Eideard

And baby makes two…

It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.

Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.

One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education…

The forces rearranging the family are as diverse as globalization and the pill. Liberal analysts argue that shrinking paychecks have thinned the ranks of marriageable men, while conservatives often say that the sexual revolution reduced the incentive to wed and that safety net programs discourage marriage…

Which gives an idea how dim and out-of-date conservatives can be. Sad. Life really is more complex than black-and-white B movies.

Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Gove has brushed aside Britain’s economic problems to propose the public donate a new royal yacht to the Queen as a mark of respect during this year’s diamond jubilee celebrations, according to a confidential letter to fellow ministers.

In the letter, which has been sent to Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary and minister overseeing the celebrations, and to the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, Gove at one point comes close to suggesting that Britain’s dire economic climate means that a large-scale celebration is required to lift the country’s spirits…

Starting bids around £60 million.

Gove, an enthusiastic monarchist, writes in the letter: “I feel strongly that the diamond jubilee gives us a tremendous opportunity to recognise in a very fitting way the Queen’s highly significant contribution to the life of the nation and the Commonwealth…”

“My suggestion would be a gift from the nation to her majesty; thinking about David Willetts’s excellent suggestion of a royal yacht, and something tangible to commemorate this momentous occasion.” He adds: “The year ahead provides an enormous opportunity to showcase the very best of Britain.”

…Gove’s office confirmed the authenticity of the letter but refused to comment.

I suppose that aficionados of monarchies and other 18th Century silliness will not consider this proposal at all out of line. It’s only silly buggers like me – and my peers in the UK – who might consider the maths and suggest that this would pay for a useful number of schoolrooms. Something that benefits a nation much more than another craptastic toy for decorative leftovers from the era of Imperial England.

The photo links to a site from the German Ministry of Education and Research

German unemployment fell more than forecast in December as exports of cars and machinery boomed and one of the mildest winters on record helped support jobs in construction…

German companies, working off orders for exports and investment goods, have so far defied a debt crisis the European Commission says risks triggering a recession in the euro area. The Munich-based Ifo institute’s measure of business confidence rose unexpectedly in December, and polls show most Germans see their job as secure even as Europe’s biggest economy slows…

Carmaker Audi AG said on Dec. 27 that it may add 1,200 jobs this year as it expands investment in electric vehicles and light-metal technology. Airbus SAS, maker of the A380 superjumbo whose German production sites include Hamburg, said Dec. 14 that it’s seeking 4,000 more workers. Of Hamburg’s largest 200 employers, 42 percent said they plan to boost hiring in 2012, the Abendblatt newspaper reported Dec. 30, citing its own poll…

Across Germany, 90 percent of voters said they view their jobs as secure, a poll of 2,000 respondents by Ernst & Young International for Die Welt newspaper published today showed. Forty percent said they expect the economy to weaken in 2012.

Compare that to any poll of economic confidence in the United States since Bill Clinton left office. Even in the period before the Great Recession – brought to us by Bush/Cheney in the White house – American workers confronted economic policies that focused solely on maximizing profits through outsourcing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Pasi Sahlberg speaking to students in Manhattan

Ever since Finland, a nation of about 5.5 million that does not start formal education until age 7 and scorns homework and testing until well into the teenage years, scored at the top of a well-respected international test in 2001 in math, science and reading, it has been an object of fascination among American educators and policy makers.

Finlandophilia only picked up when the nation placed close to the top again in 2009, while the United States ranked 15th in reading, 19th in math and 27th in science…

Critics say that Finland is an irrelevant laboratory for the United States. It has a tiny economy, a low poverty rate, a homogenous population — 5 percent are foreign-born — and socialist underpinnings (speeding tickets are calculated according to income).

One more reflection of America’s insular, ignorant, conservative politics.

Its school system has roughly the same number of teachers as New York City’s but far fewer students, 600,000 compared with New York’s 1.1 million. Finnish students speak Finnish and Swedish and usually English…the average resident checks out 17 books a year from the library…

Read the rest of this entry »

“>

Campaign billboard for Salem al-Shaali
Reuters Photo by Mahmoud Habboush

The United Arab Emirates is gearing up for the second elections in its 40-year history, but officials and candidates are finding it tough to answer a commonly asked question: why can’t everyone vote?

The UAE government in July hand-picked 129,000 voters to elect 20 of the 40 members of the Federal National Council (FNC), an advisory assembly with very limited parliamentary powers.

The pool represents 12 per cent of Emirati nationals in the Arabian Peninsula nation who will vote on September 24.

The rest of the council will be directly appointed by the Gulf Arab state, which is governed by several ruling families that transfer power from father to son, or brother to brother…

The wealthy Gulf oil nation has been virtually untouched by the Arab Spring, witnessing from afar the toppling of autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, and any hint of dissent has been swiftly stamped out.

This week’s elections are part of stated efforts by the seven emirate member states to gradually introduce representation and educate voters and candidates in its methods in an orderly way… Uh, OK.

The UAE government held seminars in the past few weeks for candidates about the rules of campaigning while at least one non-profit organization held a training course on “how to run a successful campaign.”

But many candidates still appear to lack a basic understanding of the FNC’s constitutional powers, which are virtually nil…Salem al-Shaali, a Dubai candidate, is campaigning on a platform to hand more power to the FNC.

He pledges, in an ad in Al Bayan, a Dubai newspaper, to “help FNC members obtain the right tools to be effective in the decision-making process.”

There have been growing demands by former FNC members and intellectuals to give the assembly real powers, introduce universal suffrage and fully elect the council, created in 1972…

Less than 7,000 people, or less than 1 percent of the population, were allowed to vote in the UAE’s first elections for the council in 2006.

I guess proceeding in the direction of democracy and participation of the electorate is always a positive. Still, there should be some effort for the voting franchise to move a little faster than, say, molasses on a cold day in Alaska.

RTFA for more history, anecdotal coverage from Reuters.

“Money is not the problem,” the union leader tells me brightly — and for a moment I feel far from debt-stricken, austerity-obsessed Europe…

“Women,” says the union leader, Mie Opjordsmoen of the Norwegian Confederation of Trade, a mother of two. “Norwegian women work, pay taxes and have babies. That’s our secret.”

I am touring one of the world’s last functioning welfare states and finding preconceptions shattered one by one. Unions here peg their wage demands to the needs of the export industry. Employers lobby for longer parental leave for fathers. Parties win elections promising not to cut taxes.

And gender equality is treated as a competitive advantage: By law, 40 percent of Norwegian boardroom seats are filled with women. Two male cabinet members, Knut Storberget, the justice minister, and Audun Lysbakken, the minister of equality (yes, this position exists), recently took three and four months off, respectively, to look after their latest offspring. The cost of full-time toddler child care is capped at the equivalent of about two Big Macs a day thanks to state subsidies…

“One Norwegian lesson,” Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said from his modestly sized office one afternoon, “is that if you can raise female participation, it helps the economy, birth rates and the budget…”

All told, family policy, including a system of child care from a guaranteed place for 1-year-olds to after-school and vacation care, costs the Norwegian government 2.8 percent of gross domestic product. “These policies are expensive, but their cost is offset by the return in terms of female labor supply and tax revenues,” says Danielle Venn, a labor economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Even excluding oil, Oslo’s deficit of 5.4 percent of G.D.P. is a percentage point below the E.U. average…

Every two years, her union calculates wage demands by closely examining the cost base and demand situation of Norway’s export industries and then working back from that. “We negotiate for exporters first. No other industry gets more,” she explained…

Economically literate unions and employers may be necessary ingredients of a 21st-century welfare state. But nothing works without an electorate willing to pay taxes, the prime minister notes. Tax revenue accounts for 42 percent of G.D.P. here, compared with a 35 percent O.E.C.D. average.

“Many European countries have been trying to achieve the tax level of the U.S. and the welfare level of Scandinavia. That’s not possible,” said Mr. Stoltenberg. “We won two elections promising not to lower taxes. Voters know: Tax cuts mean welfare cuts.”

Entirely too rational for the average American voter – illiterate in history and economics. And our Congress and the Christian right wing would shriek with claims of the imminent anti-Christ. Collecting taxes from all for the common good, education and opportunity would make our hypocrite puritans hide under the bed.

It pays to live in Sherman County: $590 a year.

“Now you wake up and the wind is blowing and it’s like, yes!” said one Sherman County resident who is making money from wind turbines on her farm.

In this sparsely populated landscape south of the Columbia River Gorge, annual checks for that amount are local residents’ share of a windfall brought by the growing wind energy industry. In an area otherwise dominated by wheat farms, hundreds of 300-foot wind turbines now generate electricity and cash.

“Wind is the only thing that is going to save rural Oregon,” said Judge Gary Thompson of Sherman County Court, “especially since all the timber is gone and the sawmills and all that are closing down. I think what it is is a breath of fresh air.”

The Columbia Gorge has been like an expressway for hard-blowing wind since long before the turbines arrived. Trees here lean to the east from the gusts that rip across the plateau.

Sherman County, which earned $315,000 in property taxes from the first wind farm in 2002, raked in $3 million from wind farms in 2010. The bounty, while mostly flowing to the farmers who lease their land for the turbines, also benefits the public. Taxes, fees and assessments on more than 1,000 megawatts of wind turbine capacity have brought $17.5 million in nine years to a county with just 1,735 residents.

The county’s four towns — Wasco, Moro, Rufus and Grass Valley — are prospering. At Sherman Junior/Senior High School in Moro, wind money paid for new computers, musical instruments, robotics equipment, portions of a greenhouse and a new teacher to instruct the most gifted of its 124 students last year…

Judge Thompson said the payments were intended to reward residents who have made no financial gains from wind energy development, but whose views of Mount Adams and the county’s stunning landscape now include a panorama of turbines. The checks are also intended to soothe any unease about the influx of corporations, occasional turbine noise and the risks posed to bats and birds by turbines.

“It’s modeled after a lot of Alaska compensation,” Judge Thompson said. “There are a lot of people who live in the county who are not necessarily going to benefit from the renewable energy, and we felt we needed to share it with all the county residents.”

The judge is the kind of politician liable to be indicted – or lynched – by the Kool Aid Party and the Oil Addicts they cohabit with in the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, it’s just a heckuva nice story about folks who band together and distribute a little bit of their new-found environmental wealth among those who surely can use it. Especially schoolchildren.

Armenia’s GM Levon Aronian, sporting an academic look

Every child aged six or over in Armenia is now destined to learn chess. The authorities there believe compulsory lessons will “foster schoolchildren’s intellectual development” and improve critical thinking skills.

The country has plenty of reasons to believe in chess. It treats grandmasters like sports stars, championships are displayed on giant boards in cities and victories celebrated with the kind of frenzy most countries reserve for football…

A two-year study conducted in the US by Dr Stuart Marguilies found that learning chess improved reading test scores and reading performance in elementary schools.

Another study by Professor Peter Dauvergne, who is also a chess master, concluded playing chess could raise IQ scores, strengthen problem solving skills, enhance memory and foster creative thinking.

Malcolm Pein, chief executive of Chess in Schools and Communities, a programme that puts chess into UK schools, says there are lots of reasons why chess has a positive impact on primary school children.

“Not only does it give children good thinking skills and improve concentration, memory and calculation, but it teaches children to take responsibility for their actions.”

Of course, the most important consideration isn’t even discussed at all. Is chess something worthy of study in its own right? The answer is yes, whether you view chess as art, science, or sport, or whether you want to study the history of chess, which in itself will teach you a lot about how theories are created, applied, revised, built upon, discarded. Read the rest of this entry »

Eleni Giannousis teaching her English Class

A math teacher, José Rios, used to take a day or two on probabilities, drawing bell-shaped curves on the blackboard to illustrate the pattern known as normal distribution. This year, he stretched the lesson by a day and had students work in groups to try to draw the same type of graphic using the heights of the 15 boys in the class.

“Eventually, they figured out they couldn’t because the sample was too small,” Mr. Rios said. “They learned that the size of the sample matters, and I didn’t have to tell them.”

In three years, instruction in most of the country could look a lot like what is going on at Hillcrest, one of 100 schools in New York City experimenting with new curriculum standards known as the common core…an ambitious set of goals that go beyond reading lists and math formulas to try to raise the bar not only on what students in every grade are expected to learn, but also on how teachers are expected to teach…

The new standards give specific goals that, by the end of the 12th grade, should prepare students for college work. Book reports will ask students to analyze, not summarize. Presentations will be graded partly on how persuasively students express their ideas. History papers will require reading from multiple sources; the goal is to get students to see how beliefs and biases can influence the way different people describe the same events…

With 3,200 students, Hillcrest is the second largest school in the city’s pilot. Its size and diversity — whites are a minority (4 percent), Muslims are the religious plurality (about 30 percent) and one-tenth of students are learning English — made it an ideal laboratory to test how the standards might work in the city, officials said…

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the city’s chief academic officer, said the city plans to create an instructional package with exercises that teachers at Hillcrest and other schools have used; student work they have assigned; and guidelines for evaluating the work…He cautioned against overly optimistic expectations.

“This isn’t one of those things where you flip the switch and tomorrow, everything is going to be different,” he said.

RTFA for details, a record of these bare beginnings. Similar to what is being tried in Brockton, Massachusetts in many ways. I hope NYC finds the same level of success.