If you want Times readers to look at something for 10 minutes, all you have to do is ask
Stayed all
10 minutes!
Immediate
quitters
In July, we ran an experiment challenging readers to look at the image of a painting for 10 minutes — as a way to train one’s ability to focus amid countless distractions. We were able to track how long our readers spent with the art.
The results? Plenty of people didn’t start. And a whole bunch dropped out quickly. But after that initial burst of impatience, the further our readers got, the more likely they were to stick with it. To our surprise, 25 percent finished.
We initially thought maybe 5 percent of readers at most would reach the 10-minute mark. The lesson, to us: Despite how harried our lives are, sometimes all we need to exercise our patience and focus is the opportunity.
That was a good excuse to run moreartexperiments. — Francesca Paris and Larry Buchanan
School districts’ pandemic recoveries weren’t as simple as rich vs. poor.
Early this year, researchers shared with us the first school-district-level data comparing students’ test scores before and after pandemic school closures. We expected that students in poor districts would remain further behind students in rich districts, and that was generally true. But some districts surprised us, like those in these spreadsheets.
Some districts that are typically assumed to be high performing — low-poverty, suburban or mostly white — had not recovered from the pandemic at all. Their students were still performing behind where they were in 2019. On the other end, there were clusters of districts with high poverty where students had completely made up any ground lost during the pandemic.
We explored why. In poor districts with strong recoveries, specific strategies were helping children recover. And the rich districts with no recovery highlighted a surprising fact about American education: Schools in rich areas aren’t necessarily delivering higher-quality education than those in poorer areas. Despite these districts’ ample resources and high test scores, they have been unable to make up for pandemic learning losses.
Instead, other data shows, the achievement gap between students from rich and poor families is driven by family resources. It begins well before students start school, and schools themselves don’t do much to close it. — Claire Cain Miller, Sarah Mervosh and Francesca Paris
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Training programs that successfully prepare underemployed men and women for cutting-edge tech careers are exceedingly rare. The work force development organization known as Per Scholas has been doing exactly that for nearly 30 years — free of charge to the men and women whose lives have been transformed by its programs. This record of success makes Per Scholas more than worthy of your support.
The program started out in the South Bronx in 1995, teaching young people to refurbish computers for distribution to local schools. The organization has since become a national work force training provider with locations in 24 cities, preparing workers for careers in information technology, cloud computing, software engineering and cybersecurity. Learners who participate can expect 30 to 40 hours of class work per week and three hours a day of post-class studying for 12 to 15 weeks.
Per Scholas works closely with leading tech employers on matters of curriculum, ensuring that its students have in-demand skills when they graduate. One of those employers is Barclays Bank, which has partnered with the program for more than a decade and has hired almost 70 graduates. Barclays helped with a cybersecurity curriculum and worked with Per Scholas to launch campuses in Brooklyn and Newark.
