California Literary Review

Rankings Go Global: Once a purely American innovation — or problem, depending on how you look at it — lists of “best colleges” are everywhere. Even as the Times Higher is competing to establish the definitive worldwide college rankings, scores of nations from Kazakhstan to Peru are fast developing new systems to evaluate and publicly rank their institutions of higher education. College rankings have gone global. [Inside Higher Ed]

Bursting the AP bubble: The problem with the AP program is that we don’t have time to really learn U.S. history because we’re preparing for the exam. We race through the textbook, cramming in the facts, a day on the Great Awakening, a week on the Civil War and Reconstruction, a week on World War II, a week on the era from FDR to JFK, a day on the civil rights movement — with nothing on transcendentalism, or the Harlem Renaissance, or Albert Einstein. There is no time to write a paper. Bound by the exam, my history teacher wistfully says we have to be ready in early May. [LA Times]

Harlem parents are voting for charter schools with their feet: The desperation of these parents is hardly surprising. In one Harlem school district, not one public elementary school has more than 55% of its pupils reading at the level expected for their grade. And 75% of 14-year-olds are unable to read at their grade level. So Harlem parents are beginning to leave the public school system in crowds. [Economist]