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Ivanka Trump almost landed one of the world’s biggest jobs (Opinion)
As The Atlantic reported in 2019, Trump considered putting his daughter in charge of the world’s main source of financial assistance for developing countries — he may even have been quite keen. With nearly $100 billion in loan commitments this year alone, the World Bank is a global leader in the struggle against poverty. Apparently, the former president believed this was a good mission for his eldest child. He was stopped from appointing her by the intervention of Steve Mnuchin, who was then Secretary of the Treasury, according to The Intercept. In 2019, Ivanka Trump was a 37-year-old with a bachelor’s degree who, but for a brief stint with a…
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Making education easier for Utah prisoners would make the community safer |Opinion
Alongside a wonderful team, we direct the University of Utah Prison Education project. We provide on-site coursework and programming to incarcerated adults at the Utah State Prison in Draper and work closely with faculty and student volunteers from a diverse range of institutions in our state, including Brigham Young University, Salt Lake Community College, Snow College, Southern Utah University, Utah State University, Utah Valley University, Weber State University, and Westminster College. We are an all-volunteer initiative, and we are currently unable to meet demand. In fact, the unmet need in our state is tremendous. There are over 200 youth incarcerated in 11 detention facilities in Utah and over 13,000 adults…
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Opinion | How Conservatives Can Reshape Education
After spending a few columns exploring current debates about history and race and education, I intended to step back and write about why the conservative effort to use state legislation to block new progressive educational theories is likely to ultimately fail. But sometimes somebody writes a better version of your intended column first, and a few days ago Samuel Goldman, a professor at George Washington University and a writer for TheWeek.com, did exactly that. Invoking the long history of failed conservative attempts to fight liberal cultural shifts with legislative backlash, Goldman noted that in the case of education, “statute books are where conservative curriculum reforms go to die.” The problem…
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Opinion | Is Education No Longer the ‘Great Equalizer’?
As the skill premium and the economic cost of failing to ascend the education ladder rise in tandem, scholars find that adults are adopting differing parental styles — a crucial form of investment in the human capital of their children — and these differing styles appear to be further entrenching inequality. Such key factors as the level of inequality, the degree to which higher education is rewarded and the strength of the welfare state are shaping parental strategies in raising children. In their paper “The Economics of Parenting,” three economists, Matthias Doepke at Northwestern, Giuseppe Sorrenti at University of Zurich and Fabrizio Zilibotti at Yale, describe three basic forms of…
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Opinion | Why Remote Learning Is a Failure
Some educators sneered that the parents who complained just wanted free babysitting. But I’m not ashamed to say that child care is at the heart of the work I do. I teach children reading and writing, yes, but I also watch over them, remind them to be kind and stay safe, plan games and activities to help them grow. Children deserve attentive care. That’s the core of our commitment to them. I am still bewildered and horrified that our society walked away from this responsibility, that we called school inessential and left each family to fend for itself. Meanwhile nurses, bus drivers and grocery workers all went to work in…
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Seven steps higher ed must take to keep pace with the changes in our society (opinion)
American higher education is undergoing a transformation as the nation hurtles from a national, analog industrial economy to a global, digital knowledge economy. The Industrial Revolution was the only other time in American history when the country and its colleges experienced change of this scope, duration and magnitude. A look back in history reveals how our colleges and universities are likely to change in the near future. It will be through a seven-step process that reveals how far we need to go to ensure that academe keeps pace with the changes taking place in our society. This step-by-step framework provides us the ability to keep score and determine what can…
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Opinion: Without foreign exchange students, we lose a vital transfer of knowledge
Mark Lautens is a JB Jones Distinguished Professor at the University of Toronto. As we all know, the pandemic has had a devastating impact on travel and tourism. Perhaps less appreciated is the dramatic change to scientific exchange programs. Basically, they stopped completely. Should we continue to discourage or even prohibit students coming from abroad when they offer so much to the Canadian scientific research effort? Some are pushing to follow that path. I hope not. Story continues below advertisement While Zoom meetings are useful for sharing data and having a discussion, they are clearly not ideal for actually doing science in the laboratory. The hands-on experience of experimental work…
Skillful education crafters
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