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How Slavery Shaped America's Oldest And Most Elite Colleges : Code Switch. Hide captionAn early flier for an event at King's College —” which would later become Columbia University — included an advertisement for a slave auction. John Minchillo/AP An early flier for an event at King's College —” which would later become Columbia University — included an advertisement for a slave auction.

A few years ago, Brown University commissioned a study of its own historical connection to the Atlantic slave trade. The report found that the Brown family — the wealthy Rhode Island merchants for whom the university was named — were "not major slave traders, but they were not strangers to the business either. " So you might think that Brown — or the College of Rhode Island, as it was known in the early days — would figure prominently into Craig Steven Wilder's new book Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities.

And while Brown does make an appearance, so does Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Yale, Dartmouth, Pennsylvania, and William and Mary. Prison-Industrial Complex? Maybe It's Time For A Schools-Industrial Complex. California has built 23 prisons since 1980. In the same period, the University of California system has opened one new campus. And although California's prison population has declined in recent years, the state's spending per prisoner has increased five times faster than its spending per K-12 student in the last two decades. California has more than 130,000 prisoners, a huge increase from the state's 1980 prison population of about 25,000. Prisons cost California taxpayers close to $10 billion, compared with $604 million in 1980. While some say the additional spending is needed for rehabilitation services, they also note that the prisons are draining scarce funds from education and other key areas. This week, Californians who hope to see the state scale down its prison spending were dismayed to learn that Gov.

But Brown's fellow Democrats in the state Senate have thrown their support behind an alternate plan. Also on HuffPost: Low income college graduates excluded from elite institutions, upward mobility. Charts: Racial Polarization Increasing in Higher Education. College attendance rates for African-American and Latino students have been increasing steadily in recent years. But here's the bad news that comes along with that: those students are mostly attending non-selective four-year colleges and community colleges, while whites are increasingly attending prestigious colleges and universities, the Washington Post reports. A study released Wednesday by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found that between 1995 and 2009, college enrollment more than doubled for Latinos and jumped 73 percent for African Americans, while only increasing 15 percent for whites.

During that period, 80 percent of white college freshman enrolled in the nation's top 468 colleges, while only 13 percent of Latinos and nine percent of African-Americans went to those selective four-year schools. More than two-thirds of African Americans and almost three-quarters of Hispanics went to non-selective schools. Look: The Best New Argument for Affirmative Action - Jordan Weissmann. White students are now more overrepresented at top U.S. colleges than in 1995. Affirmative action fans, get ready to meet your new favorite talking point. America's top colleges have always been pretty pasty white places. But you might have been under the impression that, over time, their campuses were coming to look a bit more like the country has a whole, that they were at least making some measurable, collective progress on the diversity front.

Not lately, it turns out. According to a surprising new report from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, white students are now more overrepresented at the most selective U.S. colleges than they were in 1995. Yep, that's right. Using Department of Education data, the Georgetown team pieced together enrollment statistics from the three most selective tiers of U.S. colleges, as ranked by Barron's, then compared them to Census figures on the the country's 18-to-24-year-old population.

Tea Party Groups In Tennessee Demand Textbooks Overlook U.S. Founder's Slave-Owning History. A little more than a year after the conservative-led state board of education in Texas approved massive changes to its school textbooks to put slavery in a more positive light, a group of Tea Party activists in Tennessee has renewed its push to whitewash school textbooks. The group is seeking to remove references to slavery and mentions of the country's founders being slave owners. According to reports, Hal Rounds, the Fayette County attorney and spokesman for the group, said during a recent news conference that there has been "an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.

" During the news conference more than two dozen Tea Party activists handed out material that said, "Neglect and outright ill will have distorted the teaching of the history and character of the United States. And that further teaching would also include that "the Constitution created a Republic, not a Democracy. " For poor children, metro Atlanta holds lousy odds of success | Get Schooled. Few long-time education watchers in Georgia will be surprised that children from poor families stand a better chance of attaining middle-class status in Seattle than metro Atlanta. Despite all the rhetoric, the state continues to downplay the importance of shoring up an education system that has never been first-rate.

And it doesn't look like that is about to change any time soon. As today's MyAJC.com reports: Grappling with steep budget cuts, school districts throughout Georgia are slashing days --- and in some cases full weeks --- from their school calendars to keep costs down. A handful of small, rural districts in the state have even taken the extreme step of shortening the school week to four days.The shift to fewer days runs counter to calls from a growing number of academic and policy experts to move in the opposite direction. The U.S. Department of Education is backing a pilot program to add 300 hours of instructional time to 40 schools in five states. The study stated: Unequal Classrooms: What Online Education Cannot Teach - The Conversation. Students at CUNY, where I teach, are often the first in their families to attend college, recent immigrants, or from low-income families, and sometimes all three. As a philosophy professor, I often require that my students defend a position in front of the classroom.

For many, this is the first time they have spoken in front of a crowd of students from differing socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. The experience is terrifying, but as one Latina student told me, even though her face still “lights up red” when she speaks, she is now able to raise her hand and contribute to class discussions. By the time that student graduates and walks into her first job interview, she will have learned to manage her fear of speaking her mind. For students from low-income families who manage to overcome the tough odds, college is the first place where they will be asked to defend a position and to engage in vigorous intellectual debate.

Jennifer M. Return to Top. Mom Sentenced to Jail For Seeking a Better Education For Her Children. Thenation : INFOGRAPHIC: It's not just... Beauty School Students Left With Broken Promises and Large Debts. The cost of child poverty: $500 billion a year. The United States has the second-highest child poverty rate among the world’s richest 35 nations, and the cost in economic and educational outcomes is half a trillion dollars a year, according to a new report by the Educational Testing Service.

The report, called “Poverty and Education, Finding the Way Forward,” says that 22 percent of the nation’s children live in relative poverty, with only Romania having a higher rate in the group of 35 nations. (Next are Latvia, Bulgaria, Spain, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Japan and Portugal, it says; the country with the lowest child poverty rate is Iceland, and the second lowest is Finland.) The report notes, though, that the official U.S. poverty rate is incomplete, and that other data show that 48 percent of the population had incomes in 2011 that are considered inadequate or not livable.

(Relative poverty rates refer to people with incomes below 50 percent of the poverty threshold.) The report was written by Richard J. American Dinosaurs: What's the Matter With Health Care and Education? - Marc Tucker. Welcome to America's biggest long-term challenge: Our medical and education industries are a two-headed hydra of economic inefficiency, over-eating our resources and under-serving our needy Reuters The problems with our nation's health care system are of course very different from the challenges facing our national education system.

But when you look under the hood, you could make a strong argument that the problems are actually very much the same. Consider the structure of American health care over the past few decades. One can think of it as serving four levels of clients: those with no insurance, those with Medicare or Medicaid, those with employer-provided insurance, and those wealthy enough to pay for all their health care services in cash, including concierge services. Most of those who were uninsured went without any health care services much of the time. Now consider our public education system. Yet funding for our public education system works differently. So, what is to be done? How America's 2-Tiered Education System Is Perpetuating Inequality - Emily Chertoff. President Obama, with Eduardo Padrón (left), receives an honorary Associates of Science degree from Miami-Dade College in 2011. (Larry Downing/Reuters) In 2006, Amherst College made a decision that administrators at some other schools considered radical.

The critics said it would dent the value of the school's degree, or force it to "lower its standards. " The school's then-president pushed back by saying that Amherst needed to reach a broader group of students. What was the decision? Seven years later, Amherst president emeritus Anthony Marx argues claims the program has worked brilliantly, just as his administration had expected. If other top-tier schools reached out to such students the way Amherst does, maybe more students would be able to transfer.

And so, because community colleges overwhelmingly serve low-income people and minorities, the higher education system remains two-tiered -- an arrangement those invited to the think tank to discuss the report called "separate but equal. " Why Isn't Better Education Giving Women More Power? - Garance Franke-Ruta. Walter Newton In her new book, Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, recounts a warning she delivered to Harvard Business School students in 2011. “About one-third of the women in this audience will be working full-time” in 15 years, she told them. “And almost all of you will be working for the guy you are sitting next to.” Surveying the stubborn gender inequalities of the early-21st-century workplace, Sandberg has written what might best be described as a cross between a feminist treatise and an airport business book, in which she advocates for structural changes to make corporate America more hospitable to women—particularly mothers.

She also issues a bracing call for women to propel themselves ever higher, take more risks, speak up, negotiate, and pull a seat up to the table. But for all the persuasive parts of her argument, a vexing contradiction remains mostly unaddressed. Forty years ago, Title IX mandated equality for women. Summer learning loss: Summer vacation hurts kids in school and is especially bad for the poor. Photo by Christian J. Stewart/iStockphoto/Thinkstock There are few more cherished nostrums in American life than the importance of equal opportunities. Unfortunately, one of them is the importance of summer vacation. It’s a cheap way of doing something nice for teachers, but summer vacation is a disaster for poor children and their parents, creating massive avoidable inequities in life outcomes and seriously undereducating the population.

The country claims to take schooling seriously, but the school calendar says otherwise. The entire issue tends to vanish from public debate, because the educated, affluent people who run the debate don’t particularly suffer from it. But these days, Camp Winnebago is charging $11,550 for a full eight-week session. The burden on parents is segmented by income, and the impact on children is as well.

It’s not clear whether Baltimore’s results apply to the national population, but it’s shocking that impacts of this scale exist anywhere. U.S. Higher-Education System Perpetuates White Privilege, Report Says - Students. By Casey McDermott Colleges and universities have succeeded in attracting more underrepresented-minority students, but that increased access for black and Hispanic students has been accompanied by increasing campus polarization on the basis of race and ethnicity, says a report released on Wednesday by Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce.

The result, it says, is a system in which elite selective colleges enroll predominantly white students while black and Hispanic students, even high-achieving ones, largely attend open-access institutions. Because the latter group of colleges spends less on instruction and sees lower shares of students through to graduation, higher education has thus become a "passive agent" in perpetuating white privilege, says the report, "Separate and Unequal: How Higher Education Reinforces the Intergenerational Reproduction of White Racial Privilege.

" The implications of those enrollment patterns are profound, the report argues.