Elizabeth Green has a must-read feature in this weeks' New York Times, "Building a Better Teacher."  There are several worthwhile parts focusing on effective techniques, but I particularly enjoyed the discussion of what makes teaching different from learning:

Mathematicians need to understand a problem only for themselves; math teachers need both to know the math and to know how 30 different minds might understand (or misunderstand) it. Then they need to take each mind from not getting it to mastery. And they need to do this in 45 minutes or less. This was neither pure content knowledge nor what educators call pedagogical knowledge, a set of facts independent of subject matter, like Lemov’s techniques. It was a different animal altogether. Ball named it Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, or M.K.T. She theorized that it included everything from the “common” math understood by most adults to math that only teachers need to know, like which visual tools to use to represent fractions (sticks? blocks? a picture of a pizza?) or a sense of the everyday errors students tend to make when they start learning about negative numbers. At the heart of M.K.T., she thought, was an ability to step outside of your own head. “Teaching depends on what other people think,” Ball told me, “not what you think.”

Read the whole thing.

Reports of strong growth in the fourth quarter of 2009 were a welcome addition to the positive growth in the prior quarter, but I remain concerned about the sustainability of that growth.  The recession took down the financially weakest firms and weakened the rest.  Without robust growth in the rest of the economy, we will see the financially weakest of the remaining firms contract as well.  My home institution of Dartmouth is a case in point. 

For those not following the local news, the College has tasked itself with trimming $100 million from its annual expenditures over a two-year window.  The number comes from the simple arithmetic of having lost a billion dollars of endowment (which, at a 5% spending rate, is $50 million) and from making a prudent decision to reduce its spending rate down by 2 percentage points to about 5% (creating the other $50 million, when applied to the remining $2.5 billion).  The College's president has stated, correctly, that this cannot happen without reductions in staffing. 

Since the No Child Left Behind Act was passed, to mixed reviews and with mixed success, I have been thinking about how the Republican Party should promote its education agenda of more choice and less control by teacher unions and other non-parental groups.  This is an agenda that I support.  I think the best idea for the Party to espouse, particularly at the Federal level, would be something that moved away from federal control (like NCLB exerted) and that does not get stuck in the details of how education is provided, which is where debates about vouchers and charter schools eventually end up.

What I have in mind is much simpler -- modify the federal tax code to give families that remove their children from public schools and place them in an accredited private school a tax benefit from having done so.  The tax benefit should be that the families get to claim as an income tax deduction the lesser of what they pay to the private school and the average per-pupil expenditures in the district where they would be entitled to enroll their children.  This is the financial burden they are removing from the state or locality. 

If a scho

This seems like a great program that is long overdue, and not just at an engineering-focused school like MIT.  The crux of the matter:

“A lot of MIT graduates go out into the real world and fall on their faces because they don’t know how to work within a company,’’ Goldhaber said. “They expect their bosses to be impressed by their creativity, but they don’t deliver the product on time.’’

Incorporating leadership development into an undergraduate curriculum is something that I have been focusing on quite a bit in my day job.  For more, read here.  Comments, whether on the blog or by e-mail, are welcome and encouraged.

Two new NBER working papers on a similar theme came across my inbox this morning:

The Rug Rat Race

After three decades of decline, the amount of time spent by parents on childcare in the U.S. began to rise dramatically in the mid-1990s. Moreover, the rise in childcare time was particularly pronounced among college-educated parents. Why would highly educated parents increase the amount of time they allocate to childcare at the same time that their own market returns have skyrocketed? After finding no empirical support for standard explanations, such as selection or income effects, we offer a new explanation. We argue that increased competition for college admissions may be an important source of these trends. The number of college-bound students has surged in recent years, coincident with the rise in time spent on childcare. The resulting “cohort crowding” has led parents to compete more aggressively for college slots by spending increasing amounts of time on college preparation. Our theoretical model shows that, since college-educated parents have a comparative advantage in college preparation, rivalry leads them to increase preparation time by a greater amount than less-educated parents. We provide empirical support for our explanation with a comparison of trends between the U.S. and Canada, and a comparison across racial groups in the U.S.

The beginnings of an idea: as health care reform discussions heat up in the Senate, policy makers will have to consider how a "public option" will interact in a market place with a number of smaller private plans.  It struck me this morning, in reading about the continued woes of the California public university system, that higher education provides an example of an arena in which public and private options compete with each other.  Are there lessons that can be drawn from this example?

While other states had struggled, sometimes all the way to the Supreme Court, with racial preferences in public college admissions, I thought that the Texas plan was a good one.  In brief, it enforced geographic diversity in admissions and worked to create racial and other forms of diversity in a race-neutral manner because many characteristics related to socio-economic disadvantage vary geographically.  The plan allows any student who finishes in the top 10 percent of his/her high school class to attend one of the public colleges in the state.  This most affects the flagship school, University of Texas, which would otherwise have the freedom to be very selective in its admissions.  Read about the details of the plan and the state legislature's recent decisions about scaling it back, in this post at Inside Higher Education.

The Washington Post reports today that many private colleges have admitted more applicants than usual this year:

After years of increasing selectivity driven by bumper crops of strong applicants, many private college officials are concerned that more students will turn to public universities, which are less expensive. As of today's deadline to notify most applicants, many schools have sent out more acceptance letters and e-mails, built bigger waiting lists and pumped more money into financial aid to lure students to their campuses.

The bottom line: It will be slightly easier to gain admission to some private colleges this year, officials said.

There is a fascinating post at DealBook by Steven Davidoff that takes a peek behind the curtain of high finance in higher education, using the Harvard University endowment as an illustration.  An excerpt:

So, my numbers are rough, very rough estimates — but the problem is apparent. In the short term, unless it boosts its liquid returns, Harvard is going to have to raise a lot in donations or eat up its liquid assets to fund university obligations and its private equity commitments. This results in a spiraling decline in Harvard’s liquid assets as each year they go lower to meet these needs and more and more assets become tied up in private equity. This assumes the markets stay where they are in the next three years — there are scenarios where liquid assets do worse (like yesterday), or better, of course.

Read the whole thing.

Andrew spends his days (and I suspect many nights) at Dartmouth where, as he has reminded us before, he is on the front lines of some of the biggest education battles being waged these days.  And Pete has a very personal commitment to education that he has shared with us.

But every once in a while I get to play in this area as well.  Several years ago, for example, I briefly was a member of a special committee at a major university in the Washington, D..C. area that was trying to figure out how to reconfigure its student aid program (I left when I was told that we were not allowed to talk about how to lower spending, only loans vs. grants).

About a week ago, i participated in a forum hosted by the Committee for Education Funding in Washington so I had a chance to weigh in on what the education community -- that's everything from pre-school through graduate school -- may be facing as far as finances and the federal budget are concerned.

I listed the following: