Check out the infographic below for a fascinating look at a scaled-down version of the world we live in.
If the world were 100 people:
Are you surprised by how common or uncommon your demographic is on the world scale?
Last week I had my first blog published on Huffington Post. The open forum in the Huffington Post comment sections has already been a great writing and learning experience, and I look forward to engaging with more opinionated readers.
My latest article explores why low-income students are often less likely to receive a quality K-12 education, graduate from high school, and enter college with college-level skills. Over the next few weeks I’m going to continue the conversation by sharing how low-income students can find learning opportunities outside of school to improve their personal, academic, and professional achievement as well as share some stories of  people I know personally who have overcome poverty.
You can read and comment on my blog “Why Aren’t Low-Income Students Succeeding in School?”  at the Huffington Post.
“We cannot rest until each of us would be satisfied with randomly assigning our own children to any public school in the nation.”Â
- Â Jason Kamras
MOOCs are on the minds of many educators and students today as the new open source trend opens many discussions on what learning will look like in the 21st century. Technology can bring a free college course taught by the best of the best professors from universities like Stanford and Harvard right to your living room. The popularity of MOOCs has people asking, why pay for a college education when you can get one for free online?
In his latest op-ed Thomas Friedman shares what he learned about the future of MOOCs at the recent conference “Online Learning and the Future of Residential Education.” The following are a few points I found most compelling:
As more students flock to colleges to earn a degree and better their chances at employment, more students are landing in developmental education courses before they can enroll in a degree-earning program. Though the demand for workers with a college degree only continues to increase in the 21st century workforce, college retention and graduation rates have failed to make significant gains.
Some states that are determined to greatly increase the number of college graduates are redesigning their developmental education programs in hopes of finding more potential graduates in the population of remedial students; a population which is significantly less likely than their non-remediated peers to graduate from college. In 2009, 29% of Colorado’s college students required remediation in reading, writing or mathematics, and over half (53%) of students attending two-year institutions needed remediation. Of 100 students enrolled in the lowest level of developmental math, only four will graduate.1
A new study by the Milken Institute found a strong relationship between a well-educated population and a region’s economic performance.1 Though it’s common knowledge that well-educated workers often make more money and have better jobs than less-educated workers, this study stands out in that it also found that just by their geographic location, less-educated people can make more money if they live in the same area as more-educated people.
Other key findings from the report include:
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As many as 1.7 million first-year students will take a remedial course to learn the math, reading, or writing skills they need to enroll in a credit-earning college-level course. Of all remedial courses most students are remediated in math skills. Due to a variety of factors — class dynamics, curricula, instruction, Â skill-level, academic support, financial standing, life — retaining and passing students in a remedial course is a major concern.
Colorado Community College System conducted a longitudinal remedial math study that tracked remedial math students for 4 years. They found that though the majority of students required remedial math, math had the lowest pass rate of all remedial classes.
Read the rest of this entry »
This week, Denver will be hosting the National Association for Developmental Education Conference. This organization is made up of thousands of members who are dedicated to helping students who come to college without the skills required to enroll in a college-level course in math, reading or writing. As many as 1.7 million first-year students entering both two-year and four-year colleges will take a remedial course to learn the skills they need to enroll in a college-level course. Less than one-quarter of students attending a two-year college who take a remedial course will complete a college-level English or math class.1
For many students who need to take remedial courses, they will be required to take up to three remedial courses per discipline before qualifying to enroll in a credit-earning class.2 In some states, like Colorado, change is afoot. Instead of offering three classes in math and three in English and reading, these classes will be collapsed into one class for each discipline.  Much of the learning will be self-paced at community colleges where the student to advisor ratio is 1500 to 1.3 Students will need to take initiative for their own learning, work with staff when they have questions they need answered and be accountable for their own personal improvement plans. These steps will provide a successful on ramp to other classes that are more challenging and require more rigor, self-discipline and collaboration with classmates once these basic requirements are met.
A new study finds that college students are not aggressively preparing for their careers while in college, and that their lack of career efforts may be seriously hurting their future job prospects, according to The Student Career Development Study.
The study also found that the majority of college students (95%) have a Facebook account, while only 34% of students have a LinkedIn account. College students see the value of having an internship — with over half of students having over three internships in college — Â while 93 percent do not have an understanding of personal branding.
Is it the fault of the student that they are not actively pursuing their career while juggling deadlines for their history exam, their English paper, and their internship? Is it the fault of the university that the English teacher doesn’t make a connection between critical reading skills and the real world, the adviser doesn’t advise beyond the pinnacle goal of graduation day, or the business professor teaches theories without obvious ties to how they will help the student move from graduate to employed professional? Or, with the majority of students getting mentored on a profession by their parents (37 %), maybe it’s the parent’s fault?
A discouraging fact is that many low-income U.S. students today lack the opportunity to study higher level mathematics in high school. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights Data, there are close to 3,000 high schools serving nearly 500,000 students that fail to offer Algebra II or higher level math. For these students, performance on college entrance exams such as the SAT and ACT that include higher level algebra questions is negatively affected.
We know our math scores aren’t competitive with other developed countries. We all know someone, or we may be someone, who dislikes math. But why does an interest in math matter? Yes, being competitive in the global arena is crucial for our nation’s advancement. Yes, taking a math course is required to graduate. But math helps individuals accomplish much more than an “A” on their exam.
On the most basic level, learning math promotes analytical thinking skills. Dr. Vinod Menon, professor of psychiatry and neurological sciences at Stanford University, has conducted research illustrating how one year of math instruction has significant impact on the brain’s approach to problem-solving as revealed through brain scans of second and third graders.1 As students move through math curricula from elementary to high school, they must learn to apply what they know to new ideas and different types of problems, building more complex thinking processes. Years of math where students work through steps, identify patterns, and apply complex thought processes hardwires the brain for deeper level thinking.