Showing up on our door

Tangerine, brat

• CALL THE PSYCHOBABBLERS!

THE VETERANS ARE COMING!

In this morning’s Inside Higher Ed:

Vets May Bring Extra Baggage

…A new report, “Health and Health-Related Behaviors: Minnesota Postsecondary Student Veterans,” provides a glimpse of the health issues an influx of veterans are likely to bring to college when the Post-9/11 GI Bill takes effect in August. While the sample was limited to one state, it serves as an early portrait of a population that is expected to grow rapidly on college campuses in the coming years.
…

…Edward Ehlinger, director and chief health officer of Boynton Health Service at the University of Minnesota…, who authored the study of more than 8,000 veterans, said he was somewhat surprised to see that veterans’ health issues largely mirrored those of other college students. There were notable exceptions, however….

Of those surveyed, 43.5 percent of female veterans reported being sexually assaulted in their lifetime, nearly 14 percentage points higher than female students overall….

As for PTSD, 14.1 percent of females said they’d been diagnosed with the condition, compared with 5.4 percent of women overall. Male veterans had a lower rate of PTSD – 9.1 percent— but still outpaced the general male student population by 6.3 percentage points.
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College-going female veterans also reported higher incidences of domestic violence than their female classmates. Nearly half of those surveyed – 46.4 percent – reported such abuse, compared with 37.8 percent of women overall.
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“It’s a population that is going to be showing up on our door,” [Ehlinger] said. “They have every right to an education. The GI Bill is a great thing for society … We have an opportunity to take a whole new set of folks and provide them post-secondary education, which is only going to be a benefit to society.”

• REGULARIZING K-12 EDUCATION

—AT LONG LAST?

In this morning’s Washington Post:

46 States, D.C. Plan to Draft Common Education Standards

In Texas, 2 + 2 = 5

Forty-six states and the District of Columbia today will announce an effort to craft a single vision for what children should learn each year from kindergarten through high school graduation, an unprecedented step toward a uniform definition of success in American schools.

The push for common reading and math standards marks a turning point in a movement to judge U.S. children using one yardstick that reflects expectations set for students in countries around the world at a time of global competition….
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Led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the states, including Maryland and Virginia, are aiming to define a framework of content and skills that meet an overarching goal. When students get their high school diplomas, the coalition says, they should be ready to tackle college or a job. The benchmarks would be "internationally competitive."
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The nearly complete support of governors for the effort–leaders in Texas, Alaska, Missouri and South Carolina are the only ones that have not signed on–is key. Many Republicans oppose nationally mandated standards, saying schools should not be controlled by Washington….

In Alabama, sixth graders must demonstrate the ability to "bust up a chifferobe."

"This is the beginning of a new day for education in our country," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said. "A lot of hard work is ahead of us. But this is a huge step in a direction that would have been unimaginable just a year or two ago."

Duncan has said that today's patchwork system amounts to "lying to children and their parents, because states have dumbed down their standards."….

• IN CALIFORNIA, STUDENTS WILL HAVE A NEW WAY NOT TO READ!

In this morning’s San Bernardino Sun:

Digital textbooks coming to state high schools

As society continues to move toward a digital era, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is looking to expand California's education system by being the first state in the nation to offer free digital textbooks for high school students….

• LIKE WE BEEN SAYIN' ALL ALONG

From Paul Krugman’s column, yesterday:

Reagan Did It

…[T]he more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years.
…

"I think we hit the jackpot," he said

The immediate effect of Garn-St. Germain [the S&L derelgulation bill] … was to turn the thrifts from a problem into a catastrophe. The S.& L. crisis has been written out of the Reagan hagiography, but the fact is that deregulation in effect gave the industry — whose deposits were federally insured — a license to gamble with taxpayers’ money, at best, or simply to loot it, at worst. By the time the government closed the books on the affair, taxpayers had lost $130 billion, back when that was a lot of money.

But there was also a longer-term effect. Reagan-era legislative changes essentially ended New Deal restrictions on mortgage lending — restrictions that, in particular, limited the ability of families to buy homes without putting a significant amount of money down....