See? Even when it’s about love, it’s really about class: The emerging gulf is instead one of class — what demographers, sociologists and those who study the often depressing statistics about the wedded state call a “marriage gap” between the well-off and the less so. Statistics show that college educated women are more likely to […]
Education in America
Posted inEducation in America
Willful Ignorance
My friend Jen was squashed into a packed lecture hall at the University of Colorado in Boulder, scribbling notes as her sociology professor elucidated the power dynamics underlying rape, when all of a sudden her stomach and pen dropped simultaneously. Her mind flashed back to a night over a year earlier: moonlight coming through her […]
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National Embarrassment
Shakes here… It’s a record year for women in the House of Representatives. We’ve got the first ever female Speaker, and a record-setting 71 female representatives, bringing us to an astounding 16% share. That puts us at #66 on the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s list of 190 countries “classified by descending order of the percentage of women […]
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Educate Women And Save The World
By Neil the Ethical Werewolf On how to solve the biggest problems in the world, this is something worth reading: “I think it’s very important for people to recognize that the lack ofeducation for both boys and girls is a crisis in Africa,” says GeneSperling, director of the Center for Universal Education at the Councilon […]
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It’s The Economics (As Always)
Garance asks me to comment on this fascinating New York Times article laying out the strong correlations between health and education. She wonders if our health care debate isn’t “too focused on questions of coverage and disease treatment, rather than on actually improving the long-term health of the population through public health initiatives whose are […]
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EDUCATION VS. INSURANCE….
EDUCATION VS. INSURANCE. I’m a little curious to hear to what resident health policy wonk Ezra makes of this provocative article on the impact of education on health. Thoughts? The one social factor that researchers agree is consistently linked to longer lives in every country where it has been studied is education. It is more […]
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A Union Hearing
In a June, 2004, speech John Kerry brought a New Jersey crowd to its feet when he declared: “It’s time once and for all we change the laws so workers can organize when a majority of them wants to, without intimidation and interference from management.” Memorable words. But if you don’t recall them, you’re not […]
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Locked Out
The United States incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other nation in the world. The impact of the U.S. penal system, not only on the lives of prisoners but also on the nation’s civic and economic health, is far-reaching. In Punishment and Inequality in America, Bruce Western, a professor of sociology at […]
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We Don’t Need No (Traditional) Education
The New York Times Magazine’s education feature is getting some buzz today. Well worth a read, though the point is relatively simple: Poor and immigrant parents employ different parenting strategies that tend to result in worse developmental, academic, and professional outcomes (conversely, their children tend to be happier, but who cares about that?), and you […]
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Fuzzy Math
Lost amidst all the punditeering about the potential Democratic resurgence today is the possibility that an ill-advised education scheme touted by a conservative group could also find new life, as the result of a pending Colorado ballot initiative. The education funding proposal known as the “65 percent solution” is misleading at best, and seriously (perhaps […]
