Anya Kamenetz

Last updated
Anya Kamenetz
Anya Kamenetz.jpg
Born (1980-09-15) September 15, 1980 (age 41)
Baltimore
OccupationWriter
LanguageEnglish
NationalityAmerican
EducationBenjamin Franklin High School
Alma mater Yale College
Notable worksGeneration Debt, DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, The Test: Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing–But You Don’t Have to Be, The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life
RelativesRodger Kamenetz, Moira Crone

Anya Kamenetz (born September 15, 1980) is an American writer living in Brooklyn, New York City. She is an education correspondent for NPR, [1] a former staff writer for Fast Company magazine, and columnist for Tribune Media Services, and the author of several books.

Contents

During 2005, she wrote a column for The Village Voice called "Generation Debt: The New Economics of Being Young". Her first book, Generation Debt, was published by Riverhead Books in February 2006. Her writing has also appeared in New York Magazine , The New York Times , The Washington Post , Salon , Slate, The Nation , The Forward newspaper, and more.

In 2009, Kamenetz wrote a column called "How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education" [2] and, in 2010, a book on the subject entitled DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. In 2010, she was named a Game Changer in Education by the Huffington Post. [3]

As a Fellow at the New America Foundation, Kamenetz wrote a book, The Test: Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing–But You Don’t Have to Be, [4] which was released in January 2015. [5]

She was featured in the documentaries Generation Next (2006), Default: The StudentLoan Documentary [6] (2011), both shown on PBS, and Ivory Tower, [7] which premiered at Sundance in 2014 and was shown on CNN.

Her book, The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life was published by PublicAffairs, and imprint of Hachette, in January 2018. [8] It argues that families should manage screen time with rules similar to Michael Pollan’s well-known “food rules”: "Enjoy Screens. Not too much. Mostly with others." [9]

She is the daughter of Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus and other books on spirituality, and Moira Crone, fiction writer and author of Dream State and A Period of Confinement . Kamenetz grew up in Baton Rouge and New Orleans and graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School and Yale College in 2002. [10]

Reviews of Generation Debt

Generation Debt argues that student loans, credit card debt, the changing job market, and fiscal irresponsibility imperil the future economic prospects of the current generation, which is the first American generation not to do better financially than their parents. [11]

Some critics of Generation Debt have held that Kamenetz is not critical enough of her own perspective. A writer at Slate wrote, "It's not that the author misdiagnose[s] ills that affect our society. It's just that [she] lack[s] the perspective to add any great insight." [12]

Reviews of The Test

In The New York Times Book Review, Dana Goldstein wrote, [13] "Although “The Test” mounts a somewhat familiar case against standardized testing, to characterize it as simply a polemic would be to overlook the sophistication of Kamenetz's thinking."

In The Boston Globe, Richard Greenwald wrote, [14] "The value of Anya Kamenetz’s new book, “The Test,” lies in her ability to avoid the soapbox style of too many books on education reform today. Her journalistic talents coupled with her role as a mother of a student on the brink of testing humanizes this book, making it a perfect entry for parents who are too deep in the muck of testing to have the clarity of distance."

Related Research Articles

Diane Ravitch

Diane Silvers Ravitch is a historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Previously, she was a U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education. In 2010, she became "an activist on behalf of public schools". Her blog at DianeRavitch.net has received more than 36 million page views since she began blogging in 2012. Ravitch writes for the New York Review of Books.

Student loan Type of loan for educational expenses

A student loan is a type of loan designed to help students pay for post-secondary education and the associated fees, such as tuition, books and supplies, and living expenses. It may differ from other types of loans in the fact that the interest rate may be substantially lower and the repayment schedule may be deferred while the student is still in school. It also differs in many countries in the strict laws regulating renegotiating and bankruptcy. This article highlights the differences of the student loan system in several major countries.

Pearson Education is a British-owned education publishing and assessment service to schools and corporations, as well for students directly. Pearson owns educational media brands including Addison–Wesley, Peachpit, Prentice Hall, eCollege, Longman, Scott Foresman, and others. Pearson is part of Pearson plc, which formerly owned the Financial Times. It claims to have been formed in 1840, with the current incarnation of the company created when Pearson plc purchased the education division of Simon & Schuster from Viacom and merged it with its own education division, Addison-Wesley Longman, to form Pearson Education. Pearson Education was rebranded to Pearson in 2011 and split into an International and a North American division.

College tuition in the United States Aspect of American higher education

College tuition in the United States is the privately borne cost of higher education collected by educational institutions in the United States. This does not include the portion that is paid through taxes or from other government funds or that is paid from university endowment funds or gifts through scholarships or grants. Tuition for college has increased as the value, quality, and quantity of education have also increased. These increases have occasionally been controversial.

Rodger Kamenetz American poet and author (born 1950)

Rodger Kamenetz is an American poet and author best known for The Jew in the Lotus (1994), an account of the historic dialogue between rabbis and the XIV Dalai Lama. His poetry explores the Jewish experience and in recent years, dream consciousness. Since 2003 he's been instrumental in developing Natural Dreamwork, a practice that focuses on the sacred encounters in dreams.

Laura Kipnis American cultural critic and author

Laura Kipnis is an American cultural critic and essayist. Her work focuses on sexual politics, gender issues, aesthetics, popular culture, and pornography. She began her career as a video artist, exploring similar themes in the form of video essays. She is professor of media studies at Northwestern University in the Department of Radio-TV-Film, where she teaches filmmaking. In recent years she has become known for debating sexual harassment and free speech policies in higher education.

Lee Siegel is an American writer and cultural critic who has written for Harper's, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, and other publications. He is the author of eight books of nonfiction and has received a National Magazine Award.

Proprietary colleges are for-profit colleges and universities. They are operated by their owners or investors, rather than a not-for-profit institution, religious organization, or government. Because they are not funded by tax money, their long-term sustainability is dependent on the value they provide relative to the perceived value of a degree from a higher educational institution overall. The increased reliance on federal student aid funds by these "for-profit" schools is of growing concern. Since federal student loans are typically guaranteed by the government, for-profit colleges can reap a profit from taxpayers even if students drop out after enrolling, do not complete a degree, or the degree turns out to be nearly worthless for future employment. Students can be stuck with large and unmanageable debt loads, defaulting at a significantly higher rate than students at traditional non-profit institutions. Non-profit institutions generally depend in part on academic excellence and creating graduates that succeed in their fields, while for-profit schools are often based on attracting large numbers of students with few requirements in terms of academic qualifications for entry because federal loans are provided for good and bad students alike. Some institutions in this category are regionally accredited, while many others are not. Sometimes a proprietary college may also overlap with the sector of non-degree granting business colleges.

Student loans in the United States Loans incurred to pay for higher education

Student loans in the United States are a form of financial aid intended to help students access higher education. In 2018, 70 percent of higher education graduates had used loans to cover some or all of their expenses.

Virginia Heffernan American journalist

Virginia Heffernan is an American journalist and cultural critic. Since 2015, she has been a political columnist at the Los Angeles Times and a cultural columnist at Wired. From 2003 to 2011, she worked as a staff writer for The New York Times, first as a television critic, then as a magazine columnist, and then as an opinion writer. She has also worked as a senior editor for Harper's, as a founding editor of Talk, and as a TV critic for Slate. Her 2016 book Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art argued that the Internet is a "massive and collective work of art", one that is a "work in progress", and that the suggested deterioration of attention spans in response to it is a myth.

American Student Assistance (ASA) is a national non-profit organization to help students make informed choices to achieve their education and career goals. It is headquartered in downtown Boston, Massachusetts.

Dana Goldstein American journalist

Dana Goldstein is an American journalist and the author of The Teacher Wars, published by Doubleday and a New York Times best seller. She is currently a domestic correspondent at The New York Times and has worked as a staff writer at The Marshall Project and as an associate editor at The Daily Beast. She received a Bernard L. Schwartz fellowship from the New America Foundation, a Spencer Foundation Fellowship in Education Journalism from Columbia University, and a Puffin Fellowship from The Nation Institute. Her work on politics, education, and women's issues has appeared in national publications including The Atlantic, Slate, The New Republic, and Politico.

Higher education bubble in the United States Economic theory

The higher education bubble in the United States is a highly controversial claim that excessive investment in higher education could have negative repercussions in the broader economy. According to the claim, generally associated with fiscal conservatives, although college tuition payments are rising, the supply of college graduates in many fields of study is exceeding the demand for their skills, which aggravates graduate unemployment and underemployment while increasing the burden of student loan defaults on financial institutions and taxpayers. The claim has generally been used to justify cuts to public higher education spending, tax cuts, or a shift of government spending towards the criminal justice system and the Department of Defense.

Elyse Goldstein is a Canadian Reform rabbi. She is the first woman to be elected as president of the interdenominational Toronto Board of Rabbis and president of the Reform Rabbis of Greater Toronto.

Dana Stevens (critic) American film critic (born 1966)

Dana Shawn Stevens is an American film critic who writes for Slate. She is also a cohost of the magazine's weekly cultural podcast, the Culture Gabfest. She is the author of a 2022 book about Buster Keaton and the 20th century titled Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century.

The New Journal is a magazine at Yale University that publishes creative nonfiction about Yale and New Haven. Inspired by New Journalism writers like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese, the student-run publication was established by Daniel Yergin and Peter Yeager in 1967 to publish investigative pieces and in-depth interviews. It publishes five issues per year. The magazine is distributed free of charge at Yale and in New Haven and was among the first university publications not to charge a subscription fee.

<i>Discovering Gloria</i> American film

Discovering Gloria is an unreleased documentary film by Boaz Dvir. The documentary captures Gloria Merriex’s transformation into an educational innovator and shows her engaging her math, reading, and science students at the most effective levels through her innovations, which included hip-hop and dance routines.

Lisa Guernsey American journalist

Lisa Guernsey is an American early education researcher, author, and former journalist. She is currently director of the Learning Technologies Project at New America, a non-profit, non-partisan research organization based in Washington, D.C. She is also deputy director of the organization's Education Policy Program.

Tressie McMillan Cottom American writer, sociologist, and professor

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an American writer, sociologist, professor, and GenX icon. She is currently an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science (SILS), and is also an affiliate of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is also an opinion columnist at The New York Times.

Dana Burde is an American political scientist. She is a professor at New York University, where she is also Director of International Education. Burde studies the relationship between level of education and violent conflict, particularly in Afghanistan, as well as how humanitarian organizations and government policies can promote successful education outcomes. For her book Schools for Conflict or for Peace in Afghanistan, Burde won the 2017 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.

References

  1. "Anya Kamenetz Lead Blogger, Education". Tmsfeatures.com. Retrieved 2015-04-10.
  2. Anya Kamenetz (September 2009). "How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education". Fast Company . No. 139.
  3. "Arianna On Game Changers Anya Kamenetz, Jill Biden, Ted Olson & David Boies". The Huffington Post. Retrieved 10 April 2015.
  4. The Test: Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing–But You Don't Have to Be: Anya Kamenetz: 9781610394413. ISBN   1610394410.
  5. ‘The Test’ by Anya Kamenetz, By DANA GOLDSTEIN, New York Times, Sunday Book Review, FEB. 4, 2015
  6. "Default: the Student Loan Documentary". Default: the Student Loan Documentary. Retrieved 2017-01-23.
  7. "Ivory Tower". TakePart. Retrieved 2017-01-23.
  8. "PublicAffairs". PublicAffairs Books. Retrieved 20 January 2019.
  9. "Don't panic! Here's how to make screens a positive in family life". The Guardian. Retrieved 20 January 2019.
  10. "Anya Kamenetz, Adam Berenzweig". The New York Times. 2006-10-22. Retrieved 2008-06-10.
  11. "Up Against It At 25". www.businessweek.com. Archived from the original on 30 April 2008. Retrieved 2008-06-10.
  12. Gross, Daniel. "Meet the it-sucks-to-be-me generation". Slate Magazine. Archived from the original on 15 June 2008. Retrieved 2008-06-10.
  13. Goldstein, Dana (2015-02-04). "'The Test,' by Anya Kamenetz". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2017-01-23.
  14. "A review of "The Test" by Anya Kamenetz - The Boston Globe". BostonGlobe.com. Retrieved 2017-01-23.