by David Cyranoski, Natasha Gilbert, Heidi Ledford, Anjali Nayar & Mohammed YahiaThe world is producing more PhDs than ever before. Is it time to stop?Scientists who attain a PhD are rightly proud — they have gained entry to an academic elite. But it is not as elite as it once was. The number of science doctorates earned each year grew by nearly 40% between 1998 and 2008, to some 34,000, in countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The growth shows no sign of slowing: most countries are building up their higher-education systems because they see educated workers as a key to economic growth (see ‘The rise of doctorates’). But in much of the world, science PhD graduates may never get a chance to take full advantage of their qualifications.In some countries, including the United States and Japan, people who have trained at great length and expense to be researchers confront a dwindling number of academic jobs, and an industrial sector unable to take up the slack. Supply has outstripped demand and, although few PhD holders end up unemployed, it is not clear that spending years securing this high-level qualification is worth it for a job as, for example, a high-school teacher. In other countries, such as China and India, the economies are developing fast enough to use all the PhDs they can crank out, and more — but the quality of the graduates is not consistent. Only a few nations, including Germany, are successfully tackling the problem by redefining the PhD as training for high-level positions in careers outside academia. Here, Nature examines graduate-education systems in various states of health.Read the rest of the story on Nature.
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The Atlantic: When Neighborhoods Gentrify, Why Aren’t Their Public Schools...
The ups and downs of gentrification have been chronicled thoroughly, but one of its consequences hasn’t been widely addressed: the effect on neighborhood schools when a critical mass of well-educated, well-off people move in. Gentrification usually brings some benefits with it to a neighborhood, such as more attention from the city—as Spike Lee noted, suddenly the trash gets picked up! But does an influx of children from wealthier families make a positive difference to local public schools?
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Psychology Today: Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges
By Peter GrayA year ago I received an invitation from the head of Counseling Services at a major university to join faculty and administrators for discussions about how to deal with the decline in resilience among students. At the first meeting, we learned that emergency calls to Counseling had more than doubled over the past five years. Students are increasingly seeking help for, and apparently having emotional crises over, problems of everyday life.
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Preparing prisoners for gainful employment upon reentry
From The Hechinger Report
Why Americans should not be coming up with their own solutions to teacher training issues
A look at British Columbia, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore
by MARC TUCKER
Professional development of American teachers costs up to $18 billion a year with at least half of that spent on workshops for teachers. But no matter how much we spend, it doesn’t seem to result in much improvement in student achievement.
Several other countries are doing a better job than the U.S.From POLITICO
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush offered a sweeping school choice-centric education plan Monday with proposals that would allow parents to spend government dollars on the pre-K program of their choice and give college students a $50,000 line of credit to pay tuition.
Bush unveiled his plan on Martin Luther King Jr. Day as he fights to stay relevant in a GOP race dominated by Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, invoking education as a civil rights issue.From: The Atlantic
by Melinda Anderson
A year after leading thousands of protesters in the famous Selma-to-Montgomery march, Martin Luther King Jr. brought his campaign to end racial discrimination to Chicago. Rather than voting rights, the target was housing inequity in a city known in 1966—and even today—as the most racially segregated in the nation.From U.S. Uncut – Detroit’s students are trying to learn while breathing in black mold and sitting in classrooms filled with buckets catching toilet water leaking through the ceiling. And that’s not even the worst part. Republican Governor Rick Snyder is not only using the financial emergency management laws to poison children in Flint; he’s doing the same thing in Detroit via the public school system, which the state has controlled for the last seven years.
Excerpt from The Atlantic
By ALANNA SCHUBACH
The irony of the cuts in funding for academic science is that the Obama administration has simultaneously made a big push for greater investment on STEM education. The president has called upon American universities to graduate 1 million more STEM majors than they do currently, a move that would ostensibly broaden the pool of applicants to graduate from science programs—the same ones that downsized in the wake of the sequester.Jan 8, 2016 · by Beth Fertig
From: WNYC
Attorneys for New York students with autism and other disabilities claimed a major victory this week, after a federal judge granted class action status to a case that alleged the denial of education services. The ruling could affect more than 20,000 New York City students.
The original plaintiffs, eight New York City students and their parents, sued in 2013 to prevent the loss of services including individualized instruction, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and support staff.- edLeadersEducation Policy and GovernmentAdvocatesAround the Web
From NPR: School Arts Advocates Cheer New Education Measure
In this country, President Obama signed a new education law last week. Much of the focus has been on testing and a debate over whether the law moved too far away from rigorous standards. But one group celebrating the law advocates for arts education. NPR’s Elizabeth Blair explains why.
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ZDNet: Startup Springboard bets mentors can improve online education success...
By Larry Dignan Springboard, a startup that aims to put a human twist on online education, has raised $1.7 million and has a few big name backers including LinkedIn co-founder …