eSchool News | New York Times page 2

Women gain in some STEM fields, but not computer science

A few weeks ago, I wrote about ways to get more women interested in computer science, The New York Times reports. One of the points that came up frequently in my reporting is that some other STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) have actually been quite successful attracting more women. A report this week from the National Science Foundation lays out these trends nicely. As you can see, a majority of bachelor’s degrees in some STEM fields — psychology, biosciences, social sciences — were actually given to women in recent years. And women’s participation in these fields has also risen, on net, since 1991, even if there has been some erosion in biosciences in recent years. Women receive less than half of physical sciences degrees, but they earn a much higher share than they did two decades ago…

IBM to announce more powerful Watson via the internet

The New York Times reports: Welcome to the age of supercomputing for everyone. On Thursday IBM will announce that Watson, the computing system that beat all the humans on “Jeopardy!” two years ago, will be available in a form more than twice as powerful via the internet. Companies, academics and individual software developers will be able to use it at a small fraction of the previous cost, drawing on IBM’s specialists in fields like computational linguistics to build machines that can interpret complex data and better interact with humans…

Children thrive in rural Colombia’s flexible schools

Myriam Mazzo is a teacher in the central Colombian city of Armenia, a rural town of about 300,000 people nestled in the mountains southwest of Bogotá, The New York Times reports. In her school’s single classroom, she teaches children of various ages and grade levels who work in small groups at their own pace. Rather than standing by a blackboard at the front of the class, Ms. Mazzo moves among them, serving as a guide more than an instructor. Using this method, she has taught generations of children, the sons and daughters of local farmers and coffee growers, to read, write and do math. Her primary school students are often among the first in their families ever to have set foot in a classroom…

In public education, edge still goes to rich

“There aren’t many things that are more important to that idea of economic mobility — the idea that you can make it if you try — than a good education,” President Obama told students at the State University of New York in Buffalo in August. It is hardly a partisan belief, The New York Times reports. About a decade ago, on signing the No Child Left Behind Act, President George W. Bush argued that the nation’s biggest challenge was to ensure that “every single child, regardless of where they live, how they’re raised, the income level of their family, every child receive a first-class education in America.” This consensus is comforting. It provides a solution everyone can believe in, whether the problem is income inequality, racial marginalization or the stagnation of the middle class…

New milestone emerges: Baby’s first iPhone app

Charlotte Deutsch, who will be 2 years old next month, has a look of pure delight as she swipes the screen of her mother’s old iPhone, and finds a picture of herself, The New York Times reports. “Baby Chacha!” she crows, swiping again to encounter another treasure. “Dada!” On the new iPhone — the one her mother actually uses — her big sister, Izzy, 4, is utterly intent on “Dora’s Ballet Adventure,” her tiny thumb tapping away at the stars and arrows. The iPhones, loaded with 20 children’s apps and some 1,200 photographs, are among the girls’ favorite playthings. “The little one loves to go through the pictures and name who’s in them, see her grandma and her nanny,” said their mother, Tina Deutsch, a former nursery school teacher. “The older one loves the games, and taking pictures. She loves the clicking sound, and if it’s blurry, she knows how to delete it.”

After misuse, a push for tutoring

A decade after it became law as a part of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, a tutoring program heralded as an academic safety net for children from low-income families in struggling schools has earned few champions — and lost many supporters, The New York Times reports. Michael Petrilli, a former Bush administration official who helped develop and promote the initiative during his four years in the federal Education Department. “It was a poorly thought-through policy, and I think it has run its course and should be allowed to die.” Under the No Child Left Behind tutoring program, underperforming schools had to set aside a portion of the federal financing they received for economically disadvantaged students to get outside tutoring. In Texas, with minimal quality control at the state level, it resulted in millions of dollars in public money going to companies that at best showed little evidence of their services’ academic benefit, and at worst committed outright fraud…

Group presses for safeguards on the personal data of schoolchildren

A leading children’s advocacy group is challenging the educational technology software industry, an estimated $8 billion market, to develop national safeguards for the personal data collected about students from kindergarten through high school, The New York Times reports. In a letter sent last week to 16 educational technology vendors — including Google Apps for Education, Samsung School, Scholastic and Pearson Schoolnet — Common Sense Media, an advocacy group in San Francisco that rates children’s videos and apps for age appropriateness, urged the industry to use student data only for educational purposes, and not for marketing products to children or their families…

Turning education upside down

Three years ago, Clintondale High School, just north of Detroit, became a “flipped school” — one where students watch teachers’ lectures at home and do what we’d otherwise call “homework” in class, The New York Times reports. Teachers record video lessons, which students watch on their smartphones, home computers or at lunch in the school’s tech lab. In class, they do projects, exercises or lab experiments in small groups while the teacher circulates. Clintondale was the first school in the United States to flip completely — all of its classes are now taught this way. Now flipped classrooms are popping up all over. Havana High School outside of Peoria, Ill., is flipping, too, after the school superintendent visited Clintondale. The principal of Clintondale says that some 200 school officials have visited…

Turning education upside down

The New York Times reports: Three years ago, Clintondale High School, just north of Detroit, became a “flipped school” — one where students watch teachers’ lectures at home and do what we’d otherwise call “homework” in class. Teachers record video lessons, which students watch on their smartphones, home computers or at lunch in the school’s tech lab. In class, they do projects, exercises or lab experiments in small groups while the teacher circulates. Clintondale was the first school in the United States to flip completely — all of its classes are now taught this way. Now flipped classrooms are popping up all over. Havana High School outside of Peoria, Ill., is flipping, too, after the school superintendent visited Clintondale. The principal of Clintondale says that some 200 school officials have visited…

Why are there still so few women in science?

Last summer, researchers at Yale published a study proving that physicists, chemists and biologists are likely to view a young male scientist more favorably than a woman with the same qualifications, The New York Times reports. Presented with identical summaries of the accomplishments of two imaginary applicants, professors at six major research institutions were significantly more willing to offer the man a job. If they did hire the woman, they set her salary, on average, nearly $4,000 lower than the man’s. Surprisingly, female scientists were as biased as their male counterparts. The new study goes a long way toward providing hard evidence of a continuing bias against women in the sciences. Only one-fifth of physics Ph.D.’s in this country are awarded to women, and only about half of those women are American; of all the physics professors in the United States, only 14 percent are women…