Jane J. Kim of the Wall Street Journal offers some short- and long-term strategies for even upper middle class families seeking financial aid.

For financial-aid purposes, the most crucial year is the one that begins on Jan. 1 while your child is a junior in high school—the “base income year.” During that time, and throughout college, income earned or received is counted more heavily than assets in the financial-aid formulas. Try to avoid taking retirement distributions or realizing large capital gains during that period. Load up on contributions to retirement plans before the base and college years, because assets in those accounts aren’t counted in the aid formulas.

Some families may want to defer converting an IRA to a Roth IRA, even though new laws now make it possible for wealthier taxpayers to take advantage of the conversion. Many financial-aid offices may use the income generated from the conversion to reduce the students’ eligibility for need-based aid—unless parents appeal the offer through professional judgment.

For more advice, continue reading here.

The results of the NAEP national reading test are in, and while fourth graders showed significant improvement on reading tests, eighth graders did not.  Despite the fourth graders gains, the scores are still strikingly low, on city-, state-, and nationwide levels.

Nationally, only 31 percent of fourth- grade public school students are at or above the “proficient” level in reading, a standard defined by the test as “competency over challenging subject matter.” Sixty-five percent are at or above the “basic” level, with partial mastery of knowledge and skills that are considered fundamental.

Among fourth graders in New York State public schools, 36 percent are at or above the proficient level in reading, and 71 percent are at or above the basic level — both better than the national results for public school students. In the city, 29 percent of fourth graders are at or above proficiency, and 62 percent are at or above the basic level — both figures that are below the national percentages, but better than those of many other urban school systems.

To read more, follow this link to the New York Times article discussing the test results.

From the New York Times, here is a sampling of free lecture videos from some of the world’s most renowned professors on topics such as finance, anatomy, and physics.

A recent Time magazine article by Amanda Ripley discusses a study performed by Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr. to determine whether financial incentives really improve student performance.  The experiment involved four different payment schemes implemented in four different cities.  Fourth and seventh graders in New York were paid $25 and $50 respectively for good test scores, but the test showed no change on scores over the  control group.  In Chicago, 9th graders were paid different amounts for each grade they received–$50 for an A, $35 for a B, and $20 for a C.  There, students received better grades than the control group, but standardized test performance did not improve.  In Washington D.C., “middle schoolers [were] paid for a portfolio of five different metrics, including attendance and good behavior.”  These students performed better on standardized reading tests.  In Dallas, second graders were paid $2 for each book they read and successfully completed a test on.  The Dallas experiment seems to have been the most successful, with students showing significant improvement on standardized reading comprehension tests.  The article is lengthy, but worth reading for more specific details as well as Fryer’s overall conclusions.

From New York Magazine, here is a short article offering insight into what goes on inside admissions rooms at small liberal arts colleges.

A recent article for the New Republic argues for common education standards as a means to improve the U.S. public school system.

Thanks in part to this left-right alliance, attempts to formulate common standards died in their inchoate phases under both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. And even the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001–the most ambitious federal attempt ever to hold failing schools accountable–left the question of what, exactly, students should be learning up to individual states.

The results have been depressing. Not wanting their schools to be labeled as failing, many states have watered down their standards–a trend that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has correctly called “a race to the bottom.” Expectations for students are therefore often embarrassingly low. Consider that, last year, 86 percent of New York eighth-graders were proficient in math based on the state’s exam–but only 34 percent were proficient according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is given to students nationwide. A system that could produce that kind of statistical gap is clearly one in need of reform.

Surprisingly, reform is coming from individual states themselves, 48 of whom participated in drafting a set of more rigorous standards, along with the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.   These standards would be applied to all states who voluntarily adopt them.  The editors of the New Republic see this as a “seismic shift in education policy.”  For more, read on here.

From the Wall Street Journal, here is an article to remind you that rejection from your top choice school isn’t the end of the world.

Both Warren Buffett and “Today” show host Meredith Vieira say that while being rejected by the school of their dreams was devastating, it launched them on a path to meeting life-changing mentors. Harold Varmus, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, says getting rejected twice by Harvard Medical School, where a dean advised him to enlist in the military, was soon forgotten as he plunged into his studies at Columbia University’s med school. For other college rejects, from Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy and entrepreneur Ted Turner to broadcast journalist Tom Brokaw, the turndowns were minor footnotes, just ones they still remember and will talk about.

Continue reading here.

An article by Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy in Teachers College Record compares grading tendencies in public and private american colleges and universities.  The article is being made available here on Rojstaczer’s blog until next month, when TCR opens up the content to non-subscribers.  From the abstract:

Here we report on historical and recent grading patterns at American four-year colleges and universities. Records of average grades show that since the 1960s, grading has evolved in an ad hoc way into identifiable patterns at the national level. The mean grade point average of a school is highly dependent on the average quality of its student body and whether it is public or private. Relative to other schools, public-commuter and engineering schools grade harshly. Superimposed on these trends is a nationwide rise in grades over time of roughly 0.1 change in GPA per decade. These trends may help explain why private school students are disproportionately represented in Ph.D. study in science and engineering and why they tend to dominate admission into the most prestigious professional schools. They also may help explain why undergraduate students are increasingly disengaged from learning and why the US has difficulty filling its employment needs in engineering and technology.

This blog is maintained by a teacher who has decided to eat school lunches along with her students to raise awareness about what they eat.

In the U.S. News and World Report, Kim Clark lists 10 factors to consider when determining whether a college’s financial aid offer will be large enough to meet your needs.