have professors banish the machines from their classrooms, or at least complain about them.

For years, researchers have conducted studies in hopes of answering whether having laptops in class undermines student learning…

Tere is one notable consistency that spans the literature on laptops in class: most researchers obtained their data by surveying students and professors.

The authors of two recent studies of laptops and classroom learning decided that relying on student and professor testimony would not do. They decided instead to spy on students…

Both of the studies mentioned in the Inside Higher Ed article are available online. The Kraushaar & Novak paper is here (PDF) and the Sovern paper is here (PDF).

At the college level, does the teaching method matter more than the teacher?

The Associated Press (via the Washington Post) reports:

A study by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, now a science adviser to President Barack Obama, suggests that how you teach is more important than who does the teaching.

He found that in nearly identical classes, Canadian college students learned a lot more from teaching assistants using interactive tools than they did from a veteran professor giving a traditional lecture. The students who had to engage interactively using the TV remote-like devices scored about twice as high on a test compared to those who heard the normal lecture, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

The research study, by Carl Weiman of the U. of British Columbia, is available here (subscription required).

May 20 K-12 news round-up

• “At a Denver area elementary school, students are organized into classes in an unconventional manner — they are arranged by what they know, not their age or mandatory grade level.” [CNN, via the Huffington Post]
• ABC News reports that Florida high school principal George Kenney has been placed on administrative leave after a student Kenney hypnotized committed suicide.
• In a cost-cutting move, the Los Angeles Unified School District is individually interrogating librarians to determine if they actually have a teaching function and hence are eligible for employment protections afforded to educators but not, LAUSD argues, to librarians. [L.A. Times]
• “Our public schools are woefully unprepared to deal with the fastest-growing ethnic group in the U.S. Only 17% of Hispanic fourth-graders score proficient or better on the National Assessment of Educational Progress while 42% of non-Hispanic white students do. Nationally, the high school graduation rate for Hispanics is just 64%, and only 7% of incoming college students are Hispanic, according to the Alliance for Excellent Education.” [TIME Magazine]
• T.H.E. Journal reports on “six technologies that will change education.” Among these technologies are open resources and cloud computing.
• The Huffington Post examines efforts across the U.S. to redefine teacher tenure – and, in some cases, to eliminate it completely.

What kind of education research makes the news?

Researcher Holly Yettick of the Boulder, CO-based Education and the Public Interest Center has published an article in Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors:

Surprisingly little research exists on the nexus between the news media and schools and universities, despite the fact that education is among our nation’s most significant public interests and expenses. So, in 2009, the National Education Policy Center commissioned me to look into who was actually conducting the educational research mentioned in the news media…

I found that advocacy-oriented think-tank studies were more likely to be mentioned in the news sources I examined than studies by nonadvocacy think tanks. In 2007, academics produced fourteen to sixteen times more studies than did advocacy-oriented think tanks. Yet academic research was only twice as likely as advocacy-oriented think-tank research to be mentioned in the three outlets studied.

The report Holly references in her article is available here (PDF).

Full disclosure: Holly is a friend and a fellow Ph.D. candidate at the U. of Colorado at Boulder.

Billionaires’ investments in K-12 bring mixed results

Newsweek reports:

[There has been] a decade-long campaign to improve test scores and graduation rates, waged by a loose alliance of wealthy CEOs who arrived with no particular background in education policy—a fact that has led critics to dismiss them as “the billionaire boys’ club.” Their bets on poor urban schools have been as big as their egos and their bank accounts. Microsoft chairman [Bill] Gates, computer magnate Michael Dell, investor Eli Broad, and the Walton family of Walmart fame have collectively poured some $4.4 billion into school reform in the past decade through their private foundations.

Has this big money made the big impact that they—as well as teachers, administrators, parents, and students—hoped for? In the first-of-its-kind analysis of the billionaires’ efforts, NEWSWEEK and the Center for Public Integrity crunched the numbers on graduation rates and test scores in 10 major urban districts—from New York City to Oakland—which got windfalls from these four top philanthropists.

The results, though mixed, are dispiriting proof that money alone can’t repair the desperate state of urban education. For all the millions spent on reforms, nine of the 10 school districts studied substantially trailed their state’s proficiency and graduation rates—often by 10 points or more.

May 16 higher ed news round-up

• The Huffington Post asked several leading academic researchers to list the top 10 challenges facing American higher education. Among the concerns the experts raise are a devaluing of undergraduate education and a lack of diversity among the student body in higher ed.
• “Under fire this week for an unusual deal that gives a billionaire donor control over some faculty positions, Florida State University President Eric J. Barron has insisted that his institution’s academic freedom has not been compromised.
  But internal FSU emails show that top academic officers who reviewed drafts of the 2008 agreement with the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation had precisely those concerns.” [Miami Herald]
• Robotic exoskeleton helps paraplegic U. of California – Berkeley graduate walks across the stage at his commencement [Oakland Tribune]

San Antonio schools install “calorie cameras” in cafeterias

Reuters reports:

Using a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the schools in San Antonio are installing sophisticated cameras in the cafeteria line and trash area that read food bar codes embedded in the food trays.

“We’re going to snap a picture of the food tray at the cashier and we will know what has been served,” said Dr. Roberto Trevino of the San Antonio-based Social and Health Research Center, which is implementing the pilot program at five schools with high rates of childhood obesity and children living in poverty.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg News brings us this other Texas-related item:

Texas, which may balance its budget by firing thousands of teachers, plans to commit $25 million in state funds to Formula One auto racing each year for a decade…

As many as 100,000 teachers in Texas may be fired because of spending cuts to cope with the state’s budget crisis, according to Moak Casey & Associates, an Austin-based education consultant. For $25 million a year, the state could pay more than 500 teachers an average salary of $48,000.