1. What my bike taught me about white privilege 

It’s a way of trying to make visible the fact that system is not neutral, it is not a level-playing field, it’s not the same experience for everyone. There are biases and imbalances and injustices built into the warp and woof of our culture.

2. Volatile political battle with racial, religious, and democratic undertones that stemmed from a simple majority school board election.

3. Love is patient, love is kind, love will punch you in an elevator.

4. Interruption versus apology: Gender communication at the office. (Spoiler alert- everyone can do better)

Hat tips: AEK, EGM & ALA

In 2013, on the [New York] state exams that gauge proficiency in math and English, Success Academy schools far outscored not only the city’s regular public schools but also its most highly regarded charters, networks like Achievement First, KIPP (the Knowledge Is Power Program) and Uncommon Schools. At one of [Eva] Moskowitz’s Harlem academies, the fifth graders surpassed all other public schools in the state in math, even their counterparts in the whitest and richest suburbs, Scarsdale and Briarcliff Manor...It might seem as if any New York mayor would be thrilled to have thousands of the city’s most underprivileged children educated so well. But during Bill de Blasio’s campaign last year and then as he claimed City Hall, he and Moskowitz took each other on in a ferocious political battle...For many critics, performance is almost beside the point. To [Diane] Ravitch [New York University professor and education historian], the [charter school] movement itself is destructive; “it undermines the public’s commitment to public education.”...What these philanthropists are all about, Ravitch says, is making themselves feel good while using charters as a halfway step in a covert effort to pull the country toward the privatization of education.

A terrific New York Times article on the battle between New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and charter school network leader Eva Moskowitz.
 
The data-driven accountability approach (read: a lot classroom testing) that charter schools emphasize removes the glossy image around child learning and development. And the growth of charter schools, that use public funds but operate under private authority, competes with the attractive national commitment to mandatory public education. However, that image of promising universal opportunities was actually tainted ages ago when it became clear that public schools were often not successfully educating the country's poor children. The fact that this network of charter schools is able to overturn the giant table of privilege and poverty is evidence of the inexcusable necessity of reform.

Learning is complicated and school reform is hard to do. And my experience has mostly been through my advisor, who mines global nooks and crannies for the specific things that improve learning in poor countries (which is enormously different from the US context).  In other words, I am playing outside my sandbox here. But if a school or charter network is actually improving learning outcomes and closing educational disparities, I think its worth putting Ravich's (and de Blasio's) issue with the principle of charter schools aside. These schools do privatize education to some degree (and certainly introduce competition), but failing to reform for the sake of a national vision is at the expense of too many children. If this network of charter schools is actually working, I say: don't fix it, de Blasio. 

In other news, Maskowitz's advocacy group, Families for Excellent Schools, sounds about as mysterious and ominous as a Koch brothers' super-PAC.

Well, I don't actually have the answer to this. But apparently some people at some universities are thinking about the answer. Including, as previously mentioned, the cool kids.

At a conference this weekend, I met a female grad student from another large Midwestern university. In the most recent candidate search in her department, she asked her advisor if the search committee could make some effort to find a female economist to add to their ranks (currently, there is one tenured female faculty member in the department).

His response was that the department has struggled to recruit women faculty because there aren't enough industry jobs in their mid-sized Midwestern city for their husbands to find employment. In her words, she called his bluff: the sociology department at the same university is over half female. She believes that the its a struggle to bring in female faculty because the department that is already so male-dominated (in other words, the reason there aren't more women in leadership is that there aren't more women in leadership). So, departments, go out of your way to change that dynamic and start figuring out how to answer this question.

Update 4/1/2014
I was doing a lot of hypothesizing above. I talked to a friend who has actually experienced the job market as a female economist and she brings to light two points. Both challenge my previously implied hypothesis that the econ departments were simply not doing enough to hire women, based on the fact that the sociologists have plenty.

1. Who do female sociologists and economists marry? There's a good chance that the pool of trailing husbands is not the same.

2. Female economists have more outside options. Many female economists could get jobs in cities like DC, Boston and New York City, where their spouses have huge amounts of industry (or academic) options. The non-academic job market in these large cities is probably smaller for sociologists.
h/t: Professor T.

Also, relocation is a whole lot easier when one spouse has a geographically dispersed occupation.

"But how are the scholarship recipients supposed to study when they live in one dirty room with six siblings and a single mother?" asked a fellow board-member (and veteran school counselor) during our meeting last night for a Tanzanian education NGO. 

He had visited the homes of secondary school scholarship recipients and came away feeling frustrated. And now this small, highly efficient education NGO is offering loans and exploring construction opportunities.

I made a point for narrower goals, having just read about development bloat, but I'll admit that the slippery slope towards mission creep is, in fact, covered in ice. It is especially tempting to reach beyond your organizations original goals when you start to notice all the other symptoms of poverty that prevent your single intervention from working (or if you exhibit any form of empathy).

I'm doing a presentation on balancing professional and personal lives in academia next week for my Teaching in Higher Ed class. The title of this post is sarcastic; don't get your hopes up.

1. Who earns more: a tenured professor or a fry cook?

I’m a tenured professor of history of science and mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin. I finished high school 25 years ago. What if instead of attending college I had worked at McDonald’s?

2. How to be realistic about the pre-tenure life.

I’ve enjoyed my seven years as junior faculty tremendously, quietly playing the game the only way I knew how to. But recently I’ve seen several of my very talented friends become miserable in this job, and many more talented friends opt out. I feel that one of the culprits is our reluctance to openly acknowledge how we find balance. Or openly confront how we create a system that admires and rewards extreme imbalance. I’ve decided that I do not want to participate in encouraging such a world. In fact, I have to openly oppose it.

3. And why am I such a pessimist about job market prospects and getting tenure? Because academia acts as a drug cartel.

Academic systems more or less everywhere rely at least to some extent on the existence of a supply of ‘outsiders’ ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail.

Hat tips: Students of GRAD8101

I'm not sure if you've noticed, Minneapolis, but there is an enormous swath of highways in the middle of the city. I've lived one mile from this highway knot for four years and it still blows my mind.

It separates awesome hippy hangouts like Seward from the thriving East African hotspots in Cedar-Riverside, trendy downtown from the University hipsters. The Vikings stadium, the Mississippi River, Little Earth Indian Reservation (one of the largest urban Indian reservations), the University of Minnesota, the best coop in the cities, Hennepin County Medical Center and the Mill City Museum are all within one mile of this highway maze. Did the city miss the memo about how mixing folks is good for growth?

Because apparently many people don't believe economics is a science. Raj Chetty defends the field in the face of disagreement here in the NYT. First of all, economics is a social science. Secondly, as with most scientific research, testing theory through hypotheses and empirical analysis makes the field scientifically and policy relevant. Thus, the macroeconomists are maybe a little jealous of the development economists' RCTs:

As is the case with epidemiologists, the fundamental challenge faced by economists — and a root cause of many disagreements in the field — is our limited ability to run experiments. If we could randomize policy decisions and then observe what happens to the economy and people’s lives, we would be able to get a precise understanding of how the economy works and how to improve policy. But the practical and ethical costs of such experiments preclude this sort of approach. (Surely we don’t want to create more financial crises just to understand how they work.)

Hat tip: COCO (a real scientist)

The next two weeks will be my first couple of weeks staying under the same roof since January. Apparently, all this staying in one location has slipped blogging to the back of the priorities list. That's my pathetic excuse. 

Anyway, I attended AAEA in DC back in early August, presenting a poster about the factors that predict independent financial decisions by women in rural Tanzania (more to come). Sendhil Mullainathan was an excellent keynote speaker and proposed some creative answers to tough questions.

Why do the poor so often miss deadlines for public benefits? Why do dieters struggle so much with temptation? Why does socioeconomic status play such a huge role on education test scores?

Mullainathan relates all these things to brain bandwidth, proposing the (not so ground-breaking, actually) idea that in the face of scarcity, our processing is distracted and slower. The provocative examples in his talk makes his upcoming book enticing. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.

Couldn't get a video of his dynamic presentation at the conference, but since TED talks have made presentations cool again, here's a good one from 2010.

Well, we are approaching hiring season in academia, and my department is no exception this year. The influx of candidate job talks, free lunches, CV attachments, solicited and unsolicited opinions gets me thinking about gender, of course. And while my peers are probably sick of my persistent gender-based inquiry, I tend to question both our intuitive and professional perceptions of candidates.

There's a long pipeline towards tenure, which includes publication, hiring and dissertating along the way. The evidence of the gender gap in publications, by subject, is glaring according to JSTOR and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

These graphics and facts beg the question as to what combination of factors might cause this problem. And I'm quite sure that the gender bias in academic hiring is one of these factors. This research tested what I only hypothesized. Using a double-blind study to measure the effect of male or female names on judged competence, hireability and mentoring, the authors find that both male and female academic scientists rated women consistently lower. Keep in mind, this was based on the exact same application materials, the only difference was the gender of the applicant's name.

What is the source of this bias? I have a few untested hypotheses. I think women tend to be judged more harshly on their personalities, more than just strictly their professional work (although, this of course doesn't explain all the paper discrimination). And I think as much as we'd not like to admit it, implicit biases still linger in our social perceptions. Forbes has a few ideas about limiting negative stereotypes of successful women, as well. Overall, the fact that the gap is huge and that the bias empirically exists are reasons enough to critically question our opinions of candidates for academic positions. Or at least to start a discussion about pants suits.

Hat tip: COC, NAJ,