education linkdump

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/
Finland’s education system regularly scores best or near-best worldwide, yet the country has no private schools (period, at any level from preschool to doctorate), no government-created teacher evaluations, no uniform grading system, and no standardized tests except to graduate high school.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/blog/standard_tests_do_reveal_which.php
A Gates Foundation experiment finds a significant positive correlation between how good a teacher is at raising students’ standardized test scores and how much money that teacher’s students earn in their lifetimes, how likely they are to attend college, how likely they are to avoid teenage pregnancy, how well they perform at non-standardized and general comprehension tests (even if the teachers “taught to the test”), and how high the teacher scores in subjective teacher evaluations (even when the teacher is evaluated based on a self-made video of cherry-picked moments rather than being visited by surprise). And all after correcting for any chance that some teachers might just have gotten a priori better students than others.

(Gates himself talks about evaluating teachers in general, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bill-gates-a-fairer-way-to-evaluate-teachers/2013/04/03/c99fd1bc-98c2-11e2-814b-063623d80a60_story.html)

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/no-rich-child-left-behind/
An op-ed piece reveals there is a strongly positive correlation between family wealth and student academic performance all the way from kindergarten to high school — one more extreme than ethnic variances, and which has grown rapidly in the last 35 years, and which is due almost exclusively to pre-kindergarten cognitive development and home life stability rather than affording better schooling.

http://www.isa-sociology.org/global-dialogue/2013/04/german-sociologists-boycott-academic-ranking/
The German Sociological Association urges universities to boycott Germany’s most prominent third-party university ranking system, claiming that its ratings are based on incomplete data and that they do nothing to improve the universities’ research.

Things I’ve Learned About the Legal System

1. Private citizens do not charge people with crimes. Only the government can do that.
Citizens can only file civil suits against each other. Any charge of a crime, by definition, must come from a government agency — specifically, from a prosecutor. Frequently a prosecutor will decide whether to charge an alleged perpetrator based on whether someone else appears willing and able to provide strong testimony, but “pressing charges” does not cause criminal proceedings to begin automatically, nor can you stop the government from charging someone with a crime by deciding not to press charges. That decision is entirely out of your hands.

2. Bills are not formally evaluated for legality before they’re passed into law.
It’s the job of judges, and the judiciary in general, to rule on the legality of laws, but only after those laws come into existence. Acting judges don’t officially review and affirm the legality of proposed laws before the legislative branch votes on enacting them. Lawyers, retired judges, and other legal experts are often (but not always!) called upon to do these analyses, but not live judges.

3. Only people that a law applies to can challenge whether it’s legal, and often only after it’s affected them.
Tax laws can’t be challenged until after the government attempts to collect taxes subsequent to the laws’ passing, and only by people paying it. Michael Newdow wanted to sue the school system to stop it from making his daughter recite the Pledge of Allegiance, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that he couldn’t, on the grounds that his post-divorce arrangements left him no legal custody of his daughter and so he couldn’t sue anyone about anything on her behalf.