“Asian American Political Participation: Emerging Constituents and Their Political Identities” was co-authored by professors Janelle Wong (USC), Taeku Lee (UC Berkeley), Jane Junn (Rutgers), and UC Riverside’s Karthick Ramakrishnan. Released in fall 2011 by the Russell Sage Foundation, a research center dedicated to studies in the social sciences, the book has been recognized as “the most comprehensive study to date of Asian American political behavior.” ¹
The book is based on a multi-lingual national study conducted by the co-authors beginning in 2008, when they surveyed over 5,000 Asian Americans across the country from a range of national backgrounds. Although Asian Americans constitute only about five percent of the US population, they do represent a rapidly growing, well-educated, and politically active sector. As Profess
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Can’t figure out a problem in your child’s math textbook? Maybe it’s not you. “It could be that key information or steps are missing, that the problem involves a concept to which your child hasn’t yet been introduced. Perhaps the problem is structurally unsound for a host of other reasons,” notes veteran textbook writer and editor Annie Keeghan at the blog Open Salon.
The “new normal” in educational publishing is “a severe lack of oversight in the quality of curriculum being produced” and a “frightening apathy” to do anything about it. Keeghans piece, Afraid of Your Childs Math Textbook? You Should Be is a jeremiad. It does for textbook publishing what The Jungle did for the meatpacking industry.
Keeghan paints a bleak and dispiriting picture of a business gutted by mergers, competition for fewer available dollars, and an increased focus on sales and marketing at the expense of producing quality products. Materials rushed to market
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Common Core, meet Barron
Buy-in will be lynchpin to the success of Common Core. Nowhere is this more true than where the rubber meets the academic road… in our schools, within the hearts and minds of our students.
Common Core, meet Barron. (And please, please, please do not lose sight of him in the midst of all the political education shenanigans going on right now.)
See, I just got done doing a student assembly in Columbia, South Carolina. Sure, I do “talk to teacher gigs” all the time these days but having the chance to put on my YA author hat and talk to kids is where the real juice is. In South Carolina, they assembled 700 freshmen to hear me speak. Here’s a pic of them filing in. (Ladies and Gentleman, don’t try this at home. 
)
After I did my little thing with the students, I was flooded with kids who wanted to chat, get autographs, take pictures and so on. Charles Barkley famously said, “I am not a role model.” Me, I think he was wrong. I do consider
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UC Riverside alumna, Anna Gutierrez (language major), recently received a position as a cataloguing assistant for the French Pamphlet Collections at the Newberry, a distinguished independent research library in Chicago. The Newberry was founded in 1887 and primarily collects original documents from the late medieval period onward. Its collections boast roughly 1.5 million books, 5 million manuscript pages, and 500,000 historic maps, with a focus on European and Western Hemisphere history, literature, and culture.¹ The Newberry holds a National Medal for Library Service from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, and it is dedicated to promoting research and scholarship in the humanities.
The library’s French Pamphlet Collection is one of the largest compilations of original French Revolution material to date. The collection spans the years 1780 to 1810 and includes about 30,000 pamphlets, as well as 180 periodicals. Ms. Gutierrez says the highlight of her career thus far is getting to work with these historic documents. Her role is to catalog the French texts, creating a record for each one, so they will be easily accessible to library patrons. Al
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The New York Times offers up a piece about a New York City school that has put building background knowledge at the heart of its curriculum. P.S. 142, a school in lower Manhattan hard by the Williamsburg Bridge “has made real life experiences the center of academic lessons,” the paper notes, “in hopes of improving reading and math skills by broadening children’s frames of reference.”
“Experiences that are routine in middle-class homes are not for P.S. 142 children. When Dao Krings, a second-grade teacher, asked her students recently how many had never been inside a car, several, including Tyler Rodriguez, raised their hands. ‘I’ve been inside a bus,’ Tyler said. ‘Does that count?’”
This is not a Core Knowledge school, but the teachers and staff clearly understand the critical connection between background knowledge, vocabulary and language proficiency. The Times describes the schools “field trips to the sidewalk,” with children routinely visiting parking garages and auto body shops, or examining features of every day life.
“In early February the second graders went around the block to study Muni-Meters and parking signs. They learned new vocabulary wor
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