The University of California is an awesome institution. Its ten campuses give 150,000 college students a high-quality public education every year and UC Berkeley, UCSF, and Boalt Hall can compete with any super-expensive private school on quality and reputation. UC Davis is largely responsible for California’s fantastic wine, and for some reason UCLA is crazy famous in Asia. It’s a model for public higher education.

But the University of California has been getting less awesome because it’s been getting less affordable. The state has been giving the University of California less money, and the UC system is passing the favor along by hiking up rates for students. This year, the UC’s Board of Regents is raising college tuition another 32 percent. A year at UCLA will now cost $10,300, three times the price in 1999. Students are rightfully outraged.

But you know what California has managed to find the money for? Warehousing people in prison. This chart from Kevin Drum shows the parallel between tuition hikes at the UC schools and money spent on “corrections” in the state.

Do you think making the UC schools less affordable will create more or fewer future criminals? That’s a rhetorical question. The budget issues are complex, but it’s ridiculous to be spending this kind of public money on prison and denying it for education.

Photo from Flickr user Epioles (cc).

A look at what the internet is doing for learning, curiosity, and creativity outside the traditional classroom.

The average cost of a Bachelor’s degree at a public, four-year liberal arts university is $26,340. At a private one, it’s $100,520, and the Ivy League commands more than $160,000. And while the value of education is universally indisputable, the emergence of new online tools and platforms has challenged its price tag, empowering us to take charge of our own intellectual development.

In recent years, we’ve seen initiatives like AcademicEarth, MIT’s OpenCourseWare, the U.K.’s Open University and iTunesU open up the virtual gates of the world’s top universities to the intellectually curious, regardless of their location or financial situation. Today, you can click your way to lectures about Roman architecture from Yale, entrepreneurship from the University of Cambridge, the history of jazz from Arizona State University, microbiology from Berkley, and the morality of murder from Harvard.

But besides the opening up of access to education, we’ve also seen an opening up of its definition—no longer confined to the traditional world of academia, “education” now spans a much broader spectrum of learning, inspiration and curiosity. Smart blogs, online magazines, and publishers like TED and Pop!Tech have made enormous strides toward this evolution by offering content that is both intellectually and emotionally engaging, bringing an element of production value to the traditional lecture format. And, not coincidentally, they’ve reached a massive audience of self-learning enthusiasts—since TED Talks first became available in 2006, more than 180 million have been watched worldwide.

Of course, most would agree the true “value” of higher education isn’t merely in the lectures but also in the sociocultural experience of being among open-minded others who have come together to learn, socialize and, let’s face it, party. But putting a price tag on such an environment assumes it can only be handed to us rather than self-acquired, and in the era of citizen empowerment, this is a dated and somewhat docile surrender to learned—and learning—helplessness.

As web communities continue to garner critical mass, these learning environments are bound not by the brick walls of a college campus but by the broadband cables that wrap the globe. Even in our analog social circles, why not conceive of self-initiated neo-education events and environments for young adults, an intersection of dinner parties and college classes where we watch a Stanford lecture about Darwin’s legacy, then discuss it over a glass of wine?

TED has had phenomenal success with TEDx—a program of self-organized TED-like events, designed to bring local “ideas worth spreading” to light and spark public debate within the community. While this isn’t traditional education, TED has long been a beacon of intellectual empowerment and the TEDx program offers hope for a viable, powerful model for such self-initiated neo-education bolstered by a community of like-minded knowledge- and idea-hungry peers.

In my own experience, I can frankly admit that the first month of watching TED gave me more knowledge,  insight, and inspiration than all four years of the glorified status symbol that is Ivy League education. Which says something about traditional academia’s continued failure to compel, but mostly about the power of neo-education to do so. This paradigm shift is redefining both our relationship with education and our conception of “free”—tuition-free freedom of access and choice, an empowered self-guided tour of knowledge, validated not by a framed diploma but by something far more meaningful: The gratification of having pursued and explored our deepest intellectual curiosity.

This is not to say it’s an either-or situation—but the complementary role of personal initiative in the pursuit of insight is increasingly important. When the liberal arts model was first conceived in 5th century A.D., at its heart was an effort to fulfill students’ broadest intellectual potential by exposing them to a wide and eclectic array of general knowledge, as opposed to narrow specialization. But over the course of the past century, the liberal arts curriculum has mutated—students are selecting specialties like Premed and Marketing as early as their freshman year, zooming in on a narrowly defined path towards med school or an MBA.

Academia seems to have lost its capacity for inspiring the kind of indiscriminate curiosity so fundamental to developing a well-rounded intellectual and creative awareness about the world.

“Liberal arts education no longer exists in this country. We have professionalized liberal arts to the point where they no longer provide the breadth of education and enhanced capacity for civic engagement that is their signature,” says Bennington college president Liz Coleman—ironically, at TED. “The progression of today’s college student is to jettison every interest but one, and within that one, to continually narrow the focus, learning more and more about less and less—this, despite all the evidence around us of the interconnectedness of things.”

This is where neo-education steps in—not necessarily as a substitute for a university degree, at least not at this point, but as a necessary filler for the many gaps in today’s higher education, an essential exercise in flexing our inherent human curiosity about the world before it atrophies into the narrow scope of skill and vision that the original liberal arts model aimed to eradicate in the first place. In an age driven by the cross-pollination of ideas, viewpoints, and disciplines, it is only through such indiscriminate curiosity and exploration that we can truly liberalize our collective future.

Guest blogger Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of miscellaneous interestingness. She writes for Wired U.K. and spends a shameful amount of time on Twitter.

Illustration by Will Etling.

Whether the credits can add up to a degree depends on how long the program lasts. I seriously hope they get it together to keep this program in place and funded, because education has long been considered a key tool in the anti-recidivism toolbox, and this program, were it to spark even more like it, could make a big statement. (Hey, it also might even help reverse Clinton’s sucky 1994 law, which said that Pell grants could not fund prisoners’ education.) In the mean time, Wesleyan insists that an inmate’s A means the same thing as a traditional student’s A.

Other universities have tried similar experiments, but not quite like this. For starters, Wesleyan’s program is exclusive, admitting only 16 percent of applicants. It’s also academically rigorous: students were chosen based on their chops, not just based on their interest.

The article is amazing but perhaps even more amazing is the interactive portion where you can see the inmates’ sentencing information and, even better, read their fascinating application essays.

They asked the same couple of questions to nine higher education experts and the responses fell into two predictable camps.

Camp one: Postsecondary education is a practical necessity that everyone should pursue and have access to. Sample quote from Daniel Yankelovich, a public-policy expert: “In today’s society and economy, virtually everyone who has the motivation and stamina should acquire some form of postsecondary education.”

Camp two: Traditional bachelors degrees are not actually the best move for most students; they can be a waste of money; and statistics (and anecdotal evidence, surely) show this, over and over and over again. Sample quote from Charles Murray, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute: “We have a moral obligation to destroy the current role of the B.A. in American life. It has become an emblem of first-class citizenship for no good reason.”

Where do you stand?

(via Andrew Sullivan). Thanks, Patrick.

I would love to see a community library like this in Los Angeles!

“What began as an assemblage of 1,000 empty beer cartons pulled together by residents in East Germany has now evolved into an incredible open air public library. Designed by Karo Architekten in collaboration with local residents, the grassroots project revitalizes a post-industrial district in Magdeburg, Germany by creating a cultural center and pop-up library where books are free to take and leave 24 hours a day. Opened this past June, the project introduces plenty of green space and reuses the facade of an old warehouse to beautiful effect.

Libraries and book lending are a great green practices insofar as they encourage the use of shared resources and cut down on crates of pressed tree pulp circulating the globe. They’re even better when they foster a communal spirit of sharing, as does Magdeburg’s new Open Air Library.

The library was built from the ground up with the support and interaction of the surrounding community – first as a 1:1 model made from beer cartons and later as a finished project with the help of Karo Architekten, who incorporated parts of the facade from the city of Hamm’s demolished Horten warehouse. During its entire planning and construction period the library accepted book donations, which are now available to borrow any time of day without a membership – simply walk up to a cubby and pull out a tome.

In addition to its book lending facilities the Open Air Library also introduces a burst of green public space to a post-industrial district. The grassy plaza features a reading cafe and a stage that hosts elementary school theater plays, public readings, concerts, and other cultural events.”

Photo by Anja Schlamann

Original article: Shareable: Pile of Empty Beer Cartons Evolves into Open Air Library

When President Obama delivered his stay-in-school speech, reminding students for the umpteenth time that they can’t all grow up to be rappers and basketball players, he caused a stir. It sparked overblown controversy, but it also brought into the national conversation the fact that every year, 1.2 million kids drop out of school—or, one every nine seconds. It’s a shamefully high number, which is why filmmaker Mary Mazzio focused her lens on the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship program in her new uplifting new documentary Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon. NFTE is a program that helps students from low-income communities learn skills that will actually help them more forward in life—preventing them from dropping out in the process. Her film, which opens today, offers a dynamic picture of inner-city life, following a handful of kids as they compete in NFTE’s business-plan competition, all the way to the nationals. We asked her a few questions about the process.

GOOD: The competition starts with tens of thousands of kids. How did you choose who to focus on?

Mary Mazzio: The competition starts in the classroom, then it goes to the school, then it’s cities, states…. I waited until it was regional, it was down to 1,000 kids: I saw all of them, and to be honest, I wanted to follow all of them. It was unbelievably hard to choose. I originally wanted to just do six kids, but that was almost impossible. I thought, I can’t just do six kids! So I then looked for kids I thought would win, and who had compelling and diverse stories of the inner city.

G: You seemed to go to great lengths to paint a dynamic and upbeat picture of the inner city.

MM: So many stories that come out, and so many documentaries, it’s so effing bleak, and it’s all stereotypes. I didn’t know much about inner-city life going in so I learned a lot in the process. And one thing I learned was that for all the Rodneys [a character] in the film, who are so sweet and aspirational—there were hundreds or thousands of kids just like him and they need so little. All they need is a good education. This program isn’t the be-all end-all, but this is a pretty great tool in the anti-dropout toolkit.

G: Because kids are learning things that are relevant to their everyday lives?

MM: “Trig makes no sense—I’m hungry.” “Chaucer? Who cares about Chaucer if my mom is laid out with a drug issue.” Right? That education is completely irrelevant in the lives of these kids. What if you tell them, go to the wholesale district, buy five watches for $5 and sell them for $20, this makes sense: There is money in their pocket, and they learned something, too. But the beauty of that is the traditional education still makes it in there: They still have to learn math, negotiation, and then they stay in school. That’s the point of the whole movie.

G: What, that kids stay in school?

MM: No, that they’re given a reason to be excited about school. Instead of losing a generation of kids, we do something about it. These are tomorrow’s job creators. They can help take us out of the recession: they have the chutzpah, the smarts, the energy, they just have no money.

G: Right, but since not everyone can win, I guess the idea is more that it gives kids a sense of what is possible. What did you think of Obama’s stay-in-school speech a couple of months ago?

MM: Oh my god. It shocked me with the controversy it created. I was stunned. I think we’re so polarized in this country that it’s paralyzing for the nation. But here’s the one thing about this film: I am as left as they get—full disclosure—but I have been getting calls from all kinds of folks on the right, about how excited they are about this film. Here is a common ground, because it’s business, and it’s “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” and that makes sense to someone on the right, and someone on the left. The idea of creating your own opportunity is appealing to the right, but opportuinity and education to me are nonpartisan issues.

G: Or, they should be.

MM: The message about teaching people to be entrepreneurial is nonpartisan. Tom Friedman wrote an editorial recently about how you can’t just be good at what you do, you have to be entrepreneurial and you have to be an innovator. We call it “entrepreneurial” in the film but really it’s about teaching kids and encouraging them to be innovators.

G: The bootstraps argument can be a little contentious when you’re talking about kids,  though, because it can be argued they can only do as much as they are set up to do. Not every kid gets to go through this program.

MM: Well that’s the point: Every kid needs this kind of education. The second goal of this movie is for policymakers and people in positions of influence to say “Whoa, this kind of education is life changing. Why isn’t this in every high school economics curriculum?” Why is it—and let me get on my soap box real quick—that you have to go to a vocational school to learn quote-unquote business. That is ridiculous. When you have a generation of people, especially women, who can’t balance their own check book, who don’t know what a 401(k) is,  and you have to go to a vocational school to learn that? It is so backwards that to learn financial literacy you have to go out of your way. The issues have to be taught to our kids.

G: And that’s what this program teaches them?

MM: It’s innovation and financial literacy. It is my hope that the people who serve these kids to realize how aspirational they are, and that they only need a little bit of water! What is that water? This kind of education so they don’t drop out.

G: You have said you want to make sure kids to see it. How will they?

MM: We signed this innovative arrangement with AMC theatres. It’s unprecedented to have a documentary in a multiplex—in an urban multiplex—and not just your arthouse cinemas for the NPR crowd. There [were] free screenings for kids and teachers on November 12, then there is a wider release. We’re also having a screening at the Smithsonian in DC chaired by policymakers, people from treasury, and influencers. We are taking a multi-pronged approach.

Gabriel Echoles and Rodney Walker, pictured at top, were finalists in the competition. Photo by Richard Schultz. For more information visit Ten9eight.com.

Ten9Eight opens today in major cities.

“A perfect application would earn a state 500 points, with 125 points allotted for articulating a perfectly coherent agenda for change; 70 points for adopting higher standards and higher quality tests; 47 points for developing computerized systems to track student academic progress; 138 points for recruiting quality teachers, evaluating their effectiveness, and using the evaluations in tenure and other key decisions; 50 points for turning around failing schools; 30 points for other miscellaneous categories of change; and 40 points for fostering the growth of charter schools.”

Whether this will cool those critics who say this emphasizes standardized testing seems unlikely, but with a Democratic President enforcing the rules, it seems that they have very little recourse.

Schools in Los Angeles are getting lots of attention lately. You might have heard of Steve Barr, a sort of educational desperado, whose Green Dot Schools wrested away several poorly-performing schools from the Los Angeles Unified School District and transformed them into educational powerhouses. But what Barr did for these communities is far more than that. He brought these schools back to life inside extremely well-designed buildings, often in empty warehouses and abandoned lots that sat like black holes in low-income neighborhoods. Barr has proved what educators and architects consistently try to demonstrate: Creating a safe, sustainable environment for students in a building that becomes a landmark in their own neighborhood is critical to learning.

There are other smart examples in Los Angeles. Inner-City Arts (above), designed by Michael Maltzan, is like a lighthouse in L.A.’s Skid Row, its angled walls as white as an eggshell in a rough neighborhood. The Camino Nuevo schools, a series of charter properties sprinkled around a neighborhood west of downtown, used the skills of architects Daly Genik to gracefully squeeze classrooms into whatever spaces were available—including, remarkably, a wasted sliver of space between two major thoroughfares. Of course, the reaction to a new, architecturally-significant school is not always positive: A performing arts school in downtown Los Angeles designed by Coop Himmelblau with what looks like a Monsoon Lagoon-worthy waterslide attached to it has been derided as a multi-million dollar boondoggle for the city. Even though the kids inside say they like going to school there.

For each of these schools, the fact that they’re housed in the shiniest new building on the block, or a warehouse that used to host drug transactions, makes a new connection to the neighborhood that changes the way students think about their education. But the not-yet-complete Central Los Angeles Learning Center No. 1, on the site of the former Ambassador Hotel in Koreatown, will have to work a lot harder.

In 2006, after much resistance from preservationists, the Ambassador Hotel, a 1921 building designed by Myron Hunt, was torn down. The building was famous for many reasons besides its stately Spanish-style looks: It held a coffee shop designed by Paul Williams, one of L.A.’s first African American architects; it was host of several Academy Awards ceremonies; it was home of the legendary playground for Hollywood glitterati, the nightclub The Cocoanut Grove. But it was also a place with extreme historic significance: In 1968, after delivering a speech in the hotel’s ballroom, Robert Kennedy Jr. was assassinated there. After decades of neglect, LAUSD gained control of the property, which it planned to demolish and turn into a school. Although many groups, including the LA Conservancy waged a long, emotional battle headed by its board member Diane Keaton (she delivered a eulogy at the building’s “wake”), the building was deemed unfit for preservation. The architecture fans howled. But in a neighborhood where thousands of students were being bused elsewhere every day, there was no disagreement from anyone that there was great need for a school.

The architects at Gonzalez Goodale were awarded what was probably their toughest project to date. When I visited the construction site recently with one of the project’s architects, Harry Drake, he acknowledged the challenge. Using the footprint of the original building, they designed a new plan for the site that would acknowledge the form and history of the hotel but deliver a more healthy, environmentally-friendly learning environment. “We’ve taken the elements of the original design and added more sustainable, substantial materials,” he says. And they were able to take many of the historic elements of the structure and give them appropriate educational context.

The Cocoanut Grove, renowned for its opulent Moorish-style interiors and curved roof, will become an auditorium with public programming.

The Paul Williams coffee shop, with its entrance shown here, will be preserved in its 1968 state and turned into a faculty lounge. Coincidentally, Drake told me, this area was the most difficult to restore because of all the films which had been shot here: So many set designers had added their own “period details” that it was hard to tell what was original and what was not. (See: Bobby.)

And what was once the ballroom, with a soaring arched ceiling and cut-out windows, was redesigned using Hunt’s original drawings, and is just as stunning in the context of contemporary architecture. This will be a library and center for social justice, with history about the hotel and many of Kennedy’s papers, speeches, and artifacts.

Since the hotel’s walls were essentially concrete made with beach sand, this is the only one that will remain (reinforced, of course) but many of the building’s original fixtures and windows will return to the structure. Also the hotel’s famous palm trees will be returned as well.

More features will increase interactivity with the community. The school’s pool will be open to the public in the summer. And a park will open the Ambassador’s front lawn onto the street for the first time, welcoming people onto the property where they can reflect among Kennedy’s words and images (the neighborhood is also park-deprived).

Although the school won’t open until next year, the elementary school immediately adjacent, serving K-5, opened in September. It is situated in line with the Ambassador’s strong north-south backbone, and is just downhill from the high school, so kids here can literally look up to their upperclassmen. It’s a bright, graphically-exciting place, with public artworks that acknowledge the Ambassador’s tile patterns from the former pool and a fantastic mural that chronicles the hotel’s history. As we wandered through the gates toward the school’s entrance as school let out, dodging soccer balls and scooters, I was surprised to see not only hundreds of screeching kids, but adults. Dozens and dozens of parents had walked to the school to pick up their kids, and were now gathered here doling out after-school snacks, using the courtyard as a type of public park. “We used to dismiss the students out onto the street but now I just let them all come in,” the principal said to us as she showed us the library. “Sometimes we can’t get them to leave.”

The saga of the Ambassador is still too tender a subject to broach with some preservationists I know. Keaton recently penned a beautiful essay for the Los Angeles Times about how the loss still stings—two years later. No one wanted the building to go; it’s a situation where no one could have won. But I wish that at least some of the people who are still angry about it could see what I saw at the school that day. What was once a landmark due to its exclusivity is going to be a landmark because of its inclusiveness: a place designed to be far more appropriate (and safer) for the people who will use it now, yet hopefully capturing all the importance of what came before. Whether its students truly appreciate that context remains to be seen, but one fact is certain after seeing the families congregating in the K-5 courtyard: It’s somewhere they want to be. That’s something any school could hope for.

Photos courtesy of Inner-City Arts, Michael Maltzan; Ambassador Hotel postcard, lagenealogy.com; Renderings, Gonzalez Goodale; K-5 photo, Tim Street-Porter.

Well, you can take a look at this new report by the Center for American Progress and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to find out. The report, along with an interactive map (obviously the best part), reveals a “staggering” crisis in American schools. The map allows you to click through to see how your home state performed in eight key categories, as well as its overall score.

I was bummed to see that among the biggest losers was D.C., which has had a bad wrap but where there’s a lot of interesting and innovative things underway to get the schools in shape.

A grand total of zero states got an A. A few predictable ones got Bs (New York, Arizona, California, Massachusetts), a scary amount got Cs and Ds, and three got big fat Fs.

The U.S. government has poured $100 billion of stimulus money into the Education Department, but does paying more lead to better results? Our latest Transparency is a look at the amount of money every state spends per student, and the graduation rates in those states.

A collaboration between GOOD and Lamosca