Food for Thought: Building a High-Quality School Choice Market
Source: Education Sector

The neighborhoods of Southeast Washington, D.C., are among the poorest in the city. There, the grocery stores, banks, restaurants, and other institutions that suburbanites take for granted have long been in short supply. In recent years, however, government and nonprofit agencies have begun turning things for the better. A brand new, government-subsidized shopping center recently opened on Alabama Avenue, providing one of the few full-service grocery stores in the area, along with a new sit-down restaurant and mainstream bank branch.
But reformers are finding that such initiatives won’t fix decades of market dysfunction overnight. Not far from the new Super Giant grocery store and Wachovia Bank are older businesses that continue to draw a steady stream of customers—corner stores that sell little fresh food, fast-food outlets that serve meals low in nutritional value, and tax preparation firms and check-cashing outlets that charge high fees. Markets are complicated, and improving them requires more than just creating incentives for new providers to set up shop.

+ Full Report (PDF; 648 KB) (Source: Docuticker)

The NSDUH Report - - Nonmedical Use of Adderall® among Full-Time College Students
Source: Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration

+ Adderall® is the brand name for an amphetamine formulation that is prescribed for the treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and for narcolepsy. Under the Controlled Substance Act, Adderall® is classified as a Schedule II drug because of its high potential for abuse and dependence. Data for this report on nonmedical use of Adderall® was collected as part of SAMHSA’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Nonmedical use is defined as use without a prescription belonging to the respondent or use that occurred simply for the experience or feeling the drug caused.
+ Among persons aged 18 to 22, full-time college students were twice as likely to use Adderall® nonmedically in the past year as those who had not been in college at all or were only part-time students.
+ Nearly 90% of the full-time college students who had used Adderall® nonmedically in the past year also were past month binge alcohol drinkers and more than half were heavy alcohol users. Students under the legal drinking age who used Adderall® were also more likely to be binge drinkers or heavy drinkers than their underage counterparts who had not used Adderall® nonmedically.
+ Full-time college students who had used Adderall® nonmedically in the past year were more likely to be polydrug users in the past year than their non Adderall® using counterparts, that is, both drink alcohol and use other drugs.
+ In the past year, full-time college students who had used Adderall® nonmedically in the past year were more likely to have used illicit drugs than their non Adderall® using counterparts: almost 3 times more likely to use marijuana (79.9% vs 27.2%), 8 times more likely to use cocaine (28.9% vs. 3.6%), 8 times more likely to use tranquilizers nonmedically (24.5% vs. …

Charts You Can Trust — Ladders of Success: Keeping Teacher Pay on Schedule
Source: Education Sector

When the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, held their annual meeting in 2008, candidate Barack Obama advocated changing the teacher compensation structure from the traditional “single salary schedule”—based only on years of experience and academic credentials—to one reflecting a teacher’s performance in the classroom. But Obama’s mention of pay for performance elicited boos from the crowd. And similar proposals to restructure teacher pay schemes have created controversy in cities like Washington, D.C., fueled by disagreements over a reliable means to measure an individual teacher’s performance and the fact that many teachers teach subjects that are not measurable by standardized tests or other objective instruments. Teacher pay should be more closely tied to an individual teacher’s effectiveness in the classroom than it is today, and pay for performance can be one way to achieve that goal. But policymakers also have another option: changing the way compensation is tied to experience and credentials.
Not all single salary schedules are the same. Some are much better than others in reflecting what research tells us about how teachers gain effectiveness over the life of a career. Research shows that teachers have steep learning curves—they become much more effective in their first few years on the job and then level off. And a great deal of research shows the link between teacher effectiveness and educational credentials to be minor or nonexistent. A district designing their salary structure based on these findings can more effectively attract and reward high-quality teachers without increasing the overall amount of money spent on compensation. (Source: Docuticker)

Peter Wayner—author of a smart survey of the e-book scene, mentioning our Paul Biba—is out with another good read.
A Book Author Wonders How to Reduce Piracy is the new headline in the New York Times.
Pete is vexed that students are pirating his tech-related books—for example, Disappearing Cryptography—and I sympathize. Here’s my advice: Go after the schools, from K-12 through the post-graduate level, but use the carrot, not the stick.
I agree with Pete that justifications for piracy are off-target. Screen tech keeps improving, for example, so pirated e-books will be less and less viable as a means of advertising p-books. This is fine now in many situations, but it’s hardly a sustainable approach for the long term. And what to do if you don’t want to write a series—and if you doubt that your particular readers will want as high a level of interactivity as the readers of SF books might? You lack the same range of extras to sell beyond the basic text. It’s the main show, with nothing directly related to follow, especially if your next books may be on different topics! Reader loyalty to authors extends only so far.
Does this mean you should be a copyright hawk? No. In the case  of textbooks and others used by schools at all levels, I would not recommend an RIAAish approach of turning these educators into copyright cops. But there is a better option. Why not push for federal legislation that in one way or another would encourage schools to build textbooks into the cost of tuition? Perhaps they would get more federal aid.
Unwittingly Pete himself may have made an argument for such an strategy. In his blog he wrote:
Student complain that textbooks cost too much and I certainly agree. Books easily cost more than 0 and some cost more than 0. While this sounds outrageous compared to a best seller, it’s hard to make much money in this business even at that price. …

AFT Releases New Report on Academic Workforce
Source: American Federation of Teachers

Year by year, various federal data sets are released, and document the steady growth of adjunct positions and decline of tenure-track jobs in the academic work force.
In an attempt to draw more attention to these shifts over time, the American Federation of Teachers is today releasing a 10-year analysis of the data, showing just how much the tenure-track professor has disappeared. The overall number of faculty and instructor slots grew from 1997 to 2007, but nearly two-thirds of that growth was in “contingent” positions — meaning those off of the tenure track. Over all, those jobs increased from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters of instructional positions.
The growth in these jobs — and the decline in tenure-track positions — was found in all sectors of higher education, but was most apparent at community colleges. However, one of the most notable shifts was at public four-year colleges and universities, where over the period studied, tenured and tenure-track faculty members went from being a slight majority to less than 40 percent of faculty members. At the end point of the AFT study, tenured and tenure-track faculty members do not make a majority of faculties in any sector.

+ Full Report (PDF; 1.85 MB) (Source: Docuticker)

The Fiscal Effects of Investing in High-Quality Preschool Programs
Source: Brookings Institution

Randomized treatment-control experiments suggest large returns to investments in prekindergarten education. Several studies consider the social benefits of such investments, but none have considered the full potential gains to government budgets. We embed estimates of the effects of two model programs in a growth model of the U.S. economy to judge the impact they would have on federal, state and local government budgets. Assuming a 3 percent discount rate we find that both programs would pay back in reduced costs and increased revenues in excess of three-fourths of their costs within a seventy-five year budget window. Both programs would eventually reap a positive return for government budgets if policymakers were sufficiently patient.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 210 KB) (Source: Docuticker)

I am a 56 year old grandfather with what my grandkids would feel is a dinosaur like approach and skill set when it comes to technology. One has to face the facts as hard as such realities can be! Nevertheless I have, in my ponderous dinosaur fashion, been delving into the latest technologies impacting on [...] (Source: Education.au Blog)