Rethinking school size

In our efforts to reduce class sizes in schools, we are missing a more important metric.
Son Adam noted years ago in his school safety findings that there's correlation between school size and school safety. A smaller school is more likely to be a safer school, irrespective of other factors in the community.
Researchers have published a working paper that shows this and other benefits of smaller schools in New York City.
Regionalization has been in use in Massachusetts for nearly 60 years. The goals was to save on administrative costs and make programs available to students who would not have had access in small-town schools. We're now seeing that the benefits of this consolidation weren't quite as grand as we'd hoped.

h/t Freakonomics

More on college textbooks

Anyone who goes to college or pays for someone who goes to college knows that the tuition is just the cover charge, just the amount that lets you get in the door to start the real payments. Fees, of course, are the major breath-taker, five or more times the tuition figure.
And then come the textbooks. In one class a couple of years ago, I paid $185 for one book. Typical charges are around $100 per book. They're like bridesmaid dresses, expensive items good for just that one occasion. Good study habits would have a student mark up a book with underlines and marginalia. If you hope to resell your book, though, you have a strong incentive to keep your highlighter holstered.
Textbook quality trades in a narrow range, from C+ up to a high B or very low A-. The publishingook  process has a fundamental contradictory set of goals - provide the most timely information, but don't revise the book too often. (The publishers aren't being charitable. It's expensive to order a new printing, even if they get to charge fresh prices.)
A good textbook will lead you through the material in way that fosters good retention. You'll get the key concepts as you need them, often as sidebar definitions. There will be example to illustrate complex points, study guides to help you review, and a good index to help you locate information quickly.

Even among good textbooks, there can be failings. For example, in my current real estate law text (Daniel F. Hinkel. Practical Real Estate Law. Delmar Pub, 2010.), there are 13 pages(!) of a mortgage amortization schedule. What's worse, one of the columns shows the per diem rate (the amount that would be charged per day if the loan was paid off before the end of a billing cycle) is .0000 for each line for all 13 pages. (The term per diem, it should be noted, doesn't appear in the glossary or index.)
Granted, 13 pages of stuff that's useless because it only shows the amount for one mortgage price at one interest rate for one term isn't a big deal in a 700+ page book. It does, though, make you wonder how much other filler material could be jettisoned in an effort to save the student a few bucks.
And, oh, by the way, there's a small section on subprime loans, the kind that have been in the news so much. Well, because laws and practices are changing so fast, here's what the book has to offer:

More information concerning subprime lending can be found on the Internet using a keyword search on a search engine such as http://www.google.com.

p 261

It might have been better to use Let Me Google That for You: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=subprime+lending

Ideas thrive when unemcumbered by facts

So, I have this project for school. Last night, as I'm skimmed several of the books that will become part of the bibliography, I realized a few things. (The details of the project are interesting, but not essential to my insight.)

• The current literature covers the topic pretty well.
  The major flaw that I've found in one of the key books relates to the quality of typography in the table of contents. The text doesn't quite line up in bulleted lists. (This appears to have been corrected in a later edition.)
• I can work very hard and, at best, produce a mediocre result.
  If the goal was just to write a paper, I could that. The goal, however, was to produce something useful to other people and groups. They would be better served by using the materials already available.
• What seemed like a great project yesterday morning is, now, the inspiration for a lot of bad words.

I was cautioned by a friend who has some good professional experience in this area that this might happen. My advisor and others, however, were enthusiastic. I did enough research to reach the conclusion that the project was a good idea. I'd not done enough research to realize that the project was already done by someone else.
Dunno. What started out as a Thus-and-such for Dummies



via GlitterBell.com
is turning into the Fall 2010 issue of Modern Jackass.

via “Modern Jackass,” Nancy Updike and Ira Glass « BLOGJAM AND WIKIWORLD COMICS by Greg Williams

No more pencils, almost

This morning I have a final exam in my Legal Research and Writing course. I'm as prepared as I'm going to be, which means that I'm either going to do fine or I'm toast.
I have my pencils, #2 and others, at the ready.

via “The Other Numbers”(which is by way of The Daily What)

I do have a bit of a concern because of some lingering effects from last week's defliction. I've asked the professor for some accommodation, perhaps allowing me to type the answers to the last half of the exam.
It might be better overall, given my record for untidiness.

Click to enbiggen