Something troubling happened in the public schools in 2006. From 1996 to 2005, the high-school graduation rate increased by an average of close to one-third of a percentage point annually. But from 2005 to 2006, the figure dropped more than a full point. Here is a map of the states, from EPE Research, and you can see that the full variation from state to state reaches 35 percentage points. (Here is a story in Education Week on the trends.) The breakdowns by race and gender, too, are sometimes striking.

Here from Common Core is another report that has an interesting finding. It compares the curricula of some high-performing nations around the world to those of the United States and...

The Department of Education has finally announced some concrete plans to reduce the complexity of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). After years of debate that largely focused on whether to kill the beast entirely (ditching the form and using IRS data instead) or cutting off some of its limbs (cutting some of questions but keeping the form), ED is starting with a middle-of-the-road approach. In spring they’ll pilot a program to use IRS data to populate forms for students who elect to go that route, and in the meantime cut back on asking questions about assets.

While most consumers agree that simple is best, and easy, transparent programs are notably more effective in reaching the families who need aid the most, these steps are not popular with everyone. Complex forms require specific knowledge, and those who specialize in them are nearly assured of keeping their...

Newcomers were told without solicitation: That’s where they found his brother, Craig Rey, you know. Right back there under that same diagonal dumpster behind Happy, before Happy was even Happy, what seemed like forever ago, when it was still the far-left corner of an awningless, signless Russian-American social club (Razborka-Razborka!) that splashed its heavily accented contents onto an otherwise deserted strip mall’s parking lot every Friday and Saturday night.

They found Tyrone’s brother’s dead body right back there, Alphebeters would remind one another, often with a fleshy neck-twist tacked to the back of the phrase, for emphasis. Or one of those sharp, hum-like grunts residents let out sometimes, especially when actual words felt too exacting and precise for the ambiguities of other people’s pain.

That’s the same grunt neighbors offered up when they described what Teetee’...

Fie upon thee, climbing walls to damnation! We shall not succumb to thy decadent corruptions!

The two dirtiest words in higher education these days are “climbing” and “wall.” Seriously, if you spend enough time attending conferences, reading op-eds, etc., you come to realize that climbing walls have somehow come to symbolize all that ails postsecondary education in America today. People are constantly denouncing their proliferation, or loudly noting that their institution refuses to install one, or otherwise employing them as a symbol of consumerism run amok. Students today demand all manner of creature comforts, the thinking goes, forcing colleges to kowtow to their every whim, which is why college is so expensive and academic standards are in decline and the academy in general is a pale shadow of its former, greater self, back when students were students and professors were...

Texting is much in the news these days, especially after Nielsen released its finding that teens send and receive an average of 2,272 text messages each month. The New York Times reported on the phenomenon, as has The Washington Post, Scientific American, and a thousand blogs across the country.

Texting even has entered the realm of competition, with the LA U.S. National Texting Championship offering $50,000 to the winner. This year it was a young lady from Des Moines (see here), a 15-year-old who runs up 14,000 texts each month and advises parents, “let [kids] text during dinner! It pays off!” More than 250,000 tried to enter the contest this year.

It’s not all social stuff, we are assured. One thing the winner does is use texting to...

In one of the most popular novels depicting the “masculine mystique” of the 1950s, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, we hear one of the main characters worry about the difference between the fantasy of marriage and actual married life.

Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel describes a “typical” family living for “seven years in the little house on Greentree Avenue in Westport, Connecticut,” which husband and wife both “detest,” for “many reasons, none of them logical, but all of them compelling.” The crux of Wilson’s argument seems to be summed up by the line “Nothing’s wrong with our marriage, or at least nothing permanen. t. . . We can’t be like a couple of children . . . playing house forever.” By telling themselves that they can’t expect to play house forever, the couple in Sloan’s novel is trying to account for the loss of pleasure they experienced after the first few years of marriage...

[For the folks who commented on my last post, scratching their heads and squinting their eyes with reasonable bewilderment, this is just me having a little bit of fun and taking some creative liberties with unused ethnographic fieldnotes. I’m running out of inspiration for this foray into fiction, so I probably won’t post too many more installments in this “Alphebet Houses” serial. Lucky for you all.]

All told, the first twelve years of Tyrone’s life, before that celestial visitation, were pretty standard as childhoods go, ignorable in their ordinariness. Little in Tyrone’s George Washington Elementary School days hinted at the faintest sliver of precocious exceptionalism. There wasn’t anything extraordinary about him. He wasn’t a loner or an outcast. He got along fine with most kids, well enough to swap Atari videogame cartridges and to get his name hollered up four flights of...

God first whispered to Tyrone from a rickety old dumpster in the alleyway behind Happy Liquors.

The same night day, when the 12-year-old told his mother about what had happened, she would hear none of it.

“You mustn’t say things like that,” Denise yelled, staring into the blackness of his blinking eyes. “You can never, ever, say things like that, Tyrone. Do you hear me? You can’t say that kind of thing. People will start to talk bad about you.”

Their neighbors in the Alphebet Houses already considered this skinny kid from Building 16 a little off. That’s the word they used. Off. The psychological equivalent of a burned-out light bulb or a stovetop’s ice-cold back burner.

What Alphebeters liked about the word, what made it different from crazy or cuckoo or other more flamboyant choices, was that it seemed to leave space open for sanity’s future return, for the possibility ...

Photo by Flickr user Tinou Bao

Tucked into a speech to the French parliament that concentrated on the French economic mess, President Sarkozy of France said yesterday that the French are opposed to women wearing burqas (the garment worn by some Muslim women that fully covers their face and body save for a tiny space for the eyes) in France. He didn’t flinch from using strong words. The burqa is “against French values,” he said, adding that the French “cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity.” He said the burqa “is not a religious sign, it’s a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement. I want to say it solemnly: It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic.” Sarkozy thereby gave his backing to a multi-party initiative, by several...

Jennifer Howard’s article in today’s Chronicle reports on this weekend’s meeting of the Association of American University Presses. Her account is upbeat, noting that the meeting “was more a study in resilience and adaptiveness than it was a death watch.” There are encouraging signs for university presses, she says, among them the inclination of academic presses to produce and distribute e-books. The Mellon Foundation has apparently just funded a project to survey librarians to determine what they are looking for in the way of e-books, and this will be quite useful. Howard also notes that the library community turned out for the university press bash, and the two groups made nice over one another.

But I think the underlying problem was identified by the Director of Scholarly Publishing at the University of Michigan...