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photo by P. A. Jensen
SportsData-Driven, Education

Losing the Race in College Sports (Part 1 of 3): The Myth of Overrepresentation

  • December 26, 2019January 1, 2020

Discussions of race in college sports often rely on faulty statistics. One recent, high-profile example comes from The Atlantic, where sports columnist Jemele Hill offered an intriguing thought experiment involving black student-athletes and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Unfortunately,

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photo by P. A. Jensen
SportsData-Driven, Education

Losing the Race in College Sports (Part 2 of 3): Race Is Just Part of the Story

  • December 26, 2019January 17, 2020

The first installment in this series examined whether black, male student-athletes, and black students generally, are fairly represented on campuses of universities that participate in major-conference athletics. This part of the series focuses on their performances in the classroom compared

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photo by P. A. Jensen
SportsData-Driven, Education

Losing the Race in College Sports (Part 3 of 3): Big-Money Sports vs. the Classroom

  • December 26, 2019January 1, 2020

The first installment in this series examined whether black, male student-athletes, and black students generally, are fairly represented on campuses of universities that participate in major-conference athletics. The second installment analyzed the effects of race on classroom performance, both among

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photo by P. A. Jensen
Sports

En-Title IX

  • October 3, 2019October 4, 2019

You could hear our shivers. We hummed like refrigerators in our plastic seats, our frigid winter jackets micro-trembling, heat dissipating up, up, up into the bannered rafters. Thirty-seven minutes until game time, little pockets of people huddled among the 7,000-some

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photo by P. A. Jensen
Rural LifeEducation

Schools? Blame the Parents.

  • September 26, 2019

We needn’t harken to the days of Laura Ingalls to remember when going to school was a privilege. Much more recently, children still walked to school, in the winter, trudging through the elements with slates and books and literal lunch

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photo by P. A. Jensen
Rural Life

Generations Removed

  • August 12, 2019

My father is a Baby Boomer, but he jokes that he was raised during The Depression. He grew up on a small, family-run potato farm that was a lot closer to “farming” than to “agribusiness,” if you catch the distinction.

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photo by P. A. Jensen
SportsData-Driven

Poll-Wise: Can Polls Predict College Hockey’s National Tournament Better than the PairWise?

  • July 29, 2019

Our editor has published an article on US College Hockey Online (USCHO.com) about whether polls or computer-based rankings are better at predicting the national-tournament field in college hockey.     P. A. Jensen is editor of RuralityCheck.com. He lives in

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photo by P. A. Jensen
Politics & PolicyEducation, Kernel

College Students Are Adults, Right? [Kernel]

  • July 29, 2019July 29, 2019

This is a new, shorter format: the Kernel (hence the picture). Feedback is welcome, especially on our editor’s Twitter account (@RuralityChecker). As always, thanks for reading. A local car salesman recently offered up this tidbit in casual conversation: “High school

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photo by P. A. Jensen
Politics & PolicyKernel

Amenities of the State [Kernel]

  • July 18, 2019July 20, 2019

The mayor of Duluth, MN, wants more affordable housing in the city. The idea has at least two problems. The first involves perspective, and the second involves funding. First, perspective. Leaders of cities bemoan high housing costs, but that’s often

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photo by P. A. Jensen
Politics & PolicyEducation, For Fun

Mind the Gap: Four Solutions to the Education Achievement Gap

  • July 14, 2019July 29, 2019

C. N. Hughes, Ed.D. Director State Agency on Trends In Race and Education State of Minnesota St. Paul, MN 55155 Dear Dr. Hughes, This letter summarizes the findings of our grant (“Closing Minnesota’s Race-Based Educational Achievement Gap at All Costs,”

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photo by P. A. Jensen
Sports

A Thought Experiment for #EqualPay

  • July 10, 2019

Imagine that women’s soccer takes off. Would we be talking about #EqualPay for the men? For the uninitiated, the US Women’s Soccer Team is in the middle of a firestorm, and that firestorm is squarely in the gender pay gap.

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photo by P. A. Jensen
Politics & Policy, SportsKernel

#Equal Pay, Inequality, and Yada-Yada Economics [Kernel]

  • July 8, 2019

This is a new, shorter format: the Kernel (hence the picture). Feedback is welcome, especially on our editor’s Twitter account (@RuralityChecker). As always, thanks for reading. After the US Women’s Soccer Team’s World Cup victory this weekend, all-world phenom forward

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photo by P. A. Jensen
Sports

Division Rivalry: Let’s Stop Pretending about “College Sports”

  • July 2, 2019

In college sports, when is it okay to take your ball—or puck—and go home? A couple of months ago, a group of small, private colleges in Minnesota decided to boot a school from their athletic conference, the MIAC. The University

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photo by P. A. Jensen
Politics & Policy

“Medicine?” You’re Kidding.

  • June 6, 2019

Sit in a coffee shop in middle America and you’ll see, time after time, people waddling away from the counter, with sugar-struck smiles amidst their chins, holding what appear to be quadruple double whipped frappe mochaccinos, liquid chocolate under a

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photo by P. A. Jensen
Uncategorized

Power Couples, Little People

  • May 29, 2019

I am one of the little people, it turns out. You know, the kind of person whose job is to make the lives of the big people—the people with the big jobs, the people who are busy, the people with

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photo by P. A. Jensen
Politics & Policy

Rural White Privilege

  • May 7, 2019May 7, 2019

(First, let’s get this out of the way: Instead of asking whether white privilege exists at all, I’m asking whether it exists uniformly, and what the consequences of that might be.) White privilege, or the notion that white people don’t

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photo by P. A. Jensen
Rural Life, Sports

Striking at the Heart

  • May 2, 2019May 3, 2019

The stereotypical small-town person, or at least man, is a fan of sports, probably football. As I’ve written elsewhere, this isn’t necessarily wrong, but it is misunderstood. In fact, I’d like to offer a counterpoint: an example of how small-town

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photo by P. A. Jensen
Politics & PolicyData-Driven

A Bite at the Apple: The Arithmetic of Minority Teachers

  • April 26, 2019

Both Democrats and Republicans like to talk about increasing the number of minority teachers. The stated reasons vary, but let’s get right to the specifics: in Minnesota, an education coalition is asking the state for $80m to help increase the

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photo by R. Jensen
Politics & Policy

Sharing Fairly

  • April 15, 2019

“You bitch! Just put it in!” Whoa, there. Language. My wife may be misremembering, in no small part because she was sleep-deprived. But there she was, trying to stick a needle into this woman’s spine after being roused from her

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photo by P. A. Jensen
Politics & Policy

Frame of Preference

  • April 9, 2019April 9, 2019

Clear, wet grease crawled up the sides of that brown paper bag. It sat on the counter, soggily erect, saturated with calories. A sack of beef. And cheese. And fried, krinkle-kut potatoes. And it was awesome. My life isn’t hard,

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Do Teams that Lose More Also Lose by More?

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