HOSTILE TAKEOVER
Students, teachers, and community members in Memphis protested the takeover of local schools by Tennessee’s state-run Achievement School District, which contracts the administration of failing schools out to charter providers. Students chanted in protest while brandishing signs reading, “We’re not going down without a fight." For the full story on the ASD and other reform measures in Tennessee, drop everything and turn to Nelson Smith’s classic 2013 report for Fordham.
BLOOMBERG PUSHES LOW-INCOME KIDS TO COLLEGE
As has been widely reported, dropping out of college can exact a dreadful toll on job prospects and future income. Today, just one-third of all top-performing high school students from the bottom half of the income scale attend a college with a six-year graduation rate above 70 percent. To address the problem, Bloomberg Philanthrophies has started an initiative to boost that portion to one-half, the New York Times reports.
"STUDENT"-ATHLETES
The Hechinger Report’s Joseph Rauch has an excellent, searing take on the academic scandal haunting the University of North Carolina. Though it’s easy to feign shock over a decades-long fraud, the university’s bogus “shadow curriculum” is actually just one episode in a long history of the exploitation of NCAA student-athletes. “Helping students cheat,” he writes, “is just one of many methods that educational institutions use to maintain this status quo where students allow them to rake in money without paying it back.”
ALPHA FINE
Thinking of joining a sorority? Along with the traditional complement of sisterly solidarity, you can expect to pony up thousands of dollars per semester in procedural fines (being late to chapter events, for instance), diamond-encrusted pins, and vast quantities of an apparently ubiquitous substance known as puffy paint. Hope at least the liquor’s included…
