This trend includes the 100 higher-education institutions whose leaders attended a widely publicized White House summit in January and signed a pledge to expand the opportunities for low-income students to go to college. In fact, the private universities in that group collectively raised what the poorest families pay by 10%, compared to 5% for wealthier students, according to the analysis byThe Dallas Morning News and The Hechinger Report based on information the U.S. Department of Education released this month covering 2008-09 to 2012-13, the most recent period available.

Our most recent testing and analysis gave us some new information on the risk of arsenic exposure in infants and children through rice cereal and other rice products. We looked at data released by the Food and Drug Administration in 2013 on the inorganic arsenic content of 656 processed rice-containing products. We found that rice cereal and rice pasta can have much more inorganic arsenic—a carcinogen—than our 2012 data showed. According to the results of our new tests, one serving of either could put kids over the maximum amount of rice we recommend they should have in a week. Rice cakes supply close to a child's weekly limit in one serving. Rice drinks can also be high in arsenic, and children younger than 5 shouldn’t drink them instead of milk. (Learn the new rice rules about weekly servings.)

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Francine Prose and Benjamin Moser discuss the great Russian writers and their approach to the human heart and soul.

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World
by Yong Zhao
Jossey-Bass, 254 pp., $26.95
At this juncture comes the book that Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, members of Congress, and the nation’s governors and legislators need to read: Yong Zhao’s Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World. Zhao, born and educated in China, now holds a presidential chair and a professorship at the University of Oregon. He tells us that China has the best education system because it can produce the highest test scores. But, he says, it has the worst education system in the world because those test scores are purchased by sacrificing creativity, divergent thinking, originality, and individualism. The imposition of standardized tests by central authorities, he argues, is a victory for authoritarianism. His book is a timely warning that we should not seek to emulate Shanghai, whose scores reflect a Confucian tradition of rote learning that is thousands of years old. Indeed, the highest-scoring nations on the PISA examinations of fifteen-year-olds are all Asian nations or cities: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Chinese Taipei, Singapore, Korea, Macao (China), and Japan.

The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession
by Dana Goldstein
Doubleday, 349 pp., $26.95
Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone)
by Elizabeth Green
Norton, 372 pp., $27.95
Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher
by Garret Keizer
Metropolitan, 302 pp., $27.00
Of course, our best teachers can and do make a difference in the lives of our least privileged children; you can see Keizer doing that, in small ways, in Getting Schooled, his fine book. Yet every piece of credible social science confirms that, notwithstanding such efforts, schools cannot overcome the crippling effects of poverty. Telling teachers that they can represents yet another insult to their intelligence, all in the guise of bucking them up. Ditto for the perennial promotions of digital technologies, which promise to “revolutionize” teaching very soon. Similar claims greeted film projectors, radio, and television in their own times; in 1922, for example, Thomas Edison predicted that motion pictures would replace textbooks within a few short years.
Computers have a much wider range than these earlier machines, of course, and some American teachers have obviously put them to very good use. But the countries that are outpacing us at school, like Japan and Finland, are noticeably low-tech in their classrooms; they recognize that it’s the teacher that counts, not the technology. In America, by contrast, we’re always looking for the next gadget to improve—and, one suspects, to supplant—our beleaguered teaching profession.

Perhaps the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama have been prosecuting James Risen for not revealing a confidential source not so much because "classified information" was disclosed, but rather because Risen has a long record of detailing government incompetence and misdeeds. In PAY ANY PRICE, Risen uncovers fraud and malfeasance of massive financial proportions during the war in Iraq – and the cancerous spread of the surveillance-industrial state.

Nói tóm lại, các dữ liệu thực tế cho thấy hệ thống giáo dục đại học Việt Nam kém hơn hẳn Thái Lan.

Chỉ trong vòng 50 năm phát triển, Thái Lan đã có một hệ thống giáo dục đại học tương đối hoàn chỉnh. Một số đại học Thái Lan đã trở thành những trung tâm giáo dục có uy tín ở Á châu, với nhiều sinh viên nước ngoài đến học. Ngày nay, một số đại học lớn của Thái Lan thậm chí còn vươn ra xa thu hút sinh viên từ Việt Nam và các nước trong vùng!

A study presented on Thursday at a White House conference on "bridging the word gap" found that among 2-year-olds from low-income families, quality interactions involving words — the use of shared symbols ("Look, a dog!"); rituals ("Want a bottle after your bath?"); and conversational fluency ("Yes, that is a bus!") — were a far better predictor of language skills at age 3 than any other factor, including the quantity of words a child heard.

Scientists have reconstructed the genome of a man who lived 45,000 years ago, by far the oldest genetic record ever obtained from modern humans. The research, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, provided new clues to the expansion of modern humans from Africa about 60,000 years ago, when they moved into Europe and Asia.
And the genome, extracted from a fossil thighbone found in Siberia, added strong support to a provocative hypothesis: Early humans interbred with Neanderthals.

While wealthiest top one percent own nearly fifty percent of all world's assets, the entire bottom half of the global population hold less than one percent of the wealth, new financial analysis shows
Those are the findings of an annual report by the investment firm Credit Suisse released Tuesday—the2014 Global Wealth Report (pdf)—which shows that global economic inequality has surged since the financial collapse of 2008.