Great PhD paper about parental involvement and spouse choice in urban India. She did a lot of her research using online marriage sites. I actually read a little blurb on this in the Atlantic Monthly - very cool.

Quoted: When parents are involved in mate choice, sons are significantly less likely to marry college-educated women and women engaged in the labor force.

This book looks worth checking out.

Quoted: Slate is publishing two excerpts from Tim Harford's new book, The Logic of Life, which is premised on the notion that if we want to understand our world—or how to change it—we must first understand the rational choices that shape it.

A contentious statement from Bill Cosby. I think the writer does a good job of pointing out some of the flaws with his argument, while bolstering his better points.

Quoted: A few years ago, Bill Cosby set off a firestorm with a speech excoriating his fellow African-Americans for, among other things, buying $500 sneakers instead of educational toys for their children. In a recent book, Come On People, he repeats his argument that black Americans spend too much money on designer clothes and fancy cars, and don't invest sufficiently in their futures.

Wow, apparently Japan is adopting Indian forms of education to make itself more competitive in the Asian markets.

Quoted: Suffering a crisis of confidence these days about its ability to compete with emerging Asian rivals, Japan is in the midst of a craze for Indian education.

Despite the fact that Yahoo! Answers has been more successful than Google's similar venture, this article refers to it as "every middle-school teacher's worst nightmare about the Web." Apparently the factual errors are egregious...

Quoted: The blockbuster success of Yahoo! Answers is surprising once you spend a few days using the site. While Answers is a valuable window into how people look for information online, it looks like a complete disaster as a traditional reference tool.

Melissa, great artice from Encarta! But I disagree with its contention that you don't need an MA to get into most doctoral programs. That might be the "official" statement of most PhD programs, but ask around (especially in the humanities) and you'll find that lots of people have MAs before applying...

Quoted: Master's degree programs are the ugly stepchild of higher education. They don't get a lot of respect, but they do a lot of the work around the house.

I'm so happy to hear that language instruction is starting at an earlier age...

Quoted: With an economy that recognizes few geographical borders, more Americans are demanding language instruction earlier in school.

I'm glad this piece highlights the criticism of Teach for America. For the few success stories I've heard, I've heard of 10 times as many horror stories. But I disagree with the conclusion - I don't think TFA can truly know how their teachers are performing because they're not really in touch once teachers are posted. There needs to be more of a measure for whether they're properly preparing people, and this should come from the teachers themselves. The big problem is that the TFA debate tends to exlcude the voices of TFA teachers (why weren't any of them interviewed?)

Quoted: If Teach for America were a public, for-profit company, the critiques would be factored into conventional measures of the marketplace and reflected in its stock price. In a sector for which there's no market to value stock, however, its value isn't easy to compute.

Happy 60th Birthday, India! Glad to hear more political analysis is being introduced into the curriculum at an early age.

Quoted: A broad revision of India’s school curriculum is reshaping how Indian children grasp the workings of their nation and its place in the world.