Chronicle book club, student loans, Obama promoting STEM, and school lunches: Required Readings, 5.27.14

I hope all of our Required Reading readers in the United States enjoyed their holiday weekend, if they had one. (My state institution considers Good Friday worthy of a paid holiday but not Memorial Day, apparently because the latter is considered a Yankee holiday in our neck of the woods. But I digress.) Here are today’s Required Readings for your pleasure and knowledge.

Interested in reading an academia-related book and discussing it with other education professionals? Then the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s book club is for you. This summer’s choice is The Student Loan Mess: How Good Intentions Created a Trillion-Dollar Problem, by Joel and Eric Best. To prep, you might want to read this round-up of studies about the impact of student loans on personal decisions as well as the overall economy.

As part of the White House Science Fair today, President Obama will be presenting additions to the Educate to Innovate program, which supports efforts to increase children’s interest and involvement in STEM subjects. These additions include a STEM-focused teacher training grant competition and a major expansion of STEM AmeriCorps efforts.

They say politics makes strange bedfellows. One demonstration of this axiom’s verity can be found in school reform efforts.

School lunches have proven surprisingly controversial over the years, from ketchup being considered a vegetable to the usual issues of mystery meat. This week they’re in the news for various reasons: whether higher nutritional standards are driving students away, waivers to opt out of the standards if they’re deemed too costly, and a program to feed children when school is out of session that excludes those living in urban areas. These are definitely issues to chew on.

Required Readings are a list of links that you might find interesting! Look for them to appear every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. Have some links you’d like to share? Submit them on our contact form!

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