Principal sings "Let It Go" parody to announce snow day

Broke grad students are the next debt crisis

Graduate students, not undergrads, are increasingly driving the country’s student debt crisis, and the federal government will likely end up footing much of the bill, according to a study released today by the New America Foundation.

Most studies have historically lumped together undergraduate and graduate debt, leading politicians and media reports to focus primarily on the high price of bachelor’s and associate degrees. But when graduate debt is isolated, as it was in this study, a striking picture emerges.

Around 40% of the more than $1 trillion in outstanding student loans went to financing graduate and professional degrees, the study found. Combined debt levels of the average graduate borrower, according to the study, have surged by $17,000 — from $40,000 in 2004 to more than $57,000 in 2012, adjusted for inflation. For the average undergraduate borrower, that increase was just $7,580, according to separate New America Foundation report.

While the higher debt level is more manageable for medical school student, for instance, it could be crippling for Master of Arts students, among whom the median debt is $58,000.

Some of the study’s more eye-popping statistics pertained to law school students, whose job prospects are famously declining. The level of indebtedness for this group rose by more than $50,000 from 2008 to 2012, with the typical law student now owing $140,000, the study found — a jump that’s unprecedented in any other field, including medicine.

“Most of these degrees are not intuitively worth it. They’re not gateways to the middle class,” says Jason Delisle, the study’s author. “Is a Master of Arts degree really worth $20,000 more than it was in 2004?”

New America Foundation

But thanks to changes in repayment terms, the federal government is likely to end up bankrolling many graduate degrees.

With an eye toward easing debt burdens in the wake of the financial crisis, the federal government began to offer income-based repayment plans and even total debt forgiveness for some students. One especially generous program forgives outstanding loan balances for graduates working in so-called “public service” jobs after just 10 years of income-based repayment plans. Public service sector jobs make up a full quarter of the workforce, according to a study by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, meaning huge numbers of graduate student borrowers will be eligible to have their debts forgiven after 10 years.

“People entering repayment programs with these kinds of loan balances have set themselves up to have the loans forgiven,” Delisle says.

Other data suggests that graduate students are some of the biggest users of the federal government’s debt-easing policies. An examination of outstanding student debt by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that those enrolled in the government’s income-based repayment program had an average loan balance of $48,500 — more than triple the balance of those on a straightforward 10-year plan.

“That data does suggest that graduate students are using the plan more heavily, because the average balance is in excess of normal borrowing,” says Rohit Chopra, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report’s author.

The Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment.

There are a variety of explanations for the sharp rise in graduate debt, from the 2008 financial crisis — which left students with fewer resources to fund their educations — to rising tuition prices. But Delisle also draws a connection to the government’s policies, which he says may inadvertently be making borrowing huge sums easier and more feasible for graduate students.

“The Obama administration says they’re addressing the problem, but it’s also one they’ve helped cause,” Delisle suggests. He points to the example of President Obama’s push to eliminate the third year of law school, which many say is unnecessary and adds too much to students’ debt burden. The administration’s policies also make that the year most likely to be free under loan forgiveness, Delisle alleges, removing an incentive for both students and colleges to advocate for change.

“They’re saying ‘we have a huge debt problem,’” Delisle says, “but at the same time, they’re saying to grad students, ‘Borrow as much as you want.’”

Source

Oklahoma schools required to teach high school students to manage finances

Chris Landsberger

Mustang High School teacher Carrie Hixon recently asked her students “What if you used your bank debit card to buy lunch at Taco Bell and you didn't have enough money in your checking account. What do you think Taco Bell will do?”

Sophomore Tristian Jackson finishes an exercise in a required financial literacy class at Mustang High School.

“Make you wash dishes,” the class clown popped off.

A serious Hixon countered, “Until recently, Taco Bell and your bank each could charge you a fee of $25 to $35. Thankfully, a recent law requires establishments to deny the purchase and hand your card back to you, if you have insufficient funds.”

“If you have overdraft protection for your checking account, your bank instead might extend you a short-term loan or pull the purchase amount from a linked savings account, but it comes with a cost,” she said.

“Did you really want to pay that much for your meal at Taco Bell?” she said.

The what-if scenario is meant to cause students to think about their personal finances. Per state legislation passed in 2007, Oklahoma students, effective this May, now must demonstrate an understanding in banking, taxes, investing, loans, insurance, identity theft and eight other areas to graduate. Teachers are required to certify students’ working knowledge in each area.

Schools like Mustang, which offered a personal finances course before the mandate — or Kingston, which implemented the requirement soon after enactment, are on track. But countless others are scrambling to meet the additional curriculum requirement — parking many students in front of computers for quickie, do-it-yourself learning.

Said Amy Lee, executive director of the Oklahoma Council on Economic Education, which lobbied for and helped develop the curriculum, “Oklahoma has some of the strongest standards in the country. Where other states require four or five standards regarding earnings, savings and investing, Oklahoma has 14 standards including three that are state-specific: bankruptcy, the financial impact of gambling and charitable giving,” she said.

The problem is the openness in the law, Lee said. It includes no funding for school districts to hire dedicated financial literacy teachers, she said.

Moreover, districts are permitted to implement the requirements in the seventh through 12th grades and use curriculum provided by the state Education Department or whatever they choose, she said.

Consequently, many school districts statewide are squeezing the curriculum into government, history or other classes, Lee said. Some rural schools in northwestern Oklahoma are just now getting started with the help of the Cherokee Nation Foundation, she said.

Joe Griese, a certified physical education teacher in charge of study hall and in-school suspension at Ada Junior High, oversees computer-based semesterlong classes for freshmen at Ada Junior High, along with two history teachers.

“We're basically teaching them how to live on their own,” Griese said.

At Kingston High School, Vicki Droddy teaches freshmen a year-long class in life skills. Projects include drawing straws for students’ and their would-be spouses’ future incomes and paying Droddy — “the bank” — for locally advertised cars and homes. “We’re very lucky that we have a principal who thought the class was important, and implemented it early,” she said.

Various classes

Meanwhile, Southeast High School is meeting the requirement in varied ways, said Ann Kennedy, senior sponsor and advanced placement government teacher.

The curriculum is embedded in senior government classes, but many students meet the requirements through family consumer science, or home economics, or concurrent financial literacy courses with Oklahoma City Community College, she said. Advanced-placement students use independently paced computer courses and email Kennedy for help when they need it, she said.

Source

Debt collectors are gorging themselves on student loans

The cost of college is skyrocketing. The labor market is atrocious. Employers demand a college degree for pretty much any job these days. Yes, at this point, it has become commonplace to note the crushing burden of college debt (the total amount of which is now something like $1.2 trillion). But there's another side to this story that hasn't gotten as much play: the implications for debt collection.

Debt delinquency exploded during the financial crisis, but has since steadily decreased for every type of debt — except that of students. Because the bankruptcy code is badly skewed when it comes to student loans, total debt collection has risen steadily. Students are now the fuel for one of America's more predatory agencies, which is saying a lot.


Here's how it happened, and what we might do about it.

Kevin Drum posted these two amazing charts recently from the New York Fed report on household debt. Here is the percent of each kind of debt that is delinquent. Just look at what's happening to student debt compared to the others:



And here's total debt collection:



Look at the first chart: Delinquency has fallen sharply since 2009 for everything but student debt. Now, look at the second: Total collection is actually up overall, a trend that must be driven in part by the similar increase in student debt.

This jibes with the fact that student debt is treated much more harshly than almost any other kind in the bankruptcy code. It's nearly impossible to discharge during a typical bankruptcy proceeding — it took one guy 10 years in court to get his law school loans partially discharged in such a situation. And student debt can follow people to the grave and beyond, making it closer to indentured servitude than a regular loan. (Though at least we aren't putting broke students into our shiny new system of debtor's prisons — yet.) There's no reason for this discrepancy, of course, it's just a dumb policy from decades ago that now can't be changed because of Congressional gridlock.

That horrible policy, plus the ever-increasing pile of student debt, plus a college degree's outsized role in landing a good job, has created a golden opportunity for amoral collection agencies to make vast sums hounding people who tried their luck with college and didn't make it, for whatever reason.

There has been a bit of progress here and there on this problem. Last year the federal government announced it would stop actively incentivizing atrocious behavior on the part of collectors it employs, and Kirsten Gillibrand has a bill which would allow students to refinance their debt at 4 percent interest if they've got a higher rate.

These are positive developments, but there's really no reason we shouldn't be considering some more fundamental changes to the education finance system. Student loan debt obviously ought to be dischargeable in bankruptcy, just for starters, and we ought to put pressure on the rankings and prestige systems that cause colleges to jack up prices for no obvious benefit to the student. And shoot, why not try mass debt forgiveness, so long as we're thinking boldly? If Wall Street got a do-over after the financial crisis, seems fair for America's struggling students.

Furthermore, why use debt to finance education subsidies in the first place? As with many policy objectives, America has traditionally pushed education subsides through loans and tax incentives, because that allows us to pretend like we aren't spending money when we really are. We should be wary of schools using subsidies to just hike prices and hire a slew of pointless administrators, but to the extent that education is subsidized, we ought to be doing it with straight cash transfers rather than loans, which would be clearer, fairer, and avoid crippling graduates with debt.

In any case, all that is almost certainly impossible for the time being. But as we've seen, debt collection isn't going away, and if any sort of reform ever becomes politically feasible, we ought to aim high rather than tinkering around the edges.

Source

What it's like to be a black student at a mostly white college

Epic school closing announcement

New program will offer scholarships to undocumented students

Three high-profile participants in the immigration reform movement announced a scholarship program on Tuesday that will give millions of dollars in scholarships to Dreamers, undocumented young people who came to the U.S. as children. The new program, called TheDream.US, will allow many to attend college when they otherwise wouldn't be able to afford it.

Donald Graham, CEO of the Graham Holdings Company; activist Henry Muñoz; and former Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez launched TheDream.US. The group has raised $25 million to offer scholarships to Dreamers who were granted the ability to remain in the U.S. under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, often called DACA. A dozen colleges across the country have already signed on.

"Absent the passage of the Dream Act or other breakthroughs in immigration policy, thousands of eager young people will be unable to achieve their academic dreams," Gutierrez said in a statement. "We are not waiting for Washington to solve these challenges."

It can be tough to afford college as an undocumented immigrant, particularly in states where the student must pay out-of-state tuition even if he or she attended high school there. Some members of Congress are trying to change that through a bill that would encourage states to grant Dreamers in-state tuition or financial aid at public colleges.

The effort from TheDream.US will provide scholarships for a variety of schools, including private ones, that have work-related programs and good support systems to help Dreamers stay in. The program will pay up to 100 percent of tuition, or around $25,000 over four years, based on need.

Only Dreamers who have been granted deferred action under President Barack Obama's DACA policy will be eligible. Although that leaves out some Dreamers, it would apply to the more than 455,000 undocumented young people who, as of mid-September 2013, had received relief under DACA.

Applicants would also need to have graduated from a U.S. high school with a grade point average of at least 2.5, or have received a GED with a score equivalent to that GPA. They must also plan for an associate's or bachelor's degree that is career-focused at one of the schools partnering with TheDream.US. Recipients must maintain a GPA of at least 3.0 while working toward their degree.

The program has already begun to help 39 Dreamers who received their scholarships in December 2013, before it was officially announced. One of them, Araceli Mendez, attends Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of the City University of New York. She came to the U.S. from Mexico when she was 7 years old, and didn't attend college immediately after high school because she couldn't afford the tuition.

"This scholarship means everything to me," she said at an event announcing the program, according to prepared remarks. "It means the opportunity to live my dreams, the chance of getting closer to my goals as I take each course. This scholarship has also taken away the burden of trying to scramble to find tuition money. Now I can focus on the most important thing to me, which is my education."

Source

Five banned books that you should read (that you probably hadn't already)

Our Family Tree: An Evolution Story by Lisa Westberg Peters
Okay, so this book is less for you and more for any small children you know and love. This beautifully illustrated, beautifully written book by Peters helps break down the concepts of evolution – not easy concepts in the slightest – and renders them in terms that small children can pick up and understand. According to the American Library Association, this book has been challenged in schools and libraries across the country – most likely because it succeeds in explaining those concepts, and there are a still a lot of people in this country who don’t want those concepts taught to children.


Killer Quote: ”When we began, we didn’t look like people. We didn’t have two eyes to blink or ten toes to wiggle. We were just tiny round cells in the deep, dark sea. On the outside, we were so small, we were almost invisible. But on the inside, we had the same kind of spiraling genetic code for life we have today."

The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-time by Mark Haddon
This novel is barely 10 years old and it’s already been challenged in several school and public libraries. The book itself is a masterpiece – it’s written in the first person from the perspective of Christopher, a teenager with autism, and his struggles to understand the people around him. The title refers both to a line from a Sherlock Holmes novel as well as Christopher’s own efforts to emulate Holmes, who he sees as a hero, by solving the “case” of who killed a dog in his neighborhood. It’s both fascinating and gut-wrenching, and I highly recommend it.

Killer Quote: ”And because there is something they can’t see people think it has to be special, because people always think there is something special about what they can’t see, like the dark side of the moon, or the other side of a black hole, or in the dark when they wake up at night and they’re scared.”

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei
This book hasn’t been banned for awhile, but it was banned at the time it was written. That’s because this is Galileo’s famous text in which he defends the Copernican model of the solar system, where the Earth moves around the Sun, against the current theory, Ptolemy’s, which said the Sun moved around the Earth. The book was banned by the Catholic Church and Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for it. To be sure, some of the science in this text is definitely out of date, but it’s still worth a read for several reasons. For one, it goes beyond just a discussion of two different astronomical theories and into the philosophy that should underlay proper scientific inquiry – a lot of which is still relevant today. Second, it’s worth reading because its immensely readable and is, in some spots, just wickedly funny. This is not a fair or balanced dialogue, and Galileo gleefully twists the knife at times. It’s worth reading.

Killer Quote: ”If what we are discussing were a point of law or of the humanities, in which neither true nor false exists, one might trust in subtlety of mind and readiness of tongue and in the greater experience of the writers, and expect him who excelled in those things to make his reasoning most plausible, and one might judge it to be the best. But in the natural sciences, whose conclusions are true and necessary and have nothing to do with human will, one must take care not to place oneself in the defense of error; for here a thousand Demostheneses and a thousand Aristotles would be left in the lurch by every mediocre wit who happened to hit upon the truth for himself.”

Zhuangzi
This book, named for its author, is one of the primary philosophic texts of Taoism. It’s been banned at different times in China, as different religions like Buddhism waxed and waned in fortune, and been banned in other countries besides for its content. But while many people are familiar with the Tao Te Ching, it’s been my experience that far fewer have read Zhuangzi. That’s a shame, because it’s a magnificent, poetic book that will absolutely challenge the way you think – and the way you don’t think. For those interested in Chinese philosophy and religions, I highly recommend reading this, one of its greatest works.

Killer Quote: ”A trap is for fish: when you’ve got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you’ve got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you’ve got the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find someone who’s forgotten words so I can have a word with him?”

The Epic of Gilgamesh
Believe it or not, the earliest work of Western literature has been challenged and banned in schools in the United States, by parents objecting to some of its depictions of sexuality. (The Babylonians had different standards than Americans.) But for those of you who have only read portions of this epic poem (or only know the story from Picard reciting a brief version on an episode of Star Trek), do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. The themes of Gilgamesh - friendship, good governance, the quest for immortality – are as relevant today as they were nearly 5,000 years ago when they were first sung in Mesopotamia. It’s gorgeous and challenging, and because of its age, it gives a fascinating insight into how both alike and different we are from our distant ancestors.

Killer Quote: ”The skies roared with thunder and the earth heaved, then came darkness and a stillness like death. Lightning smashed the ground and fires blazed out; death flooded from the skies. When the heat died and the fires went out, the plains had turned to ash.”

Source

Middle school rap battle about DNA

The highest-earning type of interracial couple

Asian couples, including mixed couples with either an Asian husband or wife, dominated the combined earnings in 2010, out-earning other mixed couples by $10,000, according to The Rise of Intermarriage study by the Pew Research Center.

Pure Asian couples earned on average $62,000 while mixed couples earned around $71,000.

On the other end of the spectrum, newly married couples of Hispanic descent make the lowest combined earnings of about $35,600 per year. Hispanics who married "out" of their race and tied the knot with whites earn significantly more than those who married "in."

According to the study, the newlywed pattern depicts a bigger picture:

"The earning differences of couples reflect the general pattern of income disparity among families of different racial and ethnic background in the U.S. In 2009, the median family income was $75,027 for Asians, $62,545 for whites, $39,730 for Hispanics, and $38,409 for black families."

Average income is strongly correlated to education. Higher education, more prevalent among Asians and whites, is often associated with higher earnings.

Source

When memorization gets in the way of learning

I once caught an 11th-grader who snuck a cheat sheet into the final exam.

At first, he tried to shuffle it under some scratch paper. When I cornered him, he shifted tactics. "It's my page of equations," he told me. "Aren't we allowed a formula sheet? The physics teacher lets us." Nice try, but no dice. The principal and I rejected his alibi and hung a fat zero on his final exam. That dropped his precalculus grade down from a B+ to a D+. It lingered like a purple bruise on his college applications.

Looking back, I have to ask myself: Why didn't I allow a formula sheet? Cheat sheets aim to substitute for memorization, and I hate it when my students memorize things.

"What's the sine of π/2?" I asked my first-ever trigonometry class.

"One!" they replied in unison. "We learned that last year."

So I skipped ahead, later to realize that they didn't really know what "sine" even meant. They'd simply memorized that fact. To them, math wasn't a process of logical discovery and thoughtful exploration. It was a call-and-response game. Trigonometry was just a collection of non-rhyming lyrics to the lamest sing-along ever.

Some things are worth memorizing--addresses, PINs, your parents' birthdays. The sine of π/2 is not among them. It's a fact that matters only insofar as it connects to other ideas. To learn it in isolation is like learning the sentence "Hamlet kills Claudius" without the faintest idea of who either gentleman is--or, for what matter, of what "kill" means. Memorization is a frontage road: It runs parallel to the best parts of learning, never intersecting. It's a detour around all the action, a way of knowing without learning, of answering without understanding.

Memorization has enjoyed a surge of defenders recently. They argue that memorization exercises the brain and even fuels deep insights. They say our haste to purge old-school skills-driven teaching from our schools has stranded a generation of students upriver without a paddle. They recommend new appsaiming to make drills fun instead of tedious. Most of all, they complain that rote learning has become taboo, rather than accepted as a healthy part of a balanced scholastic diet.

Certainly, knowledge matters. A head full of facts--even memorized facts--is better than an empty one. But facts enter our heads through many paths--some well-paved, some treacherous. Which ones count as "memorization"?

I define memorization as learning an isolated fact through deliberate effort. The process can unfold two basic ways.

First, there's raw rehearsal: reciting a fact over and over. When I had to memorize a speech for ninth-grade English, I huddled in the school library for 90 minutes, whispering the words to myself again and again, until they settled into my memory. The process was slow, dull, and stilted. I forgot the speech within weeks.

Raw rehearsal is the worst way to learn something. It eats up time and requires no real thinking. So of course, it's popular among students ranging from my Oakland 15-year-olds to Harvard undergraduates. During a unit on memory, I once heard a psychology student recite, "Raw rehearsal is ineffective," before proceeding to practice her vocabulary using the same technique she'd just denounced.

Second, there are mnemonics and other artificial tricks--songs, acronyms, silly rhymes. In sixth grade, for reasons only heaven knows, I memorized 48 prepositions (about, above, across, after...) to the tune of "Yankee Doodle." I can still recite them.

Such tactics certainly work better than raw rehearsal. But they don't solve the underlying problem: They still bypass real conceptual learning. Memorizing a list of prepositions isn't half as useful as knowing what role a preposition plays in the language.

So what are the alternatives? How can students learn facts, rather thanmemorize them?

First, there's repeated use. Like raw rehearsal, it relies on repetition to chisel a fact into memory, but unlike that method, it comes naturally (without "deliberate effort"). In 10th-grade English, I wrote a paper on Robert Frost's apocalyptic poem "Once by the Pacific." I read it dozens of times, dissecting every phrase. Months later, standing on a rocky, storm-swept beach, I found that I could recite the poem by heart. I never set out to memorize it. I just...did.

And second, there's building on already-known facts. Like mnemonics, this technique relies on connections and associations. But here, the connections emerge naturally from the material. The fact is no longer an isolated thread, held in place by a clever trick. It's part of a tapestry.

For example, suppose we're learning that Maryland fought with the Union during the Civil War. We could invent a mnemonic, like "Maryland starts with 'marry,' and a marriage is a union"--cheesy, but fine. Or we could build on other facts. For example, Maryland borders D.C., so if it had seceded, the American capital would have been surrounded by foreign territory. For exactly that reason, Lincoln worked hard to keep Maryland on the side of the North.

What separates memorization from learning is a sense of meaning. When you memorize a fact, it's arbitrary, interchangeable--it makes no difference to you whether sine of π/2 is one, zero, or a million. But when you learn a fact, it's bound to others by a web of logic. It could be no other way.

Highly paid employees of the super-rich

Not everyone has come out of the great recession with their finances bruised.

The super-rich lost the most when the economy crashed in 2008, but quickly bounced back. Now, as Peter Weber notes at The Week, the top one percent of American earners sit on their biggest share of the nation's wealth since the Roaring '20s.

And many of the people who work for business tycoons, celebrities, and high-earning professionals appear to be doing quite nicely, too. Here are 5 domestic careers that reportedly offer six-figure salaries — as long as you're in the upper echelon of workers employed by the upper crust:

1. Nannies
College graduates make up the fastest-growing segment of the nannying industry, household staffing specialists tell NBC News. The median salary is $16 an hour, but a well-educated and experienced nanny — or "modern-day Mary Poppins," as American University graduate Elyse Barletta calls herself — can make as much tending a toddler as they would have in an entry-level finance career, which in some big cities might mean $100,000 a year or more.

Experts say the trend has picked up in recent years as more moms enter the workforce as high-earning professionals, and look for ways to give their kids an educational leg-up in a competitive world. Cliff Greenhouse, president of the Pavilion Agency in New York, says these moms "aren’t going to work full-time unless they can leave their children in the care of someone they consider a peer."

The numbers are giving some parenting bloggers sticker shock. "College-educated nannies aren't a post-recession phenomenon," says Katie J.M. Baker at Jezebel, but the latest trends are "kinda whoa."

2. Butlers
Butlers might seem like a relic from the Downton Abbey era, but in some parts of the world, including the oil-rich Persian Gulf region, they are still in high demand, according to Sophie Robehmed at BBC News. "They may live downstairs rather than upstairs, but some are on stratospheric salaries," she says.

In fact, London's Bespoke Bureau British Butler and Housekeeper Academy this year placed a newly trained butler in the United Arab Emirates in a position that pays 582,000 Emirati Dirhams — or $158,000 — per year.

One butler in the U.A.E. tells BBC News that, after leaving the military, he got a job in a wealthy household at $55,000 a year, and that he now makes twice that. That doesn't even include perks, such as a luxury apartment, bonuses, private jet travel, and two months off in the summer to visit his family in the U.K. "I travel bi-weekly and I am expected to be on call 24/7, caring for my principal's personal things like clothes, travel bookings, reservations and shopping," says the 37-year-old butler. "I also have to make sure he's always looking good and that he stays hydrated in the heat."

3. Private chef
Private chefs — not to be confused with personal chefs, who might have several clients — typically work in a mansion, yacht, or private jet. They might cook three meals a day. Some also have added duties, like working with a butler or housekeeper to make sure the household runs smoothly.

The median compensation for a private household chef is $70,000, although some can make a good bit more.

If they work for rock stars or professional athletes, they might wind up traveling the country or the world. "Those lucky private chefs who tour with celebrities can make upwards of $5,000 a week,"says Culinary Schools Connection. "The one downside is that they are usually on call 24/7."

4. Personal shopper
If you are determined to make six figures and have a passion for fashion, you might be in luck. Top-notch personal shoppers can earn $100,000 or more annually, according to Forbes. Their mission is to make sure that their super-wealthy clientele are the best dressed people in the room.

And while the Association of Image Consultants International and other professional organizations offer certification programs, there is no formally recognized credential you need to become a style consultant. With impeccable taste — and some chutzpah — anyone has a shot at breaking into the business. "This is a bit of a Wild West industry," Bridgette Raes, president of Bridgette Raes Style Group in New York City, tells Smart Money.

5. Tutor
The private tutoring business has been growing for years. Back in 2010, the education research firm EduVentures estimated it to be a $5 billion to $7 billion industry.

Some parents are willing to pay $400 an hour for the best tutors in New York City. Tutors are just as highly sought after in the U.K. One 2011 ad in Tutors International offered the use of a London apartment, free travel, and $95,000 a year to someone capable of teaching the family's two kids, ages 5 and 7, Ancient Greek, Latin, chess, sailing, French, and Spanish, according to The Huffington Post U.K.

The high salaries are being driven, says Britain's Guardian, by striving well-to-do parents "hyperventilating that their kids are being left behind."

Source

Boston Public Schools to offer all students free breakfast and lunch

The Boston Public Schools will serve free meals – both lunch and breakfast -- to all students, regardless of their income status this year. Boston becomes one of the largest cities in the nation to join a program aimed at serving healthy meals to more children and save families money.

“Every child has a right to healthy, nutritious meals in school, and when we saw a chance to offer these healthy meals at no cost to them, we jumped at the chance,” said Mayor Thomas M. Menino. “This takes the burden of proof off our low-income families and allows all children, regardless of income, to know healthy meals are waiting for them at school every day.”

Over the summer BPS and the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education joined a national program, currently available in 10 states and the District of Columbia. The program, called the “Community Eligibility Option,” waives meal fees for all children regardless of income status and is also being implemented in cities such as Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago and parts of New York City.

“Children can focus on learning when they are well-fed, and families can focus on education when they don’t have to budget for school meals every week,” said BPS Interim Superintendent John McDonough. “This program makes sense for students. We expect that every major city will join this national program in the next few years – and we are able to put Boston’s families at the forefront.”

Already, 78 percent of BPS students qualify for free- or reduced-price meals due to their income status. Many of those who do not qualify fall just beyond income limits. Previously, families had to fill out and return forms to qualify for the meals program. By entering into the Community Eligibility Option, BPS can waive all meal charges for all students. Parents do not need to take any action to participate. Students can continue to purchase extra food items, such as snacks, for a fee.

“Our mission is to educate every student, regardless of income or ability, and this helps us achieve that,” said Boston School Committee Chair Michael O’Neill. “We are proud to take part in this project because it will help ensure every child is ready to learn, regardless of income.”

“We moved quickly to advocate for the ability to participate in this initiative and are glad to be one of the first major cities to participate,” said Michael Peck, Director of BPS Food and Nutrition Services. “It is truly a win-win for our students and our city.”

“Community Eligibility is a great new option that helps low-income children have better access to healthy school meals and helps schools reduce administrative burdens,” said Jim Weill, President of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC). “Boston Public Schools has been a leader in the effort to increase participation in school meals, and FRAC applauds the City for quickly embracing this opportunity which will benefit every BPS student.”

Last year, BPS launched a universal breakfast program that waived charges for all students for morning meals. This meant that families who did not previously qualify for free-or-reduced price meals saved approximately $230 per child.

The Community Eligibility Option means families will now save an additional $405 to $455 per child per year. The cost of lunch was previously $2.25 for elementary students and $2.50 for middle and high school students.

In total, the lunch charges alone added up to approximately $943,000 per year for families through reduced- or full-price meals last school year. However, BPS only collected about $585,000 of this total due to allowances for individual hardships or other situations.

Under the new program, federal meal reimbursements to BPS are expected to increase. This means that, even though the District would not collect money from students at cash registers, total meal revenue would increase by approximately $2.7 million per year.

Source

Retiring principal gets tear-jerking goodbye flash mob from students

Weird scholarships

Young people just don’t appreciate how easy they have it these days. Back when I was in high school, only the smartest or most athletic students were candidates for any type of college scholarship. Not anymore. Today’s students don’t have to be the best and the brightest to score some scratch – they can parlay a hobby, goofy talent or even a genetic luck of the draw into scholarship money. Take a gander at some of the more unusual opportunities that are available for eight subsets of the population (but first get the heck off my lawn.)

1. Dessert Enthusiasts
Is your sweet tooth serious enough to pursue a future as a pastry chef or chocolatier? The American Association of Candy Technologists offers an annual $5,000 scholarship to students enrolled at an accredited university who plan to major in food science and have a demonstrated interest in confectionary technology. Sounds like a great opportunity to expand both your waistline and your bank account!

2. Duck Callers
OK, this contest may border on the goofy, but the top prize is $1,500 in scholarship money, so if you’ve got a knack for calling ducks we say you’ve got nothing to lose but your dignity (and travel fare to Arkansas). The Chick and Sophie Major Memorial Duck Calling Contest is open to any high school senior in the U.S. Participants have 90 seconds to demonstrate their best hail, feed, comeback and mating calls. The top three placers also receive commemorative jackets, so get quackin’, er crackin’, because $1,500 isn’t exactly chicken feed. (Me, I’m still looking for that ever elusive Bad Pun Scholarship.)

3. Fire Safety Experts (or literate people with decent luck)

Fire sprinkler systems save lives, and they might just save your neck if you’re sweating that college tuition bill. The American Fire Sprinkler Association scholarship program is not based on financial need; all interested students need to do is read an essay about fire sprinklers and then take a 10 question multiple choice test. Get this – the test is “open book.” You can print out the essay before taking the test! Each correctly answered question enters you into a drawing for a $2,000 scholarship, so if you ace the test, you’ll have ten chances to win.

4. Bagpipe Majors at Carnegie Mellon
One of the least competitive scholarships in the U.S.—it’s not unusual for there to be zero applicants—is the Carnegie Mellon University Bagpipe Scholarship. It offers $7,000 per year to a student who intends to major in bagpiping. (Andrew Carnegie loved bagpipe music, you see, and even brought a personal piper with him from Scotland when he emigrated to the U.S.) On the plus side of this offer, you get a kilt subsidy. On the minus side, class is held in the basement of the building due to the vehement complaints from neighboring classrooms upstairs. (Sorry, no link available. Yeah, like any of you would’ve clicked on it anyway.)

5. Creative Students at David Letterman’s Alma Mater
Because David Letterman was a C student at Ball State University, he established a scholarship at his alma mater that is awarded to telecommunications majors based strictly on the creativity of a submitted project, rather than a student’s GPA. The top prize is $10,000; previous winners have included a satirical script based on the novel Pride and Prejudice and a stop-action animated film of a penguin climbing a beer bottle.

6. People Looking for Unique Prom Attire
If you don’t mind looking like a dweeb (a sticky dweeb, to boot) at your high school prom, you could earn yourself a $3,000 scholarship check from the folks who make Duck Brand Duct Tape. You and your date simply need to fashion your prom outfits completely out of duct tape and then submit a color photo for consideration. Oh, and you have to actually wear those outfits to the dance, too.

7. Aspiring Children’s Television Stars
The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences awards three $10,000 scholarships annually in the name of the late, great Fred Rogers to college students pursuing a career in children’s media. Remember all those puppet shows you used to put on in the garage? Maybe that was an early indicator of your special talent…you are special, y’know.

8. Twins Who Don’t Hate Each Other
If you happen to be a twin and don’t mind spending an additional four years with your sibling, several schools offer scholarships for twins. Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Georgia, waives tuition for one twin when both enroll, Lake Erie College in Painsville, Ohio, offers half-off tuition for each twin, and Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, has 45% discounts available on tuition for female twins only.

Source

Colleges with the smartest students

Think there's a difference between the most selective colleges and those with the smartest students?

That's what Lumosity, a cognitive training site run by Lumos Labs, sought to find out with a series of games designed to test America's leading higher education institutions.

After realizing that national and global rankings for colleges each year were based almost solely on standardized test performances and information about the school's resources (including endowment per student, student-faculty ratio, and graduation rates), Dr. Daniel Sternberg at Lumosity took it upon himself to discover which institution really had the smartest individuals.

He and his team tested 60,000 students at over 400 colleges and universities to play games that measured various cognitive skills including attention, memory, speed of processing, problem solving, and flexibility.

The study even broke down the college rankings by cognitive area, finding that Dartmouth College performed the highest on attention, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology was the best with memory, Harvard students ranked highest at speed of processing, and that Yale students performed best on flexibility.

The overall winner was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the school with the best problem solvers. MIT has consistently ranked highly on best-of-schools lists, and was recently named the top university in the world by the QS World University Rankings list, beating last year's winner the University of Cambridge as well as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton for the title.

The top 20 schools are below. Click here to view the complete Lumosity study.

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2. Harvard University

3. Stanford University

4. Northwestern University

5. Yale University

6. Washington University in St Louis

7. Dartmouth College

8. Wellesley College

9. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

10. Duke University

11. College of William and Mary

12. University of Pennsylvania

13. University of Portland

14. University of California-Berkeley

15. Vanderbilt University

16. University of Chicago

17. Carnegie Mellon University

18. Macalester College

19. Worcester Polytechnic Institute

20. University of California-Los Angeles

Source

Giveaway

Let The Tide Pull Your Dreams Ashore is having a great giveaway for a Graphic Image personalized planner! As a busy law student, planners are a big necessity. These are simple but stylish.

Prison food vs. school lunches

School lunch is a lot like prison food, only worse. An infographic created by Good Magazine comparing the average detention grub with the average elementary school fare shows a very similar tray breakdown.

Both offer a calorie count of around 1400, and both cost little more than $2.60 per person per day. The big difference, according to their research, sourced from national statistics, is that prisoners get a little more bang for the buck.

The average prison meal and the average elementary school lunch both consist of one bread item, one starch item and one beverage. But kids get an ounce less meat and they're usually skimped on either veggies or fruits. Overall prisoners have more options and a little more heft to their meal.

It's not the first time school and prison food have gone head to head. Institutional food, be it prisons or schools, often share the same mass distributers. (Aramark is one of the biggest food service providers for both prisons and schools.) They've also shared the same grub. Last month, the Massachusetts Department of Education donated thousands of cases of expired school lunches to prisons, from fruit and cheese to chicken. Much of it was rejected by prisons since it had passed the expiration date. But the only reason it was being offered to prisoners in the first place was because schools were under fire for feeding students the same past-due food.

Thanks to several national campaigns school food programs are under pressure to expand their healthy options for kids, but some initiatives take a correctional approach to curbing obesity. In San Antonio, school cafeterias are installing surveillance cameras that will snap photos of the contents of each student's tray to increase awareness about what kids are eating. Here's an idea: skip the cameras and just watch a marathon of "Locked-Up". With the cash saved, go buy students some veggies.

Source

Learn Korean in 15 minutes?

Boston principal dresses up like Lady Gaga

An elementary school principal in the Boston public school district showed up for work Tuesday wearing a Lady Gaga costume and prepared to milk a cow. He was not paying homage to the pop singer or to dairy farmers – he was making good on a promise he had made to his students.

With Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick in tow, Justin Vernon, the principal of Roger Clap Innovation School in Dorchester, Mass., challenged his 170 students in kindergarten through fifth grade last October to read a combined 10,000 books by the end of the academic year. But before the students accepted Vernon's challenge, they wanted something in return.

"They pushed back on me, saying 'If we're going to have to read all these books to meet our goal, you've got to do something for us," Vernon said. "Somehow I got stuck with dressing up as Lady Gaga and milking a cow."

The students exceeded their goal by 3,000 books, averaging more than 75 books per student, Vernon said. Books read for class and read aloud by parents counted toward the total.

To hold students, of which nearly three-quarters qualify for free or reduced-price lunch and more than a fifth receive special education services, accountable for their home reading claims, teachers had them fill out logs for their parents to sign. Kenny Jervis, whose son Nigel is in kindergarten daughter Sofia is in third grade at Clap, said his children took the "really took the challenge to heart," even competing among themselves.

By June, Nigel had read 200 books, including three from C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia series, and Sofia reached 150 books – mostly longer than Nigel's, her father was quick to add. Nigel and Sofia's reading "really blossomed" over the course of the challenge, he said.

First-grade teacher Tim Apple said the school's weekly town-hall meetings, at which each grade touted its book tally, helped keep students motivated. A field trip to an IMAX theater to see an underwater documentary celebrated 5,000-book milestone. But Apple said the promise of seeing their principal dressed as the often ostentatious diva was a key factor driving students to read.

"Students were always asking 'Is he really going to do it?'" Apple said.

The answer to that question became clear Tuesday morning, when a tall figure in heels, snug black tights and a black dress emerged from a stretch limousine outside Clap. Adorned with a necklace, tiara, oversized sunglasses and plenty of makeup, Vernon made his way toward a cow in the middle of an athletic field behind the school.

Students, some accompanied by parents, swarmed around their glamorously clad principal and chanted "Milk the cow!" until Vernon, pulling back his long blonde wig, knelt down and delivered on the second half of his promise.

No word yet on whether Clap has plans for a summer reading contest.

Source