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Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (PDF):
Chicken Little wasn't kidding. While Governor Walker's Act 10 stripped public employees of the right to bargain over virtually all wages, benefits and working conditions, the remaining "token" item, which unions theoretically had the continuing right to bargain, was the "total base wages". Walker's Act 10, however, limited said increase to no more than the consumer price index (CPI) over the prior 12 months (a higher amount would be subject to referendum). Now that the Walker-appointed Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission (WERC) has issued Administrative Rules as to the implementation of Walker's Act 10 calculation of "base wages", rather than providing a cost-of-living increase for teachers, it COULD ACTUALLY RESULT IN A SUBSTANTIAL DECREASE IN PAY. The following helps explain this apparently ludicrous rule.For example, a Madison teacher with a Master's degree is at Track 4, Level 16 (approximately 12 year's experience) of the current salary schedule is paid $54,985 per year. Assuming a 3% increase in the CPI, this teacher would need a salary increase to $56,635 to maintain the same standard of living. However, the new WERC rule defines the "base pay" not as the current salary ($54,985), but the salary this teacher would have received without the pay additive recognizing the achievement of additional educational credits (Walker's Law would calculate this teacher's CPI increase pay at Track 1 [BA], Level 16, or $51,497). The WERC's defined "Base Pay" for this teacher is $3,488 LESS than the teacher's current pay. Applying a 3% CPI increase to the Walker's Law base of $51,497 yields a salary of only $53,042. Therefore, under the WERC's new rules, this teacher's "cost-of-living increase" could actually result in a pay cut of $1,943 per year. Rather than a 3% increase in pay, Walker's Law could produce a 3.5% decrease in pay. The greater the educational attainment (e.g. PhD at Track 8), the greater the potential cut. One publicized example from Monticello School District shows a scenario where a teacher there could take a $14,000 pay cut.
The impact of the WERC Administrative Rule is beyond belief. Calculations illustrate that using this means to calculate wage increases for Madison's teachers will actually produce only about 90% of the revenue to fund the wages now on the salary schedule - that's right! Chicken Little wasn't kidding! This does not necessarily mean that teachers will receive a pay cut after bargaining Walker's "cost- of-living" increase. School districts could, and should, continue to provide salary schedules which encourage teachers' continued education and reward them for same. Doing so will be to the advantage of each child enrolled in the district. But, as with all other wages, hours and working conditions under Walker's Law, such is entirely at the district's discretion. Walker's Law even makes it a violation of law for school districts to negotiate over wages, other than the increase in the CPI. Should the employer utilize such discretion, salaries would not have to be cut and increases could occur. But, it's a fallacy to think that Walker's Law allows Unions to truly bargain cost-of-living increases for all of their members. While that may be true for employee groups without compensation plans connected to educational credits, such as MTI's EA, SEE, SSA and USO units, under Walker's WERC rules, it is certainly not the case for teachers. JUST ONE MORE REASON TO RECALL!
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"But Will Fitzhugh, the publisher of the Sudbury, Mass.-based Concord Review, a quarterly scholarly journal that publishes secondary students' academic writing, said he is skeptical of whether there is any application of automated essay graders that would enhance students' educational experience."
Education Week: Published Online: April 24, 2012
Published in Print: April 25, 2012Study Supports Essay-Grading Technology
But researchers raise concerns about some conclusions
By Ian Quillen
After a recent study that suggested automated essay graders are as effective as their human counterparts in judging essay exams, "roboreaders" are receiving a new wave of publicity surrounding their possible inclusion in assessments and classrooms.
But while developers of the technology are happy to have the attention, they insist the high profile has more to do with timing of policy changes such as the push to common standards than with any dramatic evolution in the essay-grading tools themselves.
"What's changed is the claims people are willing to make about it. ... [I]t's not because the technology has changed," said Jon Cohen, an executive vice president of the Washington-based American Institutes for Research, one of nine organizations developing software that participated in the study.
"I think, over time, a mixture of technologies will make this really good not only for scoring essays," but also for other assignments, said Mr. Cohen, the director of AIR's assessment program. "But we really need to be clear about the limits of the applications we are using today so we can get there."
Human vs. Machine
The study, underwritten by the Menlo Park, Calif.-based William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, is driven by the push to improve assessments related to the shift to the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts and math, and is based on the examination of essays written specifically for assessments. (The Hewlett Foundation also provides support to Education Week for coverage of "deeper learning.")
Essay Graders
A recent study examined essay-grading software developed by the following organizations:American Institutes for Research
www.air.org/focus-area/educational-assessmentCarnegie Mellon University
www.hcii.cmu.eduCTB/Mcgraw-Hill
www.ctb.comEducational Testing Service
www.ets.orgMeasurement Inc.
www.measurementinc.comMetaMetrics
www.metametricsinc.comPacific Metrics
www.pacificmetrics.comPearson Knowledge Technologies
kt.pearsonassessments.comVantage Learning
www.vantagelearning.comSOURCE: "Contrasting State of the Art Automated Scoring of Essays: Analysis"
Each developer's software graded essays from a sample of 22,000 contributed by six states, using algorithms to measure linguistic and structural characteristics of each essay and to predict, based on essays previously graded by humans, how a human judge would grade a particular submission. All six states are members of one of two state consortia working to develop assessments for the new standards.By and large, the scores generated by the nine automated essay graders matched up with the human grades, and in a press release, study co-director Tom Vander Ark, the chief executive officer of Federal Way, Wash.-based Open Education Solutions, a blended-learning consulting group, said, "The demonstration showed conclusively that automated essay-scoring systems are fast, accurate, and cost-effective."
Mr. Cohen of AIR cautioned that interpretation could be too broad.
"I think the claims being made about the study wander a bit too far from the shores of our data," he said.
Mark Shermis, the dean of the college of education at the University of Akron, in Ohio, and a co-author of the study, said the paper doesn't even touch on the most exciting potential of automated essay graders, which is not their ability to replace test scorers (or possibly teachers) with a cheaper machine, but their ability to expand upon that software to give students feedback and suggestions for revision.
'Inspiring Composition'Two vendors in the study--the Princeton, N.J.-based Educational Testing Service and Vantage Learning, with headquarters in Yardley, Pa.--already have offered for most of the past decade software that gives students some basic feedback on the grammar, style, mechanics, organization, and development of ideas in their writing, Mr. Shermis said.
"It's designed to be a support, so that a teacher can focus him- or herself completely on inspiring composition of writing or creative composition of writing," he said. "It's possible that an administrator will say, 'I'm just going to throw it all to the computer,'... but that's not what we would ever recommend."
Further, one entrant in the study, the LightSIDE software developed by Teledia, a research group at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, was created as an extension of research its developers say is only loosely related to automated essay graders.
Their examination of natural language processing, or the science of how computers interact with human language, has focused on the idea that software could help students hold more-productive collaborative discussions about any range of academic subjects, said Carolyn P. Rose, an associate professor of language technology and human-computer interaction.
For example, one project involves using artificial intelligence to drive discussions on an online platform provided by the university to secondary students in the 25,000-student Pittsburgh public schools. A computer-generated persona interacts as one of several participants in an online discussion, asking questions of the students and at times even interjecting humor into a tense situation among students involved in the discussion.
Creating an automated essay grader based on that research came out of a curiosity to see whether the researchers' methods of evaluating student discussion could transfer to assessment of student composition, said Elijah Mayfield, a doctoral candidate in language and information technology working with Ms. Rose. Commercial vendors involved in the study did not possess a similar background in studying student interaction, perhaps because they couldn't afford to do so from a business standpoint, he said.
"I think it gets caught up between what machine learning is aiming for and what is commercially feasible," Mr. Mayfield said.
Smarter ComputersJohn Fallon, the vice president of marketing with Vantage Learning, said that using current policy momentum--including the drive for the creation of new, more writing-intensive assessments--will only help drive improvements in all realms of natural-language-processing study. That includes projects like those at Carnegie Mellon, as well as those at his own company.
"A lot of it comes down to, the more submissions we get, the smarter the [computer] engine gets," said Mr. Fallon, who asserts that his company's offerings are able not only to score student writing, but also to give those students feedback for improvement.
"The transition to the common core and what that's going to require is really bringing a much stronger focus for writing," he said. "And the challenge has always been how can we get teachers to get students to write more and maintain interaction at the student level."
But Will Fitzhugh, the publisher of the Sudbury, Mass.-based Concord Review, a quarterly scholarly journal that publishes secondary students' academic writing, said he is skeptical of whether there is any application of automated essay graders that would enhance students' educational experience.
Contrary to those concerned about how the technology would change the roles of teachers, Mr. Fitzhugh said the greater issue is that such software encourages the assignment of compositions to be written in class and the use of assessments in which learning the content before writing about it is undervalued.
And he disputes the notion that understanding organization, sentence structure, and grammar alone is enough to give students the writing command they'll need in future careers.
"The idea that the world of business or the world of whatever wants you to write something you know nothing about in 25 minutes is just a mistake," Mr. Fitzhugh said. "I haven't looked deeply into what the computer is looking at, but I don't think they are capable of understanding what the student is actually saying."
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Regarding Oconomowoc's proposal to let go 20% of its high school teachers, get rid of prep time, give the remaining teachers a $14,000 pay increase, and evidently move to a flipped classroom model supported by some kind of online system that provides content and creates individualized learning plans for the students --
It's extraordinarily bold, and it may represent the wave of the future, but -- I'm glad they're going first. Reading between the lines of the Journal-Sentinel article, their plan will put a lot of weight on an online learning system that students will use at home, at night. The system will assess where each kid is on a learning continuum (probably the Common Core) and will "deliver appropriate content." Teachers, during school, will help the kids with their homework. This is why the concept is called a "flipped classroom." I'm oversimplifying, but this is the basic concept.
Some of this sounds good. Depending on class size, kids could end up getting more personalized attention from teachers than they do under the current lecture format. Kids also might have more opportunities to collaborate and problem solve together than they do now, lined up in rows and facing forward.
But there are concerns, too. A lot of students don't even do schoolwork when at home, which means that in a flipped model they would never learn the subject matter in the first place. Online systems of this kind are expensive, which will put pressure on districts to increase class size. This could come to seem palatable since more and more of the instruction will be happening out of class, but it could backfire: the model depends on teachers having a manageable number of kids to help. And, most worrisome, online systems to support a flipped classroom are in their infancy. If I had kids at Oconomowoc HS, I'd be extremely concerned.
It would be nice if the Chris Rickerts of the world, before trumpeting the value of whatever disrupts the status quo, would look a little closer at the details, and ask a few more questions.
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To Kathleen Porter Magee, via email:
"Of course, teachers should carefully consider how they can best hit the targets laid out in the Common Core. Obviously the vision outlined by Coleman and Pimentel isn't the only path to implementation. Careful analysis is needed to determine how best to drive achievement in this new environment. However, in this case, it's obvious from the outset that Chaffee and his colleagues were impervious to change. Unless the presenter was going to mirror back to them exactly the kinds of things that they've always done--perhaps with some tweaks, but certainly within the narrow constraints of their own vision of excellence--they were not open to the ideas. That is not the pathway to meaningful reform.
Worse, the particulars of Chaffee's criticisms are often misguided (and apparently went uncorrected)."
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"HELP IS ALWAYS DEFINED BY THE RECIPIENT"
Douglas McGregor, Sloan School, MIT, The Human Side of Enterprise
Boston: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1960, p. 163-164
"The Appropriate Role of Staff
The appropriate role of any major staff group...is that of providing professional help to all levels of management. In some cases, such as engineering, the help is provided primarily to one or two functions, e.g., manufacturing and sales. In other cases, such as accounting and personnel, the help is provided to all other functions.
The hierarchical nature of the organization has tended to focus attention on help given to the level at which the staff group reports. Rewards and punishments for staff members come from there. Moreover, prestige and status are greater the higher level of 'attachment.' In large companies, where there are both headquarters and field staff groups, it is particularly important that the headquarters groups recognize and accept their responsibilities for providing help to all levels of management.
The provision of professional help is a subtle and complex process. Perhaps the most critical point--and the one hardest to keep clearly in mind--is that help is always defined by the recipient. Taking an action with respect to someone because 'it is best for him,' or because 'it is for the good of the organization,' may be influencing him, but it is not providing help unless he so perceives it. Headquarters staff groups tend to rationalize many of their activities on the field organization in a paternalistic manner and, as a consequence, fail to see that they are relying on inappropriate methods of control. When the influence is unsuccessful, the usual reaction occurs: The recipients of the 'help' are seen as resistant, stupid, indifferent to organizational needs, etc. The provision of help, like any other form of control or influence, requires selective adaptation to natural law. One important characteristic of 'natural law' in this case is that help is defined by the recipient..."
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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Which better reflects who you are, your high school or your college?For most Americans, the answer is high school. Half of us did not attend college. Many college graduates think, as I do, that our high schools are more in tune with our habits and tastes.
So why don't we mention them? Why is it, in any detailed writing about a person, the college is often mentioned but the high school is not? The exceptions -- like the San Diego Air and Space Museum identifying the Apollo 9 astronauts's high schools (Western in D.C., Central Kalamazoo in Michigan and Manasquan in New Jersey) -- are rare surprises.
High school defines us. It is an educational experience we nearly all share. Useful abilities, such as reading, writing, math and our own peculiar talents, for the most part take root in high school, or don't, to our sorrow. High school offers lessons in love, social dynamics, news and what we are most likely to enjoy in our adult lives, at work and play. Hillsdale High School in San Mateo, Calif., gave me more than my colleges, Occidental and Harvard.
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Chris Rickert summarizes a bit of recent Madison School Board decision making vis a vis educational outcomes. Contrast this with the recent governance news (more) from Oconomowoc; a community 58 miles east of Madison.
Christian D'Andrea
Moreover, it's not like Madisonians are certain to oppose a large tax hike, especially given the way they responded to Walker's bid to kill collective bargaining.Before that idea became law, the board voted for -- and the community supported -- extending union contracts. Unions agreed to some $21 million in concessions in return for two years' worth of protection from the law's restrictions.
But the board could have effectively stripped the union of seniority protections, forced members to pay more for health insurance, ended automatic pay raises and taken other actions that would have been even worse for union workers -- but that also would have saved taxpayers lots of money.
Board members didn't do that because they knew protecting employees was important to the people they represent. They should be able to count on a similar dedication to public schooling in asking for the money to pay for the district's latest priorities.
The changes would have a significant effect on teachers that the district retains. Starting positions - though it's unclear how many would be available due to the staff reduction - would go from starting at a $36,000 salary to a $50,000 stipend. The average teacher in the district would see his or her pay rise from $57,000 to $71,000. It's a move that would not only reward educators for the extra work that they would take on, but could also have a significant effect in luring high-level teachers to the district.The Madison School District has, to date, been unwilling to substantively change it's model, one that has been around for decades. The continuing use of Reading Recovery despite its cost and lower than average performance is one example.In essence, the district is moving forward with a plan that will increase the workload for their strong teachers, but also increase their pay to reflect that shift. In cutting staff, the district has the flexibility to raise these salaries while saving money thanks to the benefit packages that will not have to be replaced. Despite the shuffle, class sizes and course offerings will remain the same, though some teachers may not. It's a bold move to not only retain the high school's top performers, but to lure good teachers from other districts to the city.
Tuesday's meeting laid out the first step of issuing non-renewal notices to the 15 teachers that will not be retained. The school board will vote on the reforms as a whole on next month.
With respect to facilities spending, perhaps it would be useful to look into the 2005 maintenance referendum spending & effectiveness.
It is my great "hope" (hope and change?) that Madison's above average spending, in this case, 33% more per student than well to do Oconomowoc, nearby higher education institutions and a very supportive population will ultimately improve the curriculum and provide a superior environment for great teachers.
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Hundreds of photos of standardized tests have begun to appear on social-networking sites in California, raising concerns about test security and cheating by students.In the worst-case scenario, the photos could lead to invalidating test scores for entire schools or prevent the state from using certain tests. For now, officials have warned school districts to heighten test security and investigate breaches. Students are not allowed to have access to cellphones or other devices that can take pictures when the tests are administered.
"Test security was compromised when students posted images of actual test questions, answer documents and test booklets to social networking sites," Deb Sigman, a state Department of Education deputy superintendent, said in a letter Friday to school districts. "You have a responsibility to prevent any such incidences in the future."
Educators involved in testing sign an affidavit asserting that they follow and enforce all rules.
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A high-profile effort by a pair of national education groups to strengthen, simplify and focus the building blocks of elementary and secondary education is finally making its way into schools. But two years ahead of its planned implementation, critics on both the right and left are seizing upon it. A few educators say the new standards, supported by the U.S. Department of Education, are untested, and one Republican governor wants to block the measure, saying it's a federal intrusion into local decisions.Much more on the common core, here.How did something so simple become so fraught?
The story begins in 2009, when the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers announced an effort to create voluntary national standards in math and reading. All but four states -- Arkansas, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia -- quickly signed on to the standards, known as the Common Core, agreeing to help create then implement them by 2014. Their decision was helped partly by President Obama, who has tied "college and career-ready standards" to billions in federal grants. Last September, he all but required adoption of the Common Core if states want to receive federal waivers from the 2002 No Child Left Behind law.
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I read an article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel a few months ago with great interest. It was the story of a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee education professor who was struggling to make ends meet. My story is not entirely different from his, except that I had the opportunity to make a change, and it led me to accept a position with a university just south of Wisconsin's border.My story is one that I fear is being replicated throughout the UW System.
In order to put my recent decision in context, I think it is useful to share a portion of my life story (albeit a condensed version). I was born in Green Bay and moved to Milwaukee at a young age. I attended Forest Home Elementary School, Kosciuszko Middle School and Milwaukee Trade and Technical High School.
No one in my family had ever attended college before my older brother did. A few years later, I followed him to UWM. I went on to earn a bachelor's degree, master's degree and a doctorate from UWM. Upon graduation, I took a research position in Madison but remained in Milwaukee because my wife and I enjoyed the area and were closer to family (my wife grew up in Greendale, attended Marquette University and has been working at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin for the past 22 years).
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The growth of student debt is stirring debate about whether the government should step in to ease the burden by rewriting the bankruptcy laws--again.In 2005, Congress prohibited student debt from being discharged through bankruptcy, except in rare cases, because of concerns that many young graduates--who often have no major assets such as a house or a car--would be tempted to walk away from loan obligations.
Some lawmakers now want to temper that position, pointing to concerns that a significant number of Americans could be buried under education loans for decades. Their efforts, however, would apply only to private loans--a fraction of the market.
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On whether a degree is necessary and importance of the choice of major:Paul Elliott:
Like home ownership, Americans are obsessed with the importance of obtaining a college degree, and so it gets over-emphasized and over-subsidized through student loans that lead in many cases to too many people paying ever-higher tuition rates at mediocre colleges and obtaining a worthless degree. Look at Germany, whose population has a much lower percentage of college degrees than the U.S., but it still has a low unemployment rate and a solid manufacturing economy. We need to recognize that vocational occupations like mechanics, machinists, electricians, and plumbers are worthy alternatives to college.
Andrew Black:
Um, quality and usefulness of education is being ignored here? It isn't a fact that more education means better jobs or a better workforce. Too many kids are majoring in sociology, women's studies, and other useless fields of study that do not equate to any measurable economic benefit.
Also, they gloss over the fact that many people choose to go to college and rack up debt, when many of them would be better served going to a professional school or a trade school.
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On a rainy day just after Thanksgiving, Amanda Kimbrough played with her 2-year-old daughter in her raw-wood-paneled living room, petting her terriers and half-watching TV. Kimbrough, who is 32, lives a few miles outside Russellville, a town of fewer than 10,000 in rural northwestern Alabama, near the border of Franklin and Colbert Counties. Textiles were the economic engine of the area until the 1990s, when the industry went into decline and mills shut down. Now one of the region's leading employers is Pilgrim's, a chicken supplier. The median household income is $31,213, and more than a third of children live below the poverty line.
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Olli Martio - University of Helsinki, Marticulation Board in Finland
olli.martio@helsinki.fi, via a kind Richard Askey email:
Curricula changes in the Finnish school system have taken place in 8-10 year intervals. They have been recorded in the official curricula for schools by the Finnish Ministry of Education. However, these texts do not provide a complete picture since they are rather short of details. Schools can freely choose their textbooks and there is neither an official inspection nor an official approval for the textbooks. The system is based on the free market principle. Because of this textbooks, and the practice of teaching, should also be studied in order to understand the Finnish mathematics curriculum. A similar situation prevails in many other countries.The leading ideas, from the point of view of people working in pedagogy, from 1960 on were "New Math" (1960-1970), "Back to Basics" (1968-80) and "Problem Solving"(1978- ), see [M1] and [PAL]. These trends have appeared in many other countries as well. However, these key words do not give a proper picture what really happened in the mathematics curriculum and education.
In Finland these trends had the following effects on the mathematics curriculum.
"Problem Solving" and putting emphasis on calculators have taken time from explaining the basic principles and ideas in mathematics. It should be also remembered that with the invention of calculators and computers the pressure to traditional mathematics teaching increased enormously since a general believe in 1960-70 was that all the mathematical problems can be solved by computers and hence the traditional school mathematics is useless. This criticism did not come from ordinary laymen only but from well known scientists as well and this attitude was very much adopted by people working in education and didactics. These ideas had a profound effect on the changes in the Finnish school curriculum.
- Mathematics at school became descriptive - exact definitions and proofs were largely omitted.
- Geometry and trigonometry were neglected.
- Computations were performed by calculators and numbers and not on a more advanced level.
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I've periodically wondered what the downstream effects of the Madison School District's mid-2000's war on the long running strings program might be. Perhaps this chart is a place to begin the discussion.
Of course there may be many other explanations, from staff changes, student interests and so on. That said, the Wisconsin Youth Symphony continues to be popular.
Data via The Wisconsin School Music Association. Note that I looked around the WSMA site extensively for Sun Prairie counts, but failed to find any.
Per Student Spending:
Middleton 2011-2012 budget: $87,676,611 for 6,421 students = $13,654.67/student, about 8% less than Madison.
Madison spends $14,858.40/student (2011-2012 budget)
Waunakee spends $12,953.81/student about 13% less than Madison.
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Matthew DeFour, via a kind reader's email:
Madison community members say an extended school day, career academies, cultural training for teachers, alternative discipline, more contact between school staff and parents and recruiting minority students to become teachers are some of the best strategies for raising achievement levels of low-income and minority students.Additional reader notes:However, some of those same ideas -- such as adding an extra hour in the morning and emphasizing career training over college preparation for some students -- are raising the most questions and concerns.
Those are a few of the key findings of a two-month public-input process on Superintendent Dan Nerad's achievement gap plan.
The district released a summary report Friday. Nerad plans to revise the plan based on the public's response and deliver a final proposal to the School Board on May 14.
Nerad said there is clearer support for more parent engagement and cultural training for teachers, than for an extended school day. He said not everyone may have understood that students who focus on a technical rather than liberal arts education might still go on to college after they graduate.
There are profound deficiencies in the methodology and attempted "analysis" in the district's and Hanover reports (https://boeweb.madison.k12.wi.us/files/boe/Appx%2010-40.pdf), but it's interesting to see the district's summary of staff input on literacy (page 2 of Marcia Standiford's memo):Madison School District related website comments includes:"4. Literacy - Start early with a consistent curriculm [sic]
Support for an emphasis on literacy was evident among the comments. Staff members called for a consistent program and greater supports at the middle and high school levels. Several questioned why the recommendations emphasized third grade rather than starting at earlier grades. Comments also called for bringing fidelity and consistency to the literacy curriculum. Several comments expressed concern that dedicating extra time to literacy would come at the expense of math or other content areas." And a somewhat buried lede in the Hanover report (p. 3 of the report, p. 21 of the pdf):"Nine focus groups mentioned the reading recovery [sic] program, all of whom felt negatively about the strategy." and (p. 10 of the report, p. 29 of the pdf) "Nine comments referred to the reading recovery plan, all of which were negative. Comments noted that 'reading recovery has failed' and 'reading recovery has not been effective in Madison Schools.' None of the comments supported reading recovery."
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When Cindy Ballagh's 10-year-old son Kaden lost his portable videogame recently, she asked him where he last put it. His answer: on his dresser.After they spent several minutes searching on, under and all around the dresser, she happened to spot the game--buried in his bed. He had been playing with it there the night before and broke a rule by falling asleep with it, says Ms. Ballagh, of Clarksville, Tenn. Frustrated, she told Kaden he would get in less trouble if he would "just be honest and tell the truth."
It's a tense moment--one almost all parents experience: You look in your child's eyes and realize: "He's lying."
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Why are some of us caring and some of us cruel, some generous and some greedy? Paul J. Zakon the new science of morality-- and how it could be used to create a more virtuous society.Could a single molecule--one chemical substance--lie at the very center of our moral lives?
Research that I have done over the past decade suggests that a chemical messenger called oxytocin accounts for why some people give freely of themselves and others are coldhearted louts, why some people cheat and steal and others you can trust with your life, why some husbands are more faithful than others, and why women tend to be nicer and more generous than men. In our blood and in the brain, oxytocin appears to be the chemical elixir that creates bonds of trust not just in our intimate relationships but also in our business dealings, in politics and in society at large.
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Republican and Democratic lawmakers agreed this week to approve new subsidies for college students but clashed on how to offset the $6 billion cost of the measure so it doesn't add to the federal deficit, setting up a potential election-year showdown over budget policy.House Republicans plan to vote as early as Friday to freeze the interest rates on certain federal student loans at 3.4% for the year that starts July 1. The lawmakers plan to make up the unrealized revenue by tapping money that was directed by the 2010 health-care overhaul to fund investment in illness-detection procedures. Without congressional action, the rate on the loans would double on July 1 to the 6.8% level that applies to the most commonly used type of federal student loan. Loans issued before July 1wouldn't be affected.
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David Wessel & Stephanie Banchero:
Throughout American history, almost every generation has had substantially more education than that of its parents.That is no longer true.
When baby boomers born in 1955 reached age 30, they had about two years more schooling than their parents, according to Harvard University economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, who have calculated the average years of schooling for native-born Americans back to 1876.
In contrast, when Americans born in 1980 turned 30 in 2010, they averaged about eight months more schooling than their parents.
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McClatchy-Tribune Information Services:
Minnesota is in the midst of developing a new teacher evaluation system, one that Republican lawmakers would like to use to make layoff decisions based on performance rather than seniority.The movement to overhaul how teachers are rated has picked up steam nationwide, fueled in part by President Barack Obama's $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition. But as states such as Rhode Island and Colorado are finding out, developing intricate performance measures requires more time and money than they bargained for.
"It's easy to make broad statements about goals and how this is going to work. But the devil's always in the detail," said Rose Hermodson, assistant commissioner at the Minnesota Department of Education.
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I have taught 28 years in the Oconomowoc Area School District, the last 25 at Oconomowoc High School. I am retiring at the end of this year so I have some perspective on the proposed "transformation" of the high school. I also have the luxury of being able to speak my mind without fear of repercussion.Alan Borsuk:Media coverage has focused on how the transformation is a bold educational innovation. However, there is more to the story.
For most of the years I have taught, there has been a genuine feeling of collaboration and teamwork among administrators, teachers and support staff. That has quickly eroded this past year into a culture of fear. Teachers fear that by speaking up, by questioning, they may be putting their careers in jeopardy.
I do not believe this is the kind of culture our school administration wants, but it is what we have. And now they are going to compound this situation by taking away the most valuable resource a teacher has: time.
I have been, as have many teachers, to many workshops over the years where innovative and exciting ideas and programs have been put forth on how to better meet the needs of students. Teachers come away thinking: If only we could . . . well we could . . . if we had the time.
Without a doubt, the No. 1 limiting factor in the successful implementation of new ideas and programs is time - the time to read, to mull over, to discuss, to plan, the time to create, to implement, to evaluate and to make changes.
Oconomowoc Superintendent Pat Neudecker calls the plan "the right thing to do for our students, our schools and the teaching profession." Even before the financial belt got much tighter across Wisconsin, she was an advocate of changing classroom life to take better advantage of technology and make education more customized for students. Neudecker is currently president of the American Association of School Administrators; she was a leading figure in developing a statement issued by a group of Milwaukee area educators in 2010 that called for these kinds of changes.Now, talk turns into action. Act 10, the Republican-backed state law that pretty much wiped out the role of teachers unions in school life, and cuts in education spending create the landscape for Oconomowoc to make big changes.
Oconomowoc High uses a block schedule, which means its days are built around four periods of about 90 minutes each, rather than, say, seven of 50 minutes. Generally, teachers teach three blocks and get one to work on things such as preparation. (If you think three blocks is a fairly light schedule, that's because you haven't done it.)
There is a big need to reduce spending for next year. For many school districts, that is going to mean reducing staff, keeping a tight grip on salary and benefits (as allowed now by state law), reducing offerings and increasing some class sizes - the four pillars of school cost cutting.
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I keep stumbling across unswerving predictions that the future belongs to China. Or, perhaps to the contrary, that the Middle Kingdom will always struggle to challenge US primacy. Don't ask where India and Brazil fit in. Enjoyable as it is, this exercise in the remaking of the geopolitical landscape is also something of a diversion. The 21st century will not be shaped by the abstract choices of states. Transformative power will belong to a new global middle class.The story of the past couple of decades has been of the great shift of economic weight and geopolitical influence from west to east. This rebalancing still has some way to go. However, comparisons of the relative position of established and emerging powers obscure some of the more fundamental drivers of change. What is happening within states is every bit as interesting as what might change in the relationships between them. Within 20 years or so a world that is now predominantly poor will be mostly middle class.
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For decades, California was regarded as the domestic paradise of the United States, lush with beautiful views and ample resources. This no longer seems to be the case. While many insist that those who reside in California are among the happiest in the country, studies show that Californians are increasingly pursuing happiness elsewhere.In an interview with demographer Joel Kotkin, the Wall Street Journal found that this exodus of California residents is enormous in scale -- with potentially profound impacts.
Mr. Kotkin's analysis has found that the driving factors behind families' decisions to move to states like Nevada and Texas include:
- Nearly 4 million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states.
- This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving.
- According to Kotkin, most of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45; in other words, young families.
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Our teens are fighting in a war that they can't handle themselves.This is just one of the many "pregnancy pacts" that teenage girls in communities and schools across the country are participating in. The girls create these pacts to form a sisterhood. They want to feel apart of something and have an image they can all identify with. Unfortunately, they've chosen to be young, single parents, birthing these children into an environment of instability and poverty, instead of aspiring to be lawyers, doctors, writers, engineers and scientists. Instead of game parties and movie nights, our teen girls are a apart of a group effort to get pregnant and give birth together.
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Dominique Gaines, 22, has lived in Wisconsin foster homes most of his life. As he moved between schools he would miss lessons and fall behind. Eventually he dropped out.Looking back he said he would have benefited from more hands-on, technical classes and experiences, similar to what he does now as a participant in Operation Fresh Start.
"It would have been nice to actively use the brain," Gaines said.
Gaines and other Operation Fresh Start participants have experiences common among students whom the Madison School District wants to help with its sweeping achievement gap plan. They also have a unique perspective on how best to reach struggling students.
In their opinion, the best strategies for improving low-income and minority student achievement are providing assistance to transient families, offering students that cause trouble other outlets for their energy, and creating career academy programs, according to a recent survey.
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The leadership of Madison Teachers Inc. is letting its membership know it has unearthed yet another reason to recall Gov. Scott Walker.In its weekly "Solidarity!" newsletter that was mailed out Friday, the union warns how administrative rules recently released by the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission related to the implementation of Act 10 could result in teachers' pay being cut.
"This is causing a lot of angst," says John Matthews, executive director of MTI.
"This could be very bad for teachers," adds state Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts, D-Middleton, who sits on the Assembly's Committee on Education. "These rules allow for teachers' base pay to be redefined, and I think that's absurd."
The roots of this story reach back to last summer, when Act 10 eliminated most public employees' ability to collectively bargain over virtually anything except "base wages." Even then, workers are limited to bargaining over raises that can't exceed the consumer price index (CPI), unless voters approve a hike via a referendum.
After receiving requests to explain what "base wages" could be bargained over, the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission (WERC) -- a state agency designed to settle labor disputes -- worked on rules to clarify the matter.
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Two Madison students are among 10 from Wisconsin who have been named semifinalists for the 2012 Presidential Scholars award, the nation's highest honor for graduating high school seniors.Suman Gunasekaran, a senior at Memorial High School, and Joanna Q. Weng, a senior at West High School, are among the 550 national semifinalists for the program.
About 3,300 students out of nearly 3.2 million graduating seniors were identified as candidates for the award based on their performance on college admissions tests. The semifinalists were selected by a national committee based on essays, self-assessments, secondary school reports and transcripts.
The Presidential Scholars program was established in 1964 to recognize and honor some of our nation's most distinguished high school students. Presidential Scholars are selected each year to travel to Washington for an awards ceremony along with a teacher whom they identify as having been most influential in their education.
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Tom Zhou arrived from Beijing three years ago to attend Chinese Christian High School here. The 17-year-old is graduating in June and is set to attend the University of California, Los Angeles in the fall.In China, "high school is just tests" with no emphasis on personal development, says Mr. Zhou. But at CCHS, "we learn to learn like Americans," he says.
Going to a U.S. high school and learning to learn like Americans are what increasing numbers of students in China are hoping to do in order to improve their chances of getting into an American college, CCHS says. As an evangelical private high school with experience teaching students from China, CCHS has been taking in more of these overseas students and is starting to refer others to like-minded Christian high schools in the U.S.
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Steven Enoch Press Conference by Melissa Westbrook:
You came saying you were looking for a good fit between you and the district. What do you think?Sandy Husk by Melissa Westbrook.I hope my perspective can be useful and that I can be a good leader for this district but that's for the Board to determine. I really enjoyed visiting schools and seeing the good work going on.
We understand that your Special Ed program has been recognized as a model for inclusion; could you tell us about it and your thoughts on Special Ed?
The model for inclusion is the right thing to do for most kids (recognizing that some students have more severe disabilities). The secret to success is 1)have teachers who receive these students in their class know the IEP and its goals/outcomes, 2) aides with kids who need them but be sure that the aides don't solely focus on child to the point where the child isn't part of the class (what looks the least restrictive could be more restrictive). He said you need good communication between your special education director and teachers. He said in his district they did have to cut admn staff but that they kept the staffing in Special Ed and had a Special Ed ombudsman to help parents navigate the system AND keep staff updated.
Video is available here.
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Here is an example of a school assignment sent to me by an inventive high school psychology teacher:"To gain a better understanding of Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development, you will go to a toy store and choose one toy for each stage of development. In a paper, you will discuss what aspect of the toy corresponds with what developmental milestone in Piaget's theory. Additionally you will discuss the issue of gender identity formation, based on your visit to the toy store."
It is one of many such ideas that pop up on my Class Struggle blog. The teacher who forwarded the assignment, Patrick Mattimore, suggested an activity in which readers send in effective teaching strategies. He and I would select the best entries. Knowing the state of newsroom budgets, Mattimore suggested a reward of some value but no cost: publicity for the winner.
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Differential tuition" as a pricing concept doesn't get much discussion in higher education; it's easy to get lost in the variables. But Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University and a national higher education leader, says he's thinking about it. "We do have to start differentiating tuition costs," he said, in a visit to the Post this week.Maybe the practice isn't so uncommon as we think.
A recent survey by the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, reported in Inside Higher Ed, found 143 public institutions that had differential tuition policies, meaning that they charge different rates for students with different majors.
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Russell Rumberger, a scholar with an encyclopedic grasp of the drop-out issue, has doubts about the latest, hottest cure -- online credit recovery. That means letting struggling students take courses on a computer without the annoyances of listening to a teacher or doing homework.Online credit recovery accounts for about half of all instruction in the $2 billion online-education industry, with great potential for good, many educators say. But Rumberger, director of the California Dropout Research Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara, says he knows of a student who got a D in English so took an online course that required reading only one book -- "To Kill A Mockingbird" -- and about 12 hours of work on a computer over one week.
The student received an A for that one-semester credit. "Online credit recovery offers students a quicker and more flexible way to earn high school credits," said Rumberger, author of "Dropping Out: Why Students Drop Out of High School and What Can Be Done About It." But, he said, "there is generally insufficient evidence and accountability to ensure that the online courses are as rigorous and impart as much learning as traditional courses."
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Some local Head Start programs for the first time will have to compete for a share of $7.6 billion in federal funding under a plan aimed at weeding out low-performing preschool centers.In its initial move, the Obama administration recently told 132 Head Start programs across the country that they have been identified as deficient, including the nation's largest programs in Los Angeles County and New York City.
The targeted programs, which serve low-income three- and four-year-olds, won't lose current funding. But instead of having their grants renewed automatically, as has been the practice, the programs now have to prove they are effective in preparing children for kindergarten before they will be given future funding.
The move is part of the administration's broader goal to infuse competition and accountability into public education from preschool through college.
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The Obama administration wants to expand the use of standardized test scores as an accountability tool from K-12 into higher education.The Education Department just tried -- and failed -- to persuade a group of negotiators to agree to regulations that would rate colleges of education in large part on how K-12 students being taught by their graduates perform on standardized tests. As part of this scheme, financial aid to students in these programs would not be based entirely on need but, rather, would also be linked to test scores.
The department's plans assume that standardized test scores can reliably and validly be used for such accountability purposes . Most researchers in this field say they can't -- for a number of reasons, including the limitations of the tests themselves -- and therefore shouldn't be used for any high stakes decision in education anywhere. They say that making test scores so important is one of the negative consequences of the last decade of No Child Left Behind, and shouldn't be continued.
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There's been some good blogging lately on how to interpret the studies on Teach For America (TFA) teacher effectiveness - see Matthew Di Carlo and Adam Ozimek. But neither addresses the research from a Relinquisher standpoint. Here's what they say:Matt's takeaway: TFA teachers are by most standards "talented" - i.e., they went to selective universities, graduated at the top of their class, are motivated, and work hard. But they don't dramatically outperform traditional teachers. So perhaps that link between recruiting "talented" teachers and increasing test scores isn't as tight as it might seem.
Adam's takeaway: TFA teachers get five weeks of training and achieve roughly the same results as teachers who go through much longer university-based training programs. So imagine what "talented" TFA-type folks could do if they actually had more training.
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In its effort to transform the nation's worst-performing schools, the Obama administration is launching an unusual experiment to pump up arts education in eight struggling schools, including one in the District.The President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, working with the Education Department, will announce a plan Monday to infuse art, music, dance, theater and other forms of creative expression into the schools over a two-year period.
Officials involved in the project want to prove a theory: Robust art, music, dance and theater can set failing schools on a path to academic success.
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hy The Net Matters: How the Internet Will Save Civilization. By David Eagleman, Canongate Books, 2010. (For iPad)Unless you landed at Download the Universe with the mistaken impression that it's a new torrent aggregator, chances are you're already familiar with David Eagleman, the 40-year-old Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist/author/futurist. Perhaps you're one of the millions of people around the world who was dazzled by Sum, Eagleman's breathtaking, oftentimes brilliant, collection of short stories about the afterlife--or perhaps it was Incognito, Eagleman's exploration of the unconscious, that caught your eye. (It's not everyday, after all, that a pop-sci book pulls off the tricky balancing act of simultaneously appealing to the cognoscenti and the hoi polloi.)
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Among the problems on college campuses today are that students study for exams and faculty encourage them to do so.I expect that many faculty members will be appalled by this assertion and regard it as a form of academic heresy. If anything, they would argue, students don't study enough for exams; if they did, the educational system would produce better results. But this simple and familiar phrase--"study for exams"--which is widely regarded as a sign of responsible academic practice, actually encourages student behaviors and dispositions that work against the larger purpose of human intellectual development and learning. Rather than telling students to study for exams, we should be telling them to study for learning and understanding.
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The latest word on the street about English in America - always bad, it seems - is that the shaggy construction of texting and e-mail spells the death of formal writing. Yet the truth about English in America - always sunnier, in fact - is that the looseness and creativity of these new ways of writing are a sign of a new sophistication in our society. This becomes clear when we understand that in the proper sense, e-mail and texting are not writing at all.Historical perspective is useful. Writing was only invented roughly 5,500 years ago with the emergence of cuneiform picture writing in Mesopotamia, what is now Iraq and parts of Iran, Syria and Turkey, whereas humanity arose a good 200,000 years ago, with language probably tracing back at least 50,000 years and most likely much further. According to one estimate, if Homo sapiens had existed for 24 hours, writing only came along after 11 p.m.
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There are no professors in Virginia Tech's largest classroom, only a sea of computers and red plastic cups.In the Math Emporium, the computer is king, and instructors are reduced to roving guides. Lessons are self-paced, and help is delivered "on demand" in a vast, windowless lab that is open 24 hours a day because computers never tire. A student in need of human aid plants a red cup atop a monitor.
The Emporium is the Wal-Mart of higher education, a triumph in economy of scale and a glimpse at a possible future of computer-led learning. Eight thousand students a year take introductory math in a space that once housed a discount department store. Four math instructors, none of them professors, lead seven courses with enrollments of 200 to 2,000. Students walk to class through a shopping mall, past a health club and a tanning salon, as ambient Muzak plays.
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The Madison School District's lunch program serves as a window into the national debate over school nutrition and childhood obesity in an upcoming documentary film series.The documentary, set to air on HBO on May 14 and 15 and for free on HBO.com, also features two Madison families who participate in the UW Hospital's Pediatric Fitness Clinic.
The four-part series, titled "The Weight of the Nation" and produced in collaboration with the Institute of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, is intended as a wake-up call for the country. According to the CDC, over the past 30 years the adult obesity rate has doubled and the child obesity rate has almost tripled, fueling a surge in heart and kidney disease, diabetes, cancer and strokes.
But the segment featuring Madison schools as the typical American cafeteria experience should alarm a city that prides itself on its farmers' markets and community-supported agriculture, said Martha Pings, a local parent nutrition advocate who appears in the film.
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In a move sure to capture the attention of school districts across the state grappling with how to reallocate resources in a time of reduced funding, the Oconomowoc Area School District administration on Tuesday proposed a profound restructuring of its high school, cutting staff and demanding the remaining educators take on more teaching duties.Structural change rather than just ongoing, overall spending increases.The kicker: Those remaining staffers would each get a $14,000 annual stipend.
The plan requires reducing Oconomowoc High School's core teaching force by about 20% - from about 75 to about 60 people - across the departments of math, science, social studies, language arts, foreign language, physical education and art, Oconomowoc Superintendent Pat Neudecker said Tuesday before a school board meeting where the plan's details were released.
Oconomowoc's dramatic step reflects a district responding to reduced resources amid an urgent push to reshape teaching, with newfound leeway to adjust compensation, staffing and school structures without having to bargain with unions.
"We haven't ever moved around the pieces in education like this," Neudecker said, adding that even with the stipends next year, the district would save $500,000 annually under the new plan.
"Our expectations are changing for teachers, but we're also going to deploy resources to help them change," Neudecker said.
Oconomowoc's 2011-2012 budget is $51,381,000 for 5,211 students results in per student spending of $9,860, 33% less than Madison. Madison's 2011-2012 budget spends $369,394,753 for 24,861 = $14,858.40/student.
Update: Alan Borsuk:
Oconomowoc Superintendent Pat Neudecker calls the plan "the right thing to do for our students, our schools and the teaching profession." Even before the financial belt got much tighter across Wisconsin, she was an advocate of changing classroom life to take better advantage of technology and make education more customized for students. Neudecker is currently president of the American Association of School Administrators; she was a leading figure in developing a statement issued by a group of Milwaukee area educators in 2010 that called for these kinds of changes.Now, talk turns into action. Act 10, the Republican-backed state law that pretty much wiped out the role of teachers unions in school life, and cuts in education spending create the landscape for Oconomowoc to make big changes.
Oconomowoc High uses a block schedule, which means its days are built around four periods of about 90 minutes each, rather than, say, seven of 50 minutes. Generally, teachers teach three blocks and get one to work on things such as preparation. (If you think three blocks is a fairly light schedule, that's because you haven't done it.)
There is a big need to reduce spending for next year. For many school districts, that is going to mean reducing staff, keeping a tight grip on salary and benefits (as allowed now by state law), reducing offerings and increasing some class sizes - the four pillars of school cost cutting.
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Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email [170K PDF]:
The selection of an early reading screener for Wisconsin is a decision of critical importance. Selecting the best screener will move reading instruction forward statewide. Selecting a lesser screener will be a missed opportunity at best, and could do lasting harm to reading instruction if the choice is mediocre or worse.Although there is still a long way to go on improving reading scores, Brown Deer schools show that improvements can be made. by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:After apparently operating for some time under the misunderstanding that the Read to Lead Task Force had mandated the Phonological Assessment and Literacy Screen (PALS), the Department of Public Instruction is now faced with some time pressure to set up and move through a screener evaluation process. Regardless of the late start, there is still more than enough time to evaluate screeners and have the best option in place for the beginning of the 2012-13 school year, which by definition is the time when annual screeners are administered.
The list of possible screeners is fairly short, and the law provides certain criteria for selection that help limit the options. Furthermore, by using accepted standards for assessment and understanding the statistical properties of the assessments (psychometrics), it is possible to quickly reduce the list of candidates further.
Is One Screener Clearly the Best?One screener does seem to separate itself from the rest. The Predictive Assessment of Reading (PAR) is consistently the best, or among the best, in all relevant criteria. This comment is not a comparison of PAR to all known screeners, but comparing PAR to PALS does reveal many of its superior benefits.
Both PAR and PALS assess letter/sound knowledge and phonemic awareness, as required by the statute.
In addition, PAR assesses the important areas of rapid naming and oral vocabulary. To the best of our knowledge, PAR is the only assessment that includes these skills in a comprehensive screening package. That extra data contributes unique information to identify children at risk, including those from low-language home environments, and consequently improves the validity of the assessment, as discussed below.
Both PAR and PALS have high reliability scores that meet the statutory requirement. PAR (grades K-3) scores .92, PALS-K (kindergarten) scores .99, and PALS (grades 1-3) scores .92. Reliability simply refers to the expected uniformity of results on repeated administrations of an assessment. A perfectly reliable measurement might still have the problem of being consistently inaccurate, but an unreliable measurement always has problems. Reliability is necessary, but not sufficient, for a quality screener. To be of value, a screener must be valid.
In the critical area of validity, PAR outscores PALS by a considerable margin. Validity, which is also required by the statute, is a measure of how well a given scale measures what it actually intends to measure; leaving nothing out and including nothing extra. In the case of a reading screener, it is validity that indicates how completely and accurately the assessment captures the reading performance of all students who take it. Validity is both much harder to achieve than reliability, and far more important.
On a scale of 0-1, the validity coefficient (r-value) of PAR is .92, compared to validity coefficients of .75 for PALS-K and .68 for PALS. It is evident that PAR outscores PALS-K and PALS, but the validity coefficients by themselves do not reveal the full extent of the difference. Because the scale is not linear, the best way to compare validity coefficients is to square them, creating r-squared values. You can think of this number as the percentage of success in achieving accurate measurement. Measuring human traits and skills is very hard, so there is always some error, or noise. Sometimes, there is quite a lot.When we calculate r-squared values, we get .85 for PAR, .56 for PALS-K, and .46 for PALS. This means that PAR samples 51 to 84 percent more of early reading ability than the PALS assessments. The PALS assessments measure about as much random variance (noise) as actual early reading ability. Validity is not an absolute concept, but must always be judged relative to the other options available in the current marketplace. Compared to some other less predictive assessments, we might conclude that PALS has valid performance. However, compared to PAR, it is difficult to claim that PALS is valid, as required by law.
PAR is able to achieve this superior validity in large part because it has used 20 years of data from a National Institutes of Health database to determine exactly which sub-tests best predict reading struggles. As a consequence, PAR includes rapid naming and oral vocabulary, while excluding pseudo-word reading and extensive timing of sub-tests.
PAR is norm-referenced on a diverse, national sample of over 14,000 children. That allows teachers to compare PAR scores to other norm-referenced formative and summative assessments, and to track individual students' PAR performance from year to year in a useful way. Norm referencing is not required by the statute, but should always be preferred if an assessment is otherwise equal or superior to the available options. The PALS assessments are not norm-referenced, and can only classify children as at-risk or not. Even at that limited task of sorting children into two general groups, PAR is superior, accurately classifying children 96% of the time, compared to 93% for PALS-K, and only 73% for PALS.
PAR provides the unique service of an individualized report on each child that includes specific recommendations for differentiated instruction for classroom teachers. Because of the norm-referencing and the data base on which it was built, PAR can construct simple but useful recommendations as to what specific area is the greatest priority for intervention, the intensity and duration of instruction which will be necessary to achieve results, and which students may be grouped for instruction. PAR also provides similar guidance for advanced students. With its norm-referencing, PAR can accurately gauge how far individual children may be beyond their classmates, and suggest enriched instruction for students who might benefit. Because they are not norm-referenced, the PALS assessments can not differentiate between gray-area and gifted students if they both perform above the cut score.
PAR costs about the same as PALS. With bulk discounts for statewide implementation, it will be possible to implement PAR (like many other screeners) at K5, 1st grade, 2nd grade, and possibly 3rd grade with the funds allocated by statute for 2012-13. While the law only requires kindergarten screening at this time, the goal is to screen other grades as funds allow. The greatest value to screening with a norm-referenced instrument comes when we screen in several consecutive years, so the sooner the upper grades are included, the better.
PAR takes less time to administer than PALS (an average of 12-16 minutes versus 23-43).
The procurement procedure for PALS apparently can be simplified because it would be a direct purchase from the State of Virginia. However, PAR is unique enough to easily justify a single-source procurement request. Salient, essential features of PAR that would be likely to eliminate or withstand a challenge from any other vendor include demonstrated empirical validity above .85, norm-referencing on a broad national sample, the inclusion of rapid naming and oral vocabulary in a single, comprehensive package, empirically valid recommendations for differentiated intervention, guidance on identifying children who may be gifted, and useful recommendations on grouping students for differentiated instruction.Conclusions
The selection of a screener will be carefully scrutinized from many perspectives. It is our position that a single, superior choice is fairly obvious based on the facts. While it is possible that another individual or team may come to a different conclusion, such a decision should be supported by factual details that explain the choice. Any selection will have to be justified to the public as well as specific stakeholders. Some choices will be easier to justify than others, and explanations based on sound criteria will be the most widely accepted. Simple statements of opinion or personal choice, or decisions based on issues of convenience, such as ease of procurement, would not be convincing or legitimate arguments for selecting a screener. On the other hand, the same criteria that separate PAR from other screeners and may facilitate single-source procurement also explain the choice to the public and various stakeholder groups. We urge DPI to move forward reasonably, deliberately, and expeditiously to have the best possible screener in place for the largest possible number of students in September.
There are signs that the long struggle to close the achievement gap in reading has a chance of paying off. There is a long way to go - and recent statewide test scores were disappointing - but we see some reason for encouragement, nonetheless.Schools are working to improve readingAlan J. Borsuk, a former Journal Sentinel education reporter and now a senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette University Law School, reports that black 10th-graders in the Brown Deer school district did better in reading than Wisconsin students as a whole, with 84.2% of Brown Deer's black sophomores rated proficient or advanced in reading, compared with 78.1% for all students and 47.7% for all black 10th-graders in the state. Some achievement gaps remain in this district that is less than one-third white, but they are relatively modest.
As vice chair of the Read to Lead Task Force, I am pleased that Wisconsin is already making progress on improving literacy in Wisconsin.The Read to Lead Task Force members deserve credit for making recommendations that center on improving reading by: improving teacher preparation and professional development; providing regular screening, assessment and intervention; ensuring early literacy instruction is part of early childhood programs; and strengthening support for parental involvement in reading and early literacy programs.
Across Wisconsin, districts and schools are working to implement the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and mathematics. These standards are designed to increase the relevance and rigor of learning for students. Milwaukee's Comprehensive Literacy Plan is a significant step that defines common expectations in reading for Milwaukee Public Schools students, who now receive reading instruction through one curriculum that is consistent across schools.
Learn more about Wisconsin's Read to lead Task force and the planned MTEL teacher content knowledge standards, here.
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I have recently undergone a Damascene conversion. I have fallen utterly head over heals for apps. It began as a bit of fun. I didn't even own an iPad, or any device I could view apps on.Brought up on books, living in a flat surrounded by books, an author of a couple of them, the son of one author and the nephew of another, I never listened to those who questioned whether the 500-year-old hegemony of words printed on paper was coming to an end.
Now I have all the zealotry of a convert.
I have spent the past six months working with a team to develop an app about the Second World War, Timeline World War 2. The process has given me a profound understanding and respect for exactly what is possible. Apps on a tablet device quite simply give you all the combined benefits of books, television, the web and radio, with few of the disadvantages.
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We'd just finished John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men." When we read the end together out loud in class, my toughest boy, a star basketball player, wept a little, and so did I. "Are you crying?" one girl asked, as she crept out of her chair to get a closer look. "I am," I told her, "and the funny thing is I've read it many times."But they understood. When George shoots Lennie, the tragedy is that we realize it was always going to happen. In my 14 years of teaching in a New York City public middle school, I've taught kids with incarcerated parents, abusive parents, neglectful parents; kids who are parents themselves; kids who are homeless or who live in crowded apartments in violent neighborhoods; kids who grew up in developing countries. They understand, more than I ever will, the novel's terrible logic -- the giving way of dreams to fate.
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JUST three months after he unveiled it, Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, has signed into law an unprecedented overhaul of the state's awful school system. His bold plan weakens teacher tenure, and therefore the teachers' unions, while greatly expanding the use of school vouchers and the reach of charter schools. These reforms are modelled on, but go well beyond, the ones already employed to great effect in New Orleans, traditionally home to the state's worst schools.Until now, teachers in Louisiana earned tenure after three years in the classroom. They also had the right to a hearing before the local school board before they could be fired. Now they will get tenure only after being judged "highly effective" in five out of six years. The designation will be based on pupils' test scores, and probably on classroom observation by a supervisor. Teachers who have tenure now will keep it, unless they become "ineffective".
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The iPad may only be two years old, but it's already begun to change many things. Reading is one of them. Work is another. It is selling like crazy, but it will be some time before most of the people you know own a tablet.The market for this type of device may only be in its infancy, but it's already becoming clear how it will revolutionize certain aspects our lives. Education is a huge one, as recent developments have demonstrated.
In January, Apple made good on its late CEO's vision to enter the digital textbook market with the launch of iBooks 2 and the iBooks Author production tool for e-books. That early effort was met with mixed reactions. While some were excited to see Apple move into a space that's ripe for disruption, others pointed out the inherent limitations in Apple's model, which for starters, will be cost-prohibitive for many school districts.
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This looks like a bombshell announcement to me (I'm not aware of the internal politics behind the announcement, but I'm presuming that Robert Darnton's fingerprints are all over it). Discuss.We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. ... The Faculty Advisory Council to the Library, representing university faculty in all schools and in consultation with the Harvard Library leadership, reached this conclusion: major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable. ... It is untenable for contracts with at least two major providers to continue on the basis identical with past agreements. Costs are now prohibitive. ... since faculty and graduate students are chief users, please consider the following options open to faculty and students (F) and the Library (L), state other options you think viable, and communicate your views:
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This short video clip Confessions of a Converted Lecturer from a talk by Professor Erik Mazur who teaches Physics at Harvard is quite mind blowing.Professor Mazur discovered that his students can "learn" something conceptually and re-iterate it and pass exams but still fail to understand the subject or acquire the ability to apply that learning in real world situations. No amount of "lecturing", how ever good, solves this problem.
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One in six Hongkongers has an iPad and half want one, but how many are being used as electronic babysitters? Stuffed with games, photos, music and video, there's a worry that tablet computers and smartphones are handed over too easily to youngsters.A survey by Nielsen last month reveals how prevalent iPad use is among children in North America. In households where at least one iPad was owned, 70 per cent of children used it, and what it's being used for is hardly surprising. The vast majority of children download games - 77 per cent - and while 43 per cent also watch TV and films, an impressive 57 per cent use educational apps, too. At least, that's what their parents say, over half of whom admit to using an iPad to pacify their children while travelling, or while eating in a restaurant.
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Harvesting the vegetables he has helped to plant, nurture and cultivate, Vlado Vasile, a Year Seven student at South Island School, declares: "It is simply an amazing adventure that really makes you want to gasp." In Hong Kong, where having a garden is often considered a luxury, Vlado, like many other children from 10 international and 10 local schools, has discovered the joys of horticulture and composting. That's thanks to Growing Together, a one-year pilot project initiated by the British Chamber of Commerce and sponsored by HSBC.Since last October, using micro gardens - box containers made of recyclable materials - children of all ages have been growing produce ranging from tomatoes, carrots and herbs to Chinese water spinach and bak choy. Using a Japanese Bokashi composting system, students have also been learning about recycling food waste from leftover school lunches. The fertiliser is then used to nurture the vegetables.
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Too many students 'get by' and seek tactics that lead to good marks not good learning.'Never praise a child, praise what they did' says Professor Black, and by this he meant praise the work of the learner and not the learner.
To praise the student encourages two ideas that are powerfully corrosive in learning; a) the idea that it's all down to ability b) the idea that the 'teacher' likes me.
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In US election year, voters and politicians face a wake-up call on the budget deficit.Taxes & statistics.White House Burning The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt and Why it Matters to You, by Simon Johnson and James Kwak, Pantheon, RRP$26.95, 368 pages
Last year, the Washington Post newspaper and ABC television channel conducted a poll that showed that 95 per cent of Americans wanted to cut their country's budget deficit by reducing government spending (either alone, or with tax rises). No surprise there, you might think: the issue of America's debt has come to dominate the political debate this year as the fiscal problems have worsened.
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The American high school diploma is considered less demanding than the IB and A-level qualification because students don't undertake an external examination at the end of a high school career. Students (usually in 11th grade) may take one or more standardised tests depending on their post-secondary education preferences; that is, the Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT) or the American College Test (ACT), which evaluate the overall level of knowledge and learning aptitude. Competitive universities also require students to take two or three SAT subject tests that focus strictly on a particular subject matter.The A-level qualification has been arguably the most widely recognised pre-university qualification. It places emphasis on in-depth knowledge, deep understanding, strong reasoning abilities and critical thinking and allows students to select three to four subjects in any combination. There are no educational systems where students could study fewer subjects and still meet the entrance requirements for a university.
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When Gov. Scott Walker signed the public employee collective bargaining reform bill into law, most school districts used it to correct the relationship between the school district and its teachers.Some did not, most notably Milwaukee, Kenosha and Janesville. Those three school districts have the lion's share of teacher layoffs because they decided not to put their teacher unions in their correct place.
One Kenosha teacher, Kristi Lacroix, is writing about the result in her school district:
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Fifteen years after Chicago embedded International Baccalaureate programs in tough neighborhood schools, the programs have not attracted the middle class.Middle-and upper-income Chicagoans scramble to get their kids into Chicago's top high schools, turning to test prep, private tutors, and educational consultants.
If their kids don't get in, for many it's private school or the suburbs.
But Chicago has another set of high-quality high school programs--considered gems of the district--that middle-income parents have rejected. WBEZ looks at why.
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Bean, E. (2012) Wrath of Khan?: Deconstructing the online learning academy Detroit Web 2.0 Examiner, March 12Eric Bean is an educator who has signed up as a coach/volunteer for the Khan Academy. The Khan Academy has a library of over 3,000 videos covering everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and 315 practice exercises, all free. The focus is mainly on k-12, supporting home schooling or providing additional support for students outside (and sometimes inside) school.
Bean has a number of criticisms from the point of view of a 'coach'. (Interesting use of language here by the Khan Academy: why not teacher or tutor or instructor? Is there a difference in Salman Khan's mind, and if so, what is it?) Bean's main criticism is that the interface and navigation for coaches is poor, especially compared to the student interface.
I have another criticism. As someone who struggles with math, the Khan Academy would seem perfect for me. My problem though is I don't know where to begin. Just jumping at random into a video suddenly makes me aware that I need lots of prior knowledge before I can understand this video, but there's no help on that. Also, where's the feedback? If I still don't understand after watching the video several times and doing the exercises, what do I do?
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WILDLY implausible faux news stories appear each April Fool's Day, some of which are taken seriously. This year's clear winner was the National Public Radio feature about a preschool's new requirement that all applicants submit DNA profiles.As the segment begins, the host Guy Raz is greeted by Rebecca Unsinn, described as headmaster at a school called the Porsafillo Preschool Academy, located in a striking I. M. Pei-designed building in a leafy enclave on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Dr. Unsinn walks Mr. Raz through gleaming computer labs where toddlers master C++. She proudly describes the school's Mandarin Chinese immersion program.
We are also told that Dr. Unsinn, a pediatric neurologist, was recruited to oversee the school's new genetic tests, designed to help winnow 12,000 applications for 32 available spots in next year's class. As she explains, "We now know that simple DNA testing can determine whether a child will end up at Yale or at Yonkers Community College."
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It is obvious that the absence of a major tax is a dominant factor in vaulting many of these 10 states to the top of the rankings. Property taxes and unemployment insurance taxes are levied in every state, but there are several states that do without one or more of the major taxes: the corporate tax, the individual income tax, or the sales tax. Wyoming, Nevada and South Dakota have no corporate or individual income tax; Alaska has no individual income or state-level sales tax; Florida has no individual income tax; and New Hampshire and Montana have no sales tax.The lesson is simple: a state that raises sufficient revenue without one of the major taxes will, all things being equal, have an advantage over those states that levy every tax in the state tax collector's arsenal.
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It's a Tuesday afternoon in March, and the woman the White House has tabbed to craft its national videogames policy is just a little stressed out. Her weekly flight from Madison to Washington, D.C., has been canceled, leaving only pricey last-minute alternatives flickering on her Macbook screen. And in less than an hour, she has to introduce her boss, Carl Wieman, associate director for science of President Obama's Office of Science and Technology Policy, to a crowded room of dignitaries at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.So it's not surprising that she begins the interview with her right hand unconsciously pressed to her forehead, sinking back onto a couch in Aldo's Café like it's a life raft. "His research deals with lasers and atoms," she says of Wieman. "I can start there, right?"
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Let me begin by introducing myself as the Dean of the Georgia Tech College of Computing, a member of the NAE, and a Fellow of ACM and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. I am also a former Dean of the School of Engineering at Columbia University and past President of Tel Aviv University.I am writing to express, in the strongest possible terms, my concerns about the reckless proposal to dismantle the Department of Computing and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at the University of Florida. Of course, having served as both a Dean and a university President, I fully understand that budget realities sometimes dictate that painful cuts be made. Such cuts notwithstanding, I am amazed, shocked, and angered by the proposal to dismantle CISE. And I am by no means alone--the entire computer science/computing community is dumbfounded by the news coming out of Florida. It is unbelievable that a major AAU university would even contemplate such an action in the information age we live in today--an age fueled in great part by computer science!
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"California is God's best moment," says Joel Kotkin. "It's the best place in the world to live." Or at least it used to be.Mr. Kotkin, one of the nation's premier demographers, left his native New York City in 1971 to enroll at the University of California, Berkeley. The state was a far-out paradise for hipsters who had grown up listening to the Mamas & the Papas' iconic "California Dreamin'" and the Beach Boys' "California Girls." But it also attracted young, ambitious people "who had a lot of dreams, wanted to build big companies." Think Intel, Apple and Hewlett-Packard.
Now, however, the Golden State's fastest-growing entity is government and its biggest product is red tape. The first thing that comes to many American minds when you mention California isn't Hollywood or tanned girls on a beach, but Greece. Many progressives in California take that as a compliment since Greeks are ostensibly happier. But as Mr. Kotkin notes, Californians are increasingly pursuing happiness elsewhere.
Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving. According to Mr. Kotkin, most of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45. In other words, young families.
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Erin Loury, via a kind reader:
Monkeys banging on typewriters might never reproduce the works of Shakespeare, but they may be closer to reading Hamlet than we thought. Scientists have trained baboons to distinguish English words from similar-looking nonsense words by recognizing common arrangements of letters. The findings indicate that visual word recognition, the most basic step of reading, can be learned without any knowledge of spoken language.Mark Seidenberg emails:The study builds on the idea that when humans read, our brains first have to recognize individual letters, as well as their order. "We're actually reading words much like we identify any kind of visual object, like we identify chairs and tables," says study author Jonathan Grainger, a cognitive psychologist at France's National Center for Scientific Research, and Aix-Marseille University in Marseille, France. Our brains construct words from an assembly of letters like they recognize tables as a surface connected to four legs, Grainger says.
here's what you need to know:http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3912
Basically, the study shows nothing of any interest about reading. it shows that baboons could pick up on differences in letter frequencies between word and nonword stimuli that allowed to tell them apart about 75% of the time.
This is trivial compared to what a reader knows about the properties of written English.
the paper is here:
https://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6078/245.full
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So you hope to reach young people in Armenia.Yes. As a parent you have to think about your kid and other kids. Recently there was a program on TV discussing environmental issues in Armenia. My son watched it, then he went to his room and started crying. He said, "I hate people because they do so much harm to our Earth. How are we going to change things?" I thought, What are we doing for our kids?
Actually my son is famous! In Armenia everybody knows he's the reason I started TEDx. On the way here I was stopped in the airport by a British woman. She said, "Aren't we friends on Facebook? Aren't you the mom of this great kid who pushed you to do TEDxYerevan?"
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Teachers in the Madison School District said the Board of Education there violated the law by imposing a 10% pay cut last week that is retroactive to the beginning of the current school year.Bobby Robinson, president of the Madison Education Association, which represents 77 teachers and other professional employees, said the union plans to file a lawsuit Monday.
He cited a May ruling in a case that said employers can't apply a pay cut retroactively.
Robinson said he raised those issues with the district administration after the board took action Monday, but paychecks teachers received Friday reflected the deduction. District and board leaders could not be reached Friday.
"They ignored it," Robinson said.
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The Louisiana state legislature has approved a new school vouchers system that, when signed by Governor Bobby Jindal, will be one of the largest in the country. The move caps 18 months of extensive expansion of voucher programs nationwide and broadens the national argument about the future of public education, says the Wall Street Journal.With growing systems in Florida, Virginia and Indiana joining older programs such as those in Washington, D.C., and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the use of vouchers has increased rapidly since 2010.
The Louisiana program would add hundreds of thousands of students to the voucher camp, and would also implement several innovative policy provisions that would help put the program at the cutting edge of education.
- Nineteen states and Washington, D.C., have either voucher systems or "scholarship" programs that provide tax benefits to individuals and businesses for contributions that help pay for students to attend private school.
- The vast majority of these programs are targeted at specific groups of at-risk students, such as low-income or those with special needs.
- The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, an organization that advocates vouchers, estimates that about 220,000 students are currently enrolled in the programs nationwide.
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The celebrity chef, who has campaigned for healthier school meals over the past decade, warned the progress made in recent years risks being undone by new academies which are allowed to ignore nutrient-based Government standards.In an interview with The Observer Food Monthly, Oliver said: "This mantra that we are not going to tell (academy) schools what to do just isn't good enough in the midst of the biggest obesity epidemic ever.
"The public health of five million children should not be left to luck or chance."
The chef said he was "totally mystified" as to why academies are being allowed to determine what food should be on offer, while state schools follow the national standards introduced in 2008.
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In order to become a US citizen, immigrants must pass the Naturalization Test. American citizenship bestows the right to vote, improves the likelihood of family members living in other countries to come and live in the US, gives eligibility for federal jobs, and can be a way to demonstrate loyalty to the US. Applicants must get 6 answers out of 10 in an oral exam to pass the test. According to US Citizenship and Immigration services, 92 percent of applicants pass this test.
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The analysis comes on the heels of a 2012-13 budget for the district proposed by Nerad that would increase Madison School District property taxes by 4.1 percent. Nerad's $379.3 million budget did not specify a funding source for his high-profile plan to raise the achievement levels of low-income and minority students, originally estimated to cost $105.6 million over the next five years.Related regarding the most recent Madison School District maintenance referendum: Madison School Board member may seek audit of how 2005 maintenance referendum dollars were spent.The report outlines several options for doubling the district's maintenance funds, such as using money already within the district's budget, increasing the property tax levy, using current and future equity reserves, long-term borrowing, or asking voters to approve a referendum that would allow for annual increases for maintenance.
The district spends $4.5 million, or 2.77 percent of its budget, on facility maintenance, which the committee recommended increasing by $4.2 million.
That would amount to $566 per pupil, according to the report. By contrast, the Monona Grove school district spends $1,825 per pupil on facility costs; Sun Prairie schools spend $1,787; and Waunakee spends $1,443, the report said.
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Here is an example of a school assignment sent to me by an inventive high school psychology teacher:"To gain a better understanding of Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development, you will go to a toy store and choose one toy for each stage of development. In a paper, you will discuss what aspect of the toy corresponds with what developmental milestone in Piaget's theory. Additionally you will discuss the issue of gender identity formation, based on your visit to the toy store."
It is one of many such ideas that pop up on my Class Struggle blog. The teacher who forwarded the assignment, Patrick Mattimore, suggested an activity in which readers send in effective teaching strategies. He and I would select the best entries. Knowing the state of newsroom budgets, Mattimore suggested a reward of some value but no cost: publicity for the winner.
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The Sun Prairie School District has "use data to drive decisions" as part of its credo.So...here's the data. This is how we stack up against other Dane Co. school districts.
As always, we highlight grades 4,8, and 10 because at these grades students are tested beyond reading an math. At these grades, all students are tested in Language Arts, Science and Social Studies in addition to Reading and Math.
You decide...are we doing as well as you think we should?
How about instead of some 200 page Monitoring Report that could cure the world's worst case of insomnia, the school board hold a working session where they talk candidly about our district's educational performance on the WKCE?
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UW-Madison Center for European Studies, via a kind reader's email:
The on-going global economic crisis has done much to highlight the significance of the study of international economics and the interconnectedness of regional and national economies worldwide. UW-Madison faculty, graduate students and regional outreach specialists along with guest speakers from the community will discuss aspects of the global economy, explore the ways in which specific regions and countries have been affected by economic crises, and present resources and opportunities available for the study and teaching of international economics, national economies, and business practices. Specific themes for this workshop include Fair Trade, Microfinance, NGOs, the European crisis and the prospects for the euro.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (92K PDF):
Layoff: Seniority is a right that is earned under MTI's various Collective Bargaining Agreements. Seniority is based on one's years of service and provides protection from indiscriminate layoff.Under MTI's Contracts, seniority protects members of MTI's various bargaining units from subjective or discriminatory layoff. When layoff is necessary, the Contracts provide an objective means, including tie-breakers for those with the same seniority.
Governor Walker's Act 10 puts seniority in jeopardy because all collective bargaining agreements in Wisconsin covering school district employees will disappear in 2013 under Walker's Act 10 (blekko, clusty, google news).
What can you do to protect your employment security? Get involved in this spring's RECALL ELECTION. There are only 15 days until the RECALL PRIMARY ELECTION. Candidates Barrett, Falk, La Follette and Vinehout have promised to reverse Act 10 and to restore public employees' rights to collectively bargain.
Without your help, there is no chance of reversing the negative impact of Act 10 on school district employees. Call/email MTI Assistant Director Jeff Knight (jknight@madisonteachers.org / 608-257-0491) to offer assistance via your Union.
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What is the future of reading? How can we make it more social?More from Tom Tunguz.
One of the things that bugs me about the Kindle Fire is that for all that I didn't like the original Kindle, one of its greatest features was that you couldn't get your email on it. There was an old saying in the 1980s and 1990s that all applications expand to the point at which they can read email. An old geek text editor, eMacs, had added a capability to read email inside your text editor. Another sign of the end times, as if more were needed. In a way, this is happening with hardware. Everything that goes into your pocket expands until it can read email.
But a book is a "momentary stay against confusion." This is something quoted approvingly by Nick Carr, the great scholar of digital confusion. The reading experience is so much more valuable now than it was ten years ago because it's rarer. I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, "That's it for being bored! Thank God! You're awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!"
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The Greendale School District's high-deductible plan has been in place for the past four years but was not available to teachers until last year. When the district first offered the plan, nonunion employees agreed to try it out but teachers declined, Green said. Once Act 10 came into effect, the district offered the high-deductible plan to teachers again. The district allowed teachers to choose between the high-deductible plan and the traditional plan this school year, and 70% decided to go the high-deductible route after seeing how it was working for other staff members, Green said.Related: The Madison School District recently ended their longtime support of a costly WPS healthcare plan.The district runs the plan in conjunction with a health reimbursement account.
In addition to a wellness plan, the Greendale district provides an on-site nurse practitioner from Aurora Health Care.
Green said the high-deductible plan significantly reduces the price of health insurance plans for school districts. When factoring in the cost of the high-deductible plan each year plus what the district is putting into the health reimbursement account, the total is about $1,000 less per family plan per year than the traditional plan.
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For months, Leeds Global Partners, a New York-based firm specializing in educational issues as "attractive investment opportunities," has been closely involved in developing Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's proposed school reforms.And while the governor's major proposals, including teacher evaluations, changes to tenure and the expansion of charter schools are meeting opposition in the General Assembly and the state's educational community, Leeds Global's school-privatization agenda has been front and center in a variety of closed-door negotiations.
Unionized teachers and a leading state lawmaker take the privatization proposals -- including plans to circumvent teacher contracts and public bidding procedures -- as major threats, underscored by the company's track record in creating individual agreements with teachers hired to turn around failing urban school districts.
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April 30 marks the deadline for a contest challenging software developers to create an automated scorer of student essays, otherwise known as a roboreader, that performs as good as a human expert grader. In January, the Hewlett Foundation of Hewlett-Packard fame introduced the Automated Student Assessment Prize (ASAP...get it?) offering up $100,000 in awards to "data scientists and machine learning specialists" to develop the application. In sponsoring this contest, the Foundation has two goals in mind: improve the standardized testing industry and advance technology in public education.The contest is only the first of three, with the others aimed at developing automated graders for short answers and charts and graphs. But the first challenge for the nearly 150 teams participating is to prove their software has the spell checking capabilities of Google, the insights of Grammar Girl, and the English language chops of Strunk's Elements of Style. Yet the stakes are much higher for developing automated essay scoring software than the relatively paltry $60,000 first-place prize reflects.
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Lloyd Thacker is a former college counselor who has become a one-man movement for reform of the admissions process. He hates the U.S. News and other college rankings, although is kind to people like me who support the rankings but can see their flaws. He has created the Education Conservancy, a nonprofit organization promoting change, with the help of several friendly university admission deans and other good souls.
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Samples of DNA were collected without parental consent from students at a Sacramento, Calif., middle school in connection with the murder of an 8 th grade student who was found stabbed, strangled and beaten to death near the dugout of a local park.The Sacramento Sheriff's Department, which has been spearheading the investigation into the murder of Jessica Funk-Haslam, 13, said parental consent was not required in the DNA collection and interview of minors, several of whom were taken out of class during the day last week at Albert Einstein Middle School.
"These are interviews, not interrogations," Sheriff's Deputy Jason Ramos told ABCNews.com. "They are all consensual. Once it's done, there is a mechanism in place for school administrators to notify parents."
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Education is shaping up to be a key, yet complicated, issue in the upcoming recall election of Gov. Scott Walker.2012's Act 166 is Wisconsin's most substantive K-12 change in decades. Learn more, here.Democrats vying to oust the first-term Republican say his cuts to state education funding are a top issue in the campaign, and it's as important or even more so than the issue that sparked the recall effort -- the governor's rollback of public employee collective bargaining.
"It's the major issue in the campaign why we're recalling the governor," said Sen. Kathleen Vinehout, D-Alma, one of four Democrats in the May 8 primary. "It comes back to the issue of priorities."
But Walker is telling voters the cuts were necessary to balance the state budget, and that collective bargaining changes have allowed school districts to become more efficient.
In recent weeks he's taken the fight to the state's largest teachers union over how to interpret the impact of the cuts. In a recent campaign ad he highlighted that school property taxes declined 1 percent this year statewide.
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As the nation grapples with the growing gap between rich and poor and an economy increasingly reliant on formal education, public policies should address housing market regulations that prohibit all but the very affluent from enrolling their children in high-scoring public schools in order to promote individual social mobility and broader economic security.Madison results can be viewed here (PDF).View our interactive feature to find data on test scores, housing, and income.
Go to the profiles page for detailed statistics on your metropolitan area.
An analysis of national and metropolitan data on public school populations and state standardized test scores for 84,077 schools in 2010 and 2011 reveals that:
Nationwide, the average low-income student attends a school that scores at the 42nd percentile on state exams, while the average middle/high-income student attends a school that scores at the 61st percentile on state exams. This school test-score gap is even wider between black and Latino students and white students. There is increasingly strong evidence--from this report and other studies--that low-income students benefit from attending higher-scoring schools.
Northeastern metro areas with relatively high levels of economic segregation exhibit the highest school test-score gaps between low-income students and other students. Controlling for regional factors such as size, income inequality, and racial/ethnic diversity associated with school test-score gaps, Southern metro areas such as Washington and Raleigh, and Western metros like Portland and Seattle, stand out for having smaller-than-expected test score gaps between schools attended by low-income and middle/high-income students.
Across the 100 largest metropolitan areas, housing costs an average of 2.4 times as much, or nearly $11,000 more per year, near a high-scoring public school than near a low-scoring public school. This housing cost gap reflects that home values are $205,000 higher on average in the neighborhoods of high-scoring versus low-scoring schools. Near high-scoring schools, typical homes have 1.5 additional rooms and the share of housing units that are rented is roughly 30 percentage points lower than in neighborhoods near low-scoring schools.
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The most important issue in higher education might not be cost control. It might be advertising.Have you heard about the dangerous, rising cost of not going to college? In the last 30 years, the typical college tuition has tripled. But over the exact same period, the earnings gap between college-educated adults and high school graduates has also tripled. In 1979, the wage difference was 75%. In 2003, it was 230%.
Over the last three decades, the cost of going to college has increased at nearly the exact same rate as the cost not going to college. How can the price of getting something and not getting something both rise at the same time?
That is the paradox of college costs.
BUYING THEIR ATTENTION
In the fight to put low-income kids on the college track, one of the simplest weapons is also one of the most controversial. It's cash. If a student gets a good grade, he gets some money. If he doesn't get a good grade, he gets no money. Same goes for teachers. If their students succeed, they get richer. If they don't, then they don't.
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This week the Pulitzer Prize board deemed the latest crop of American novels and short-story collections not up to scratch. Asked to choose between the late David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, Denis Johnson's Train Dreams and Karen Russell's Swamplandia!, the judges answered: none of the above. Since the prize was established in 1917 there have been 10 other years when no book got the nod, but it hadn't happened since 1977. The publishing industry is reeling from the impact of ebooks. Editors and writers needed a morale-booster.The novelist Ann Patchett complained in The New York Times that most readers would "just figure it was a bum year for fiction" - and would be wrong. Her fellow novelist Doug Magee, by contrast, declared himself "ecstatic". He wrote: "The prize only serves to heighten and concentrate a hierarchy built primarily on promotion." In this view, the judges' demurral looks like a victory for standards. But the situation is probably more dire than Ms Patchett or Mr Magee realise.
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Technical colleges in Texas are poised to up the ante on performance-based state funding, linking 45 percent of their operating budget to the employment rates and salaries of alumni.State lawmakers have provided legislative encouragement to the Texas State Technical College System as it works on the still-developing proposal; the Legislature last year mandated that the system devise a funding formula that rewards "job placement and graduate earnings projections, not time in training."
But system officials have voluntarily forged ahead with the plan, which they fully support and believe will help the system be more efficient.
"Some sort of outcomes-based methodologies are inevitable for likely all of public higher ed," said Michael L. Reeser, the system's chancellor. "We thought we'd be the first."
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The Madison School Board is moving quickly to conduct a search for a new superintendent to replace Dan Nerad.A bit of history and perspective on recent Madison Superintendent hires.The board plans to vote Monday on hiring a consultant for up to $3,000 to assist with the search process.
A board committee Friday recommended hiring George McShan, a former president of the National School Boards Association from Harlingen, Texas. McShan advised the board in 2007-08 when it hired Nerad.
The committee also recommended hiring a search firm by the end of July to help find the best candidate.
Separately, the board is considering candidates to hire on an interim basis should Nerad leave sooner than expected and the search for a permanent replacement is still ongoing.
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Jason Stein and Patrick Marley:
Gov. Scott Walker used his broad new powers to reshape a state rule and effectively lower the cost-of-living raises that public worker unions can win through bargaining.For workers in public schools and technical colleges, the revised emergency rule put in place Thursday could reduce the upper limit of their allowed salary increases by an estimated 30% or more. A spokeswoman for the Walker administration said that the change was necessary to properly implement the labor legislation signed by the Republican governor last year.
Under that law, unions' bargaining is limited to cost-of-living adjustments and the change by Walker would limit that bargaining more than the original rule proposed by his own appointees.
Katy Lounsbury, a Madison labor attorney, said the rules effectively neuter teachers unions in their bargaining over salaries. She said the rules may result in legal action because she believes they violate people's rights to associate.
"It certainly seems worthy of a challenge," she said. "It penalizes members of a union."
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Karla De La Torre kept her end of the bargain.After defaulting on her federal student loan, she entered into a "rehabilitation" agreement with the collection agency and made the required nine on-time payments toward the debt. According to the agreement, her loan was supposed to be restored to good standing last September.
Instead, Ms. De La Torre is stuck in default, the victim of a systems glitch that is taking the Education Department months to correct. Her collection agency told Ms. De La Torre, an executive assistant whose husband was laid off a year and a half ago, that she has to keep paying until the problems are fixed, and it can't say for sure how long that will be.
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The widening gap between America's haves and have-nots (highlighted in a Journal article today) is fueling debate across the political spectrum. But here's one less-appreciated take-way: It suggests getting a college education -- and indeed, an advanced degree -- might just be worth the hefty price tag.Let's back up. As most people know, the cost of a four-year college education is rising, forcing students to take on a pile of debt that some economists fear will spark America's next debt mess. There's talk of a student-loan "bubble." And some feel America should be funneling more kids into vocational training instead of encouraging everyone to get seemingly useless liberal arts degrees -- something Germany already does.
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via a kind reader:
Alexander Russo linked the Badger Herald's video excerpt:(I hope that the common core standards will lead to high school graduates knowing when to use "fewer" instead of "less," because evidently a Princeton degree doesn't \snark. It's interesting to see the Madison business community represented in this video, given the economic development implications of the district's challenges.)
http://badgerherald.com/news/2012/04/18/us_sec_backs_forgivi.php
(Good reporting by the Badger Herald.)http://www.ed.gov/blog/2012/03/wisconsin-community-targets-achievement-gap/
(The reflections by Dan Nerad and Sue Abplanalp on the district's achievement gap plan may be of interest here.)http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/education/local_schools/u-s-education-secretary-praises-madison-schools-efforts-on-achievement/article_88563b3c-8983-11e1-97b5-0019bb2963f4.html?mode=story
(I think an earlier version of this article included a description of Kaleem Caire asking Secretary Duncan if he was aware of other places that have been successful in addressing the achievement gap, and Duncan replying something to the effect of 'it's a challenge for everyone.' It would have been useful information for the audience if Duncan would have mentioned that Massachusetts reduced the percentage of low income black students performing at the below basic level on the NAEP in 4th grade reading from 54% to 43% between 2003 and 2011, compared to Wisconsin, where it went up from 62% to 67%.)
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The big news out of New York City is that the admissions test for the city's gifted kindergarten programs is about to get tougher.News organizations report that a portion of the current test, which assesses which 4-year-olds have an exceptional grasp of shapes, colors and numbers, will be replaced with a way to better gauge logic and reasoning skills.
It's about time, is all I can say. The last thing we need in this country is a bunch of overrated preschoolers coasting into gifted kindergarten.
Wait a second ... gifted kindergarten?
You have got to be kidding.
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By the time the police arrived with the pepper spray, sending throngs of college students choking to the ground, it was clear that Santa Monica College's plan to raise tuition had gone badly awry.Days earlier, the trustees of the 31,000-student community college had announced a novel strategy for dealing with the state of California's latest round of punishing budget cuts. It would open up new sections of perpetually over-subscribed courses like English and Math--but only to students willing to pay four times the standard price. The college's mostly-minority, low- and middle-income students saw this as an affront to the institution's bedrock tradition of affordable higher education. They protested, the cops arrived, the pepper spray was deployed, cell-phone videos of screams and chaos were instantly broadcast, the media descended, and in short order the leadership caved and cancelled the plan.
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The barbarians have done it, finally infiltrated a remaining bastion of order in a linguistic wasteland. They had already taken the Oxford English Dictionary; they had stormed the gates of Webster's New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition. They had pummeled American Heritage into submission, though she fought valiantly -- she continues to fight! -- by including a cautionary italics phrase, "usage problem," next to the heretical definition.Then, on Tuesday morning, the venerated AP Stylebook publicly affirmed (via tweet, no less) what it had already told the American Copy Editors Society: It, too, had succumbed. "We now support the modern usage of hopefully," the tweet said. "It is hoped, we hope."
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In his marvelously insightful and useful new book Net Smart: How to Thrive on Line, Howard Rheingold tells the story of what may be the world's first email interruption. David Levy, formerly a researcher at the legendary PARC think tank in Palo Alto, was demonstrating how the very first email interface worked when a new email happened to come in. He switch from demonstrating to answering the email, thus ushering in (if you believe some pundits) The End of Civilization As We Know It.This delightful story goes on. Now a professor at the University of Washington, Levy teaches a class called "Information and Contemplation." Like so many digital innovators I work with, Levy is concerned with deep breathing, mindfulness, and introspection. Rather than that being in contradiction to email interruption or compensation for what Rheingold calls "our always-on lives," mindfulness, according to Levy, is a response to attention overload not just for a digital age but for a modern age in which just about everything we do, for the last two hundred or so years, has come time-stamped. The Industrial Revolution required humans to act as much like machines as possible. Yes, the digital interrupts our well-learned assembly line rhythms. Yes, multimedia distract us. But returning to the nostalgia of the "good old days"--meaning any time before April of 1993 when the Mosaic 1.0 browser went public--is a misplaced nostalgia for the most recent attempt to mechanize the human soul. It is hardly a return (as Levy, Rheingold, and I would say) to an introspective, unregulated, mindful inner life that eludes not only the multimedia digital age but the regulated, machinic assembly line of industrialism too.
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The last several years has seen significant cuts to federal student aid funding to shore up the budget of the Pell Grant program, the primary source of government aid to low-income students. But in a new Chart You Can Trust, Education Sector's Stephen Burd argues that there's a better way to keep the Pell Grant program viable: elimination of the American Opportunity Tax Credit and the other federal tuition tax break programs.Moving On Up: How Tuition Tax Breaks Increasingly Favor the Upper-Middle Class takes a look at tax breaks that have been portrayed as a way to help middle-class families. But the data show that increasingly, it is families with the highest incomes that benefit.
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Rhode Island is a tiny state with just over one million people in one thousand square miles. California is 37 times more populous and many times that size. And yet, when it comes to public employee pension reform, the tiny state of Rhode Island is acting both bigger and bolder.For years, Rhode Island lawmakers watched fearfully as the state's required pension contributions, the second-fastest-growing line item in its budget, exploded, doubling from 2003 to 2010. Without significant reforms, the liability was on track to double again by 2013. Lawmakers knew that if the pension liability remained unchecked, it would severely limit funding for other budget priorities.
California finds itself on a similarly unsustainable path. Earlier this month, the California Teachers' Retirement Board announced that the $152 billion pension fund faces a $64.5 billion shortfall over the next three decades, an increase of $8.5 billion from last year. To put this in perspective, California spent $64.4 billion on K-12 education during 2010-11. Unless California acts to make its pension system more sustainable, the K-12 education budget - along with other important government priorities - will likely be carved up to feed the ever-growing pension deficit.
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Most of our high schools and colleges are not preparing students to become innovators. To succeed in the 21st-century economy, students must learn to analyze and solve problems, collaborate, persevere, take calculated risks and learn from failure. To find out how to encourage these skills, I interviewed scores of innovators and their parents, teachers and employers. What I learned is that young Americans learn how to innovate most often despite their schooling--not because of it.Though few young people will become brilliant innovators like Steve Jobs, most can be taught the skills needed to become more innovative in whatever they do. A handful of high schools, colleges and graduate schools are teaching young people these skills--places like High Tech High in San Diego, the New Tech high schools (a network of 86 schools in 16 states), Olin College in Massachusetts, the Institute of Design (d.school) at Stanford and the MIT Media Lab. The culture of learning in these programs is radically at odds with the culture of schooling in most classrooms.
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"Insufficient number of supporting examples. C-minus. Meep." (Photo by Flickr/CC user geishaboy500)A just-released report confirms earlier studies showing that machines score many short essays about the same as human graders. Once again, panic ensues: We can't let robots grade our students' writing! That would be so, uh, mechanical. Admittedly, this panic isn't about Scantron grading of multiple-choice tests, but an ideological, market- and foundation-driven effort to automate assessment of that exquisite brew of rhetoric, logic, and creativity called student writing. Without question, this study is performed by folks with huge financial stakes in the results, and they are driven by non-education motives. But isn't the real question not whether the machines deliver similar scores, but why?
It seems possible that what really troubles us about the success of machine assessment of simple writing forms isn't the scoring, but the writing itself - forms of writing that don't exist anywhere in the world except school. It's reasonable to say that the forms of writing successfully scored by machines are already - mechanized forms - writing designed to be mechanically produced by students, mechanically reviewed by parents and teachers, and then, once transmuted into grades and sorting of the workforce, quickly recycled. As Evan Watkins has long pointed out, the grades generated in relation to this writing stick around, but the writing itself is made to disappear. Like magic? Or like concealing the evidence of a crime?
The Pen is Advanced Technology
Of course all machines, from guitars to atom bombs, have no capacity to achieve any goals on their own. Nonetheless detractors of machine grading point out the obvious, that machines don't possess human judgement, as if they possessed some other, alien form of reasoning. Computers can't actually read the papers, they insist. Computers aren't driven by selfless emotions, such as caring about students. Faced with proof that human test graders don't always meaningfully read the papers or care about students, machine-grading detractors pull the blankets over their heads and howl: But they're not human, damn it!
But the evidence keeps piling up. Machines successfully replicate human mass-scoring practices of simple essay forms, including the "source-based" genre. After reading reports released on the topic for nearly twenty years now, most working teachers of student writing grumble for a while, then return to the stack of papers at their elbow-and grade them mechanically.
The fact is: Machines can reproduce human essay-grading so well because human essay-grading practices are already mechanical.
To be sure, these results are usually derived from extremely limited kinds of writing in mass-scoring situations. They are easily defeated by carefully constructed "bad faith" responses. Since machines don't read, they don't comprehend the content, and cannot give feedback on rhetorical choices and many aspects of style. They can-and do-give feedback on surface features and what is sometimes called, more appropriately than ever, mechanical correctness. They cannot assess holistically, but can provide a probabilistic portrait by assembling numerous proxies, usually the same as those that human teachers use to substantiate holistic judgments, such as complexity of word choice and variety of sentence construction. Automated scoring can detect rhetorical dimensions of an essay, including the presence of evidence and the syntax used in simple argument.
Humans Acting Badly
Developers of these programs generally admit these limitations, primarily offering automation as an alternative to human graders in mass-assessment circumstances. When performed by humans, large-scale scoring of simple writing is commonly outsourced to poorly paid, under-qualified, overworked temps managed by incompetent greed-merchants in the scandal-ridden standardized testing industry.
Like the machines that replicate their efforts so well, the humans working in mass writing assessment are working to cookie-cutter specifications. They are not providing meaningful feedback on content. Spending a minute or two on a few hundred words, they are generally not "reading," but scanning for many of the same characteristics that machine scorers are programmed to do. Like factory workers, they are providing results as quickly and cheaply as possible in order to line their employers' pockets. Routinized, working to narrow formula, scanning superficially for prescribed characteristics at high speed, often incompetently managed and administered, most mass graders perform robotically.
Reading like a confessional "I was an economic hit man" for managed instruction, Making the Grades by Todd Farley chronicles one temp essay-scorer's rise to high living at the pinnacle of mass testing's profit-accumulation scheme. Riding in hired cars through burned-out public school districts to eat exotic meals prepared by celebrity chefs, Farley details how the for-profit scheme of high-stakes testing forces public-school teachers, students and parents on a faux-learning assembly line featuring teaching as test-prep drill instruction with 60 students in a class.
But Are Robots Also Teaching?
Teaching and test-scoring are very different circumstances. The fact that test scorers act mechanically doesn't mean that teachers do. Except that most teachers are under very similar pressures-too many students, too little time, intense bureaucratic control, insufficient training, insufficient rewards to recruit and retain talent, and pedagogically unsound working conditions.
Just like teachers of other subjects, high school writing teachers are expected to "teach to the test," usually following a rigid curriculum tailored to produce essays that do well in the universe of mechanical scoring, whether that mechanical scoring is provided by machines or degraded humans. Because of the high stakes involved, including teacher pay and continuing employment, the assessment drives the rest of the process. There are plenty of teachers who have the ability to teach non-mechanical forms of writing, but few are allowed to do so.
This managed--often legislated--pedagogy generally fails. Mechanical writing instruction in mechanical writing forms produces mechanical writers who experience two kinds of dead end: the dead end of not passing the mechanical assessment of their junk-instructed writing, and the dead end of passing the mechanical assessment, but not being able to overcome the junk instruction and actually learn to write.
As bad as this pedagogy's failure is its successes. Familiar to most college faculty is the first-year writing student who is absolutely certain of their writing performance. She believes good writing is encompassed by surface correctness, a thesis statement, and assiduous quote-farming that represents "support" for an argument ramified into "three main points."
In reality, these five-paragraph essays are near-useless hothouse productions. They bear the same relationship to future academic or professional writing as picking out "Chopsticks" bears to actually playing music at any level. Which is to say, close to none.
But students, particularly "good" students, nonetheless have terrific confidence in these efforts because they've been mechanically assessed by caring human beings who are, reasonably enough, helping them through the gates represented by test after test that looks for these things.
Not everything that teachers do is mechanical, but the forces of standardization, bureaucratic control, and high-stakes assessment are steadily shrinking the zone in which free teaching and learning can take place. Increasingly, time spent actually teaching is stolen from the arid waste of compulsory test preparation-in writing instruction as much as in every other subject. In this, teachers resemble police officers, nurses, and other over-managed workers, who have to steal time from their personal lives and from management in order to actually do law enforcement or patient care, as The Wire points out.
What Would Be Better?
Rebecca Moore Howard is a researcher in one of the nation's flagship doctoral institutions in writing studies, the program in Composition and Cultural Rhetorics at Syracuse University. Howard's Citation Project explores the relationship of college writers to source material. The first major findings of the 20-researcher project, conducted at 16 campuses? Even academically successful students generally don't understand the source material on which they draw in their school writing.
Howard employs the term "patchwriting" to describe one common result of what I have long called the"smash and grab" approach that students employ to produce what we encourage them to pass off as "researched writing:" Scan a list of abstracts like a jewelry store window. Punch through the plate glass to grab two or three arguments or items of evidence. Run off. Re-arrange at leisure. With patchwriting, students take borrowed language and make modest alterations, usually a failed attempt at paraphrase. Together with successful paraphrase and verbatim copying, patchwriting characterizes 90 percent of the research citations in the nearly 2,000 instances Howard's team studied at a diverse sampling of institutions. Less than 10 percent represented summary of the sense of three or more sentences taken together.
My own take on this research is that it strongly suggests the need for a different writing pedagogy. These students aren't plagiarists. Nor are most of them intrinsically bad writers, whatever that might mean. Instead, I believe they've been poorly served by ill-conceived mass instruction, itself a dog wagged by the tail of mass assessment.
Like most of the students I've seen in two decades of teaching at every level including doctoral study, they have no flipping idea of the purpose of academic and professional writing, which is generally to make a modest original contribution to a long-running, complicated conversation.
To that end, the indispensable core attribute of academic writing is the review of relevant scholarly literature embedded within it. An actual academic writer's original contribution might be analytical (an original reading of a tapestry or poem). Or it might be the acquisition or sorting of data (interviews, coding text generated in social media, counting mutations in an insect population). It might be a combination of both. In all of these cases, however, an actual academic writer includes at least a representative survey of the existing literature on the question.
That literature review in many circumstances will be comprehensive rather than merely representative. It functions as a warrant of originality in both professional and funding decisions ("We spent $5-million to study changes in two proteins that no other cancer researcher has studied," or "No one else has satisfactorily explained Melville's obsession with whale genitalia"). It offers a kind of professional bona fides ("I know what I'm talking about"). It maps the contribution in relation to other scholars. It describes the kind of contribution being made by the author.
Typically actual academic writers attempt to partly resolve an active debate between others, or answer a question that hasn't been asked yet, what I describe to my students as "addressing either a bright spot of conflict in the map of the discourse, or a blank spot that's been underexplored."
In many professional writing contexts, such as legal briefing, literature review is both high-stakes and the major substance of the writing.
So why don't we teach that relationship to scholarly discourse, the kind represented by the skill of summary in Howard's research? Why don't we teach students to compose a representative review of scholarship on a question? On the sound basis of a lit review, we could then facilitate an attempt at a modest original contribution to a question, whether it was gathering data or offering new insight.
The fact is, I rarely run into students at the B.A. or M.A. level who have been taught the relationship to source material represented by compiling a representative literature review. Few even recognize the term. When I do run into one, they have most commonly not been taught this relationship in a writing class, but in a small class in an academic discipline led by a practicing researcher who took the trouble to teach field conventions to her students.
Quote-Farming: So Easy a Journalist Can Do It
I personally have a lot of respect for journalists, and sympathize with their current economic plight, which is so similar to that of teachers and college faculty. They too do intellectual work under intense bureaucratic management and increasingly naked capitalist imperatives. So there are reasons why their intellectual product is often so stunted and deformed that the country turns to Jon Stewart's parody of their work for information as well as critical perspective.
Albeit not always due to the flaws of journalists themselves: If there are real-world models for the poor ways we teach students to write, they're drawn from newspaper editorials and television issue reporting. In editorials, "sources" are commonly authorities quoted in support of one's views or antagonists to be debunked. In much television issue reporting, frequently composed in minutes on a deadline, quick quotes are cobbled together, usually in a false binary map of she's-for-it and he's-against-it. (NPR made headlines this year when it formally abandoned the fraudulent practice of representing or simulating balance by the common journalistic method of "he said, she said," or reporting differing views, usually two, as if they held equal merit or validity, when in reality there can as easily be 13 sides, or just one, all with very different validity.)
Of course journalism can do better and often does, but it is some of journalism's most hackneyed practices that have shaped traditional pedagogy for academic writing: quote-farming, argument from authority, false binarism, fake objectivity.
Those practices are intrinsically unappealing, but the real problem is the mismatch.
Academic writing bears a very different relationship to academic "sources" than journalism. For journalists in many kinds of reporting, academic sources are experts, hauled onto stage to speak their piece and shoved off again, perhaps never to be met with again.
It's this sort of smash-and-grab, whether from the journalist's Rolodex/smart phone, from a scholarly database, or the unfairly-blamed Google (as if this practice were invented by internet search!) that we teach to our students by requiring them to make thesis statements and arguments "supported by sources."
For practicing academic and professional writers, other professional sources are rarely cited as authorities, except as representative of general agreement on a question. Most other citations are to the work of peer writers, flawed, earnest, well-meaning persons who have nonetheless overlooked an interesting point or two.
Surveying what these peers tried to do fully and fairly, and then offering some data or some insight to resolve an argument that some of them are having, or point to an area they haven't thought about---is what we do. The substance of the originality in most academic and professional writing is a very modestly-framed contribution carefully interjected into a lacuna or debate between persons you will continue to interact with professionally for decades. In almost every respect it little resembles the outsized ambitions (let's resolve reproductive rights in 600 words!) and modest discursive context (a news "peg") of mass-mediated opinion.
Sure, no question, "everything's an argument," but argument or generic notions of persuasion used in the mass media aren't always the best model for academic and professional discourse. (And I say this as someone who's not afraid to argue.)
A big reason for the success of They Say/I Say, a popular composition handbook by Cathy Birkenstein and Jerry Graff, is its effort to provide an introduction to the actual "moves that matter in academic writing," moves which generally involve relating one's position to a complicated existing conversation.
Teaching & Grading Academic Writing By Persons Who Don't Do It
What Becky Howard has in common with Birkenstein & Graff is valuing the ability to represent that complicated existing conversation. What is particularly useful to all of us is that they grasp that this is a problem that can't be harrumphed out of existence-"Well, if those kids would actually read!" Let's leave out the fact that most of the persons enrolled in higher ed aren't kids, and that they do read, and write-a lot. Let's leave out the whole package of dysfunctional pedagogies we impose on students and the contradictory narratives we tell about them: Large lecture classes are fine, but video capture of large lectures is bad! (Right, grandpa: it's much better to deny me access to discussing the material with experienced faculty actively researching in their field because you've scaled her up with an auditorium sound system and not a video camera--that makes total sense. Defend the lecture hall!) As David Noble and I and others have pointed out many times: the reason current technologies don't, won't, and can't eliminate the labor of actual teaching is the reason that earlier technologies, like the book, post office, television and radio did not: Actual teaching is dialogic and occurs in the exchange between faculty and students. The more exchange, the more learning. (Of course much of what is certified as learning isn't anything of the kind.)
Our writing pedagogy is the main problem here what we ask faculty and teachers to do, who we ask to do it, and the ways we enable & disable them by bureaucracy and greed, whether the greed is for-profit accumulation or harvesting tuition dollars for in-house spending on a biochemist's lab. (As I've previously insisted, the for-profits can accumulate capital with sleazy cheap teaching because the nonprofits do the same thing, except accumulating their capital as buildings & grounds, etc.)
One of the reasons students don't learn to read academic articles and compose literature reviews in writing classes is that they are taught by persons who don't do it themselves--nontenurable faculty, many without the Ph.D., or graduate students newly studying for it, many of whom don't get an education in the practice themselves until they begin their own comprehensive lit review in preparation for a thesis. Often they are highly managed faculty, working like high-school teachers (except with much less training) to a scripted curriculum with mass syllabi, identical assignments that are easy to produce mechanically and grade mechanically-in a routinized "teaching" factory that is easy to assess mechanically, train mechanically, and supervise mechanically.
Unsurprisingly: No reliable computerized assessment can tell whether a review of scholarly literature is an accurate representation of the state of knowledge in a field. Nor can it adjudge whether a proposed intervention into a conflict or neglected area in that field is worthy of the effort, or help a student to refine that proposed experiment or line of analysis. Of course, many of the persons we presently entrust with writing instruction lack the ability, training, or academic freedom to do so as well.
If we are to do more with writing classes and writing assignments, we need to put aside the hysteria about machine grading and devote our attention to the mechanical teaching and learning environment in which we daily, all but universally, immerse our writing faculty. We need to change the kind of writing we ask them to teach. We need to enable writing faculty to actually do the kind of academic writing they should be teaching--which means changing our assumptions about how they're appointed, supported, evaluated and rewarded. You want to be a machine-breaker and fix writing pedagogy? Great. Start with with your professional responsibility to address the working circumstances of your colleagues serving on teaching-only and teaching-intensive appointment.
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Backed by $16 million from two of Silicon Valley's largest venture capital firms, Coursera launched today to deliver free online courses from elite universities to millions of people around the world.More, here.Kleiner Partner John Doerr: "Elite education is too expensive, and it's available for too few."
The company is headed by two Stanford University computer science professors, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, who developed an online education platform last fall that served two courses that attracted about 200,000 students, despite having no marketing.
The project was such a success that Koller and Ng decided to spin it out of Stanford and create a company. New Enterprise Associates General Partner Scott Sandell, who backed a previous company founded by Koller's husband, said he heard a brief pitch from Koller on a Saturday in October when the two families were eating lunch together at Sandell's house.
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In the grand University of California system, the Berkeley and UCLA campuses have long claimed an outsized share of the public imagination. It's easy to forget that the state system has more than two great institutions of higher education. In the heart of the Central Valley, UC-Davis has grown in a hundred years from being the "university farm" to becoming one of the world's most important research universities. Now it's part of a process that may fundamentally redefine the credentials that validate higher learning.Throughout the 20th century, scientists at UC-Davis, a land-grant institution, helped significantly increase crop yields while leading research on plant genetics, water conservation, and pest control. When the present century began, Davis leaders knew the times called for not just production but conservation and renewal. So they created a new, interdisciplinary major in sustainable agriculture and food systems. Many different departments were involved in crafting curricula that range across life sciences, economics, and humanities, along with experiential learning in the field.
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Four Rhode Island school districts -- Coventry, East Providence, Providence and Woonsocket -- were flagged for suspicious test scores between 2008 and 2011 in a recent study of standardized testing by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The results have prompted debate on the need for high-stakes testing to evaluate teacher effectiveness and student proficiency.The Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigated 196 school districts nationwide and "flagged" those districts where more than 10 percent of classes -- which are composed of all students enrolled in the same grade at the same school -- demonstrated unusually high or low performance compared to the norm.
In Coventry, 14.29 percent of classes were flagged for abnormal performance in 2009, but this number dropped to below 4 percent in 2011, the study showed. In 2009, 12.5 percent of classes in East Providence scored unusually high or low. Nearly 30 percent of classes in the Woonsocket district demonstrated a large number of scores outside the norm in 2008, a rate more than double that of any other Rhode Island school district that year. Providence classes were flagged at rates of 13.27 percent in 2008 and 11.21 percent in 2011, but abnormal score levels fell below 10 percent in the years between.
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A study of university students found that those who brought drinks, especially water, with them as they sat their exams performed up to 10 per cent better than those who did not.Psychologists said it was unclear why drinking water would improve your performance but said that being better hydrated could have a helpful impact on the brain, and knowing you had a bottle with you might make you feel more reassured.
The researchers studied hundreds of university students in their first and second years of degree courses and at pre-degree "foundation" level and observed what drinks, if any, they brought into exam halls with them.
Their study, presented at the British Psychological Society annual conference in London on Wednesday, found that those who brought drinks in with them averaged five per cent better in exams.
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Many of my friends in the education world are fond of talking about how the University of Phoenix is not in fact a disruptive innovation.They don't just stop this statement with the University of Phoenix of course. I'm using the University of Phoenix as shorthand. What they mean are many of the distinctly online universities that have emerged over the last couple of decades--everyone from Kaplan University to DeVry to Bridgepoint.
They are wrong. These online universities are disruptive innovations relative to traditional universities. They are now on their own sustaining innovation track, which every disruptive innovation moves to as it grows, expands, improves, and marches up market. It's also true that not all of them will succeed in these endeavors.
The fact that I'm saying they are disruptive innovations in the face of many saying they aren't strikes me as ironic, given that I often find my job is to correct people who want to declare nearly everything disruptive and misapply the term. I also readily admit that online learning isn't inherently disruptive; when it's used in a hybrid format to complement or extend traditional brick-and-mortar learning, chances are it's being used as a sustaining innovation. No technology is inherently a disruptive innovation, as all technologies can be applied to sustain or disrupt the industry's incumbents.
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When many people picture the typical agriculture student at the University of Minnesota, chances are they'd think of a rural farm boy.For a long time they would have been on target. Many students probably arrived as a freshman to learn agronomy, soil or animal science and planned to return to the family farm or go to work for a big agricultural company.
That's no longer true. Professors are seeing a different kind of agricultural student on the Twin Cities campus.
"It's a woman who grew up in suburban Twin Cities, and is a transfer student from some place in MnSCU," said Jay Bell, associate dean the U of M's College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences.
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Most colleges have strict polices about student plagiarism, often including stringent penalties for those who violate the rules. (At the University of Virginia, where I teach, the penalty is expulsion.) Yet infractions occur. Why?My own intuition has been that plagiarism is often due to oversight or panic. A student will fall behind and, with a deadline looming, get sloppy in the writing of a paper: a few sentences or even a paragraph makes its way into the student paper without attribution. In the rush to finish the student forgets about it, or decides it doesn't matter.
Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob had a different idea.
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Between the ages of 18 and 22, Jodi Romine took out $74,000 in student loans to help finance her business-management degree at Kent State University in Ohio. What seemed like a good investment will delay her career, her marriage and decision to have children.Ms. Romine's $900-a-month loan payments eat up 60% of the paycheck she earns as a bank teller in Beaufort, S.C., the best job she could get after graduating in 2008. Her fiancé Dean Hawkins, 31, spends 40% of his paycheck on student loans. They each work more than 60 hours a week. He teaches as well as coaches high-school baseball and football teams, studies in a full-time master's degree program, and moonlights weekends as a server at a restaurant. Ms. Romine, now 26, also works a second job, as a waitress. She is making all her loan payments on time.
They can't buy a house, visit their families in Ohio as often as they would like or spend money on dates. Plans to marry or have children are on hold, says Ms. Romine. "I'm just looking for some way to manage my finances."
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An innovative electronic pen which could replace whiteboards is to be tested in schools in the US.Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second largest with 770,000 students, will soon try out the gadget, named Penveu.
The handheld wireless device "electronically" works on any surface such as a bare wall, computer monitor or pulldown screen.
Penveu's makers say it is far cheaper than existing whiteboard systems.
The device, which writes, points, and highlights on any flat surface, costs $499 (£312) for educational use - far less than existing interactive whiteboards which can cost more than £2,000.
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I've followed Horace's excellent online writing ("precision, poetry") for the past few years and had the opportunity to meet him at Friday's asymconf.
I've been impressed by the depth and breadth of his writing and analytical presentations. That naturally led me to ask about his education (he moved 30+ times growing up), work and more recent experience with Finland's system ( more here) as a parent. I also asked where he mastered such a broad command of the English language. Listen for the answer.
I hope you find this podcast (28mb mp3) as illuminating as I did.
Links: asymco.com, asymconf.com, quora and twitter.com/asymco.
Update (4.26.2012): A transcript is available here.
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Paul Vallas made his mark in education-reform circles as school superintendent in the big cities of Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans, post-Katrina. Now the superstar superintendent is trying to turn around the schools in much smaller Bridgeport, Conn.--in 150 days or so.Bridgeport's 2010-2011 budget spent $215,843,895 for "more than" 21,000 students = about $10,278/student. Madison spent $14,858.40/student during the 2011-2012 budget cycle.This is more than a curiosity: America's economic future depends on fixing its public schools. And, as Mr. Vallas observes, "There are a lot of Bridgeports"--small, de-industrialized, cash-short cities with failing schools.
If he succeeds here--within "existing financial constraints," as he puts it, and with strong unions--Bridgeport can inspire others. "There are models for school improvement that don't cost $1 million a school," Mr. Vallas argues, a not-so-subtle swipe at the cost of experiments elsewhere.
The saga of schools in Bridgeport (pop. 144,229), a poor city amid the wealth of Fairfield County, is too long for this space. The short version: For nearly a decade, the state has flunked the 20,250-student, 37-school system. Only 10% of tenth graders meet state math and reading standards. At the best-performing of the city's three high schools, the dropout rate is 23%; at the worst, 45%.
For years, members of the elected school board were at odds both with each other and with the city. The city hasn't increased school funding for four years.In July, with quiet backing from the mayor, governor and wealthy education-reform enthusiasts, the school board took the extraordinary step of voting itself out of existence and asked the state to take over. A new state-appointed board fired the superintendent and, in December, signed Mr. Vallas to a one-year contract, raising money from private donors whose identities weren't disclosed to pay his $229,000 salary and settle with his predecessor. But in February, the state Supreme Court declared the takeover illegal, and ordered a special election for a new school board. The date has yet to be set.
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Officials with the Los Angeles Unified School District were considering a plan on Wednesday that would require all students to take advanced courses and earn at least a "C" in order to graduate.The proposal is part of the district's effort to make every LAUSD graduate meet the minimum standards for admission to University of California and Cal State University Systems.
The change would require students graduating in 2016 to pass a third year of math and two years of foreign language courses. With these changes, the district would no longer require the currently mandated health and applied technology courses.
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We know that a college diploma boosts earnings, but a student's choice of major also plays a big part.The gap wages rates between electrical-engineering and general-education majors is nearly as large as the difference between college graduates and high school graduates, according to a wide-ranging study by Joseph G. Altonji, Erica Blom and Costas Meghir of Yale University.
The economists examine the large differences in labor-market outcomes across college majors in several ways. In one section of their paper, they look at data on wages by college major obtained through the Census Bureau's 2009 American Community Survey. They find that among other things, math skills are correlated to higher earnings. "Wages tend to be high for engineers and low for elementary education majors, suggesting that perhaps much of the wage differences between majors are due to differences in mathematical ability and high school course work," the authors write.
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Madison School District officials are warning that the group financing a building for the city's newest charter school is short of its fundraising goal, and families are wondering if their children will be in another temporary location in the fall.The organization building an environmental campus that will include Badger Rock Middle School is "100 percent confident" it will be able to secure $1.1 million in loans and raise about $340,000 over the next two months.
Also, the construction manager for the project said Tuesday the building will be completed by July 31, in time for the school's second year of operation.
"Although administration doesn't share their confidence, we fully agree that there is sufficient time to finish this project if there is an increased sense of urgency on the job site in the very near future," Superintendent Dan Nerad wrote in a memo to the Madison School Board last week.
Nerad briefed the board on the matter Monday night.
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Florida has long given folks nationwide good reason to pay attention to school choice happenings at the state level. Now comes a compelling story at the local level.Glen Gilzean, 31, is seeking a school board seat to help lead the 101,000-student Pinellas County school district. He's a former staffer with the state education department; an education entrepreneur whose business helps low income kids; an energetic guy with a solid grasp of education issues. He also happens to openly support school choice options like vouchers and tax credit scholarships.
That support prompted headlines after Florida Gov. Rick Scott appointed Gilzean to the District 7 seat in January. And it was mentioned again when Gilzean announced last week that he's running to hold on to the seat. It should be kept in perspective.
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The Madison Metropolitan School District Board reviewed the almost $373 million budget proposed by Superintendent Dan Nerad Monday night.Related: Singapore vs. Madison/US Schools: Do We (Americans) Put Money into Our Children?If the superintendent's budget is approved, Madison property taxes could increase more than four percent, about a $100 tax increase on the average home in Madison.
The estimate does not include a proposed $12.4 million put aside to help the achievement gap in Madison schools.
The budget already poses an estimated $12.4 million deficit.
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It's become a pattern in California. An exhausted Legislature finally completes work on a tardy state budget. Soon afterward, it becomes obvious the budget is a farce stitched together with funny numbers and delusional assumptions.With the 2012-13 budget, however, the process has accelerated. Even before Gov. Jerry Brown issues his May revised budget, decisions made by lawmakers, the courts and federal bureaucrats - combined with bad news on the revenue front - make it close to impossible to expect a spending plan with a shred of credibility or accounting substance.
The most basic problem is that the governor plans to introduce a budget premised on the idea that voters in November will approve a midyear increase in income taxes on the wealthy and sales taxes, with "trigger cuts" hammering public schools if they are rejected. This screwball brinkmanship bodes terribly for schools if it fails and sets a horrible precedent if it succeeds. Only in Sacramento could a budget strategy that evokes a legendary National Lampoon cover - "buy this magazine or we'll kill the dog" - be seen as inspired.
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Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad 188K PDF:
The important component of this information, is to realize that MMSD prior to re- financing for lower interest rates, had debt service for the unfunded pension liability all along with an interest rate of 7.8%. It wasn't transparent as it was simply paid on an annual basis, but to recognize lower interest rates, we chose to issue bonds that will save the district over $13 million in interest costs.
There are a few ways to look at what the appropriate level of debt is for a school district, and we have attempted to put information together relative to each differing way. The ways are:
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Milledgeville's acting police chief, Dray Swicord, said Tuesday that he stands by an officer's decision to handcuff an elementary school student for safety Friday after she allegedly threw a tantrum.Swicord said the arresting officer is not under investigation for his actions.
According to the police report, kindergartner Salecia Johnson is accused of tearing items off the walls and throwing furniture.
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"There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press." ~Mark Twain"If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." ~Malcolm X
It's true; the media have the power to destroy. But their real job is to uphold truth, accountability and transparency; to inform the people; and to investigate and shine a light on wrongdoing.
Today's media are struggling to remain afloat. Challenged by blogs and Web sites, and accused of shallowness and bias, traditional media are scrambling to remain relevant and to retain readership. Many have cut space and reporting staff and now depend heavily on wire reports. Basic principles of journalism have been ground into dust under the need to satisfy advertisers and allies. It's become convenient for media to use "stories" already written by government agencies (including school districts) and corporations. In return, the agencies ask for favorable coverage, which they get.
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I spent this weekend at LindzonPalooza. Once a year Howard Lindzon gets together a bunch of his friends at the intersection of financing, tech, media, and entrepreneurship, we descend on The Del in Coronada, and have an awesome 48 hours together. Many interesting and stimulating things were said, but one I remember was from Peter Pham over dinner. It was a simple line, "why do we teach languages in junior high and high school but not a computer language?" that had profound meaning to me.When I was in high school, I had to take two years of a foreign language. I had three choices - French, Spanish, or German. I didn't really want to learn any of them so I opted for French. I hated it - rote memorization and endless tedious classes where I didn't really understand anything. Fortunately I liked my teacher for the first two years and I did fine academically (I got an A) and ended up taking a third year of French.
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Laura DeRoche-Perez:
The Urban League of Greater Madison would like to inform you of our new ACT College Readiness Academies, which have recently been established through a generous grant we received earlier this year from Great Lakes Higher Education Guaranty Corporation. As such, ULGM is currently seeking certified teachers to teach ACT prep classes. Please forward this paid opportunity to your staff. Classes run in the evenings or on Saturdays, making it possible for teachers who are currently working full-time to lend their expertise to our ACT Readiness Academies. Teachers should contact Stephen Perez at 608-729-1209 or sperez@ulgm.org if interested. Please forward this message to other educators.
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Madison Teachers Inc 92K PDF Newsletter:
EMOCRACY IS NOT A SPECTATOR SPORT. That is one message that should be evident with all that has happened in the last year. A functioning democracy requires an informed and engaged citizenry. Such is as true with union democracy as it is in a political democracy. MTI is a union of 4,700 members in five bargaining units, each with Bylaws enabling democratic governance to ensure the union reflects the will of its members. Each MTI unit elects its leadership - every member has a vote, and is free to seek office. Also, Collective Bargaining Agreements are subject to member ratification, with every member having a vote. Similarly, the MTI Budget is enacted only after approval by the MTI Finance Committee and by approval by the MTI Joint Fiscal Group, which is comprised of representatives proportionate to the membership of each of the five bargaining units. But,just like the right of suffrage cannot ensure voter participation, neither can union Bylaws ensure member participation in the union. Only you can. YOU ARE THE UNION.In the coming months, your union will be engaging in a number of initiatives to further engage individuals in discussion about your union, what we have achieved together, what is at risk, and where we can go from the terrible situation created by Governor Walker's Act 10. Beginning with a Member Engagement Survey which is being sent to the personal e-mail addresses of all MTI members who have shared their email address with the Union from all five bargaining units. Members are encouraged to take ten minutes to complete the on-line survey and share their thoughts. If you have not already provided your personal e-mail address to MTI, please do so now by contacting kantzlerr@madisonteachers.org. Those for whom MTI does not have a personal email address may access the survey on MTI's webpage www.madisonteachers.org or by calling MTI Headquarters (257-0491).
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The nonprofit insurer that covered about two-thirds of Wisconsin school districts last year has seen its revenue decline almost $70 million after the state gave districts more freedom to switch insurers.But WEA Trust said it's still in good shape. Spokesman Steve Lyons said the insurer is expanding its customers from just school districts to municipalities and individual state employees.
The insurer's business took a hit after Gov. Scott Walker eliminated certain collective bargaining rights for most public employees.
Walker's office touts data showing that 52 school districts that switched carriers saved a total of $30 million.
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For Wake Forest University students in the "Options in the World of Work" course on Wednesday, the topic was location. Heidi Robinson, the instructor, walked students through exercises in which they discussed how to evaluate job opportunities in different localities. The students were divided into small groups, each with an iPad with material designed to compare a specific job here (in a relatively small, affordable city) and a larger city such as Boston or Los Angeles. Salaries are provided for the jobs, and students are given websites to find out how much they would spend on groceries in a week, the cost of an apartment, and so forth.Before they do the analysis, Robinson leads the class in a discussion of a range of issues to consider when deciding where to pursue jobs -- the possibility for advancement (or moving to different companies in the same city), the quality of these jobs, opportunities for a social life. Then she listens in on the small groups, firing questions at the students. When someone boasts of finding an affordable apartment in Los Angeles, Robinson asks if she can see photos of the apartment and figure out whether the neighborhood is one she would want to live in. When a student jokes about being able to afford living in Boston if she could just skip buying any groceries, Robinson gently reminds the group that groceries aren't optional for post-college life. As she moves around the room engaging with students, it's clear she knows each student's major, internship history and home town.
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Over the last two years I've made the point numerous times here that world university rankings have become normalized on an annual cycle, and function as data acquisition mechanisms to drill deep into universities but in a way that encourages (seduces?) universities to provide the data for free. In reality, the data is provided at a cost given that the staff time allocated to produce the data needs to be paid for, and allocating staff time this way generates opportunity costs.See below for the latest indicator of the business side of world university rankings. Interestingly today's press release from Thomson Reuters (reprinted in full) makes no mention of world university rankings, nor Times Higher Education, the media outlet owned by TSL Education, which was itself acquired by Charterhouse Capital Partners in 2007. Recall that it was that Times Higher Education began working with Thomson Reuters in 2010.
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M. Ryan Haley, a University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh economics professor, has started a company that he hopes will disrupt the academic textbook publishing industry and help college students save a lot of money.CoreTxt Plus Inc. is distributing a free digital statistics textbook to UW-Oshkosh students that's prepared the same way as at big publishing houses.
"We bypassed the middleman, which is the people making all the money off our students," Haley said. "They're putting new editions out every few years now and it's absurd. Statistics hasn't changed in 150 years."
Haley estimates the e-text has saved UW-Oshkosh students $100,000 to $150,000 in textbook costs during the four semesters the school has been using it.
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Editor's note: As momentum builds across the United States for expanded school choice, it is important to understand the movement's legal and philosophical foundations. For more than 40 years, John E. Coons, redefinED co-host and professor of law, emeritus, University of California at Berkeley, has argued that parents - and not government - have the primary legal and moral responsibility and authority to educate their children. Coons is a powerful thinker whose reflections are best consumed slowly and with respect. Enjoy this special post.It takes a village to raise a child--or so they say, and perhaps it's true. Humans are interdependent, and every particular village -whatever that word means - has influence, for good or ill.
But the phrase is murky and subject to many interpretations. It can be read as the quirky proposition that the village is what logicians call a "sufficient condition" of some outcome; alone, by itself, it determines the bundle of effects that will be the person called Andrew or Susie.
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Is this Title Envy Part 2?At the Human Resources Committee this week, Part II of the Employee Handbook (i.e., replacement for bargaining union contract) will be discussed. Part I was general information for all district employees. Part II is for the teachers....er...better make that "Professional Educators".
Beneath the surface the (former) teacher's union (SPEA) has long desired to be treated as "professionals"...and so now, to underscore that, they now will be known as "Professional Educators".
Will this mean that there will now be "Parent-Professional Educator conferences"?
Now you leave an apple on the desk for "Professional Educator"?
Does Van Halen need to re-release the single from their "1984" CD as "Hot For Professional Educator"?
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Although most new teacher evaluations are still in various phases of pre-implementation, it's safe to say that classroom observations and/or value-added (VA) scores will be the most heavily-weighted components toward teachers' final scores, depending on whether teachers are in tested grades and subjects. One gets the general sense that many - perhaps most - teachers strongly prefer the former (observations, especially peer observations) over the latter (VA).One of the most common arguments against VA is that the scores are error-prone and unstable over time - i.e., that they are unreliable. And it's true that the scores fluctuate between years (also see here), with much of this instability due to measurement error, rather than "real" performance changes. On a related note, different model specifications and different tests can yield very different results for the same teacher/class.
These findings are very important, and often too casually dismissed by VA supporters, but the issue of reliability is, to varying degrees, endemic to all performance measurement. Actually, many of the standard reliability-based criticisms of value-added could also be leveled against observations. Since we cannot observe "true" teacher performance, it's tough to say which is "better" or "worse," despite the certainty with which both "sides" often present their respective cases. And, the fact that both entail some level of measurement error doesn't by itself speak to whether they should be part of evaluations.*
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This is a story of hope, but you will have to read all the way to the end to know why.This past October, all of Rhode Island's 11th grade public school students sat down to take the NECAP test. As recently reported in the Providence Journal, one of the questions went like this:
Courtney walks three laps around a ¼-mile track. How many feet does she walk? (1 mile = 5,280 feet.)
A 440 feet. B 1,320 feet. C 3,960 feet. D 7,040 feet.Being able to multiply and divide four-digit numbers would have helped but as long as students understood the problem and the concept of fractions, a rough estimate (what is ¾ of 5280?) would have given them the answer: C.
Sixty-nine percent of them chose the wrong answer.
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But in researching the history of this battle over the surveys, I came across something much more illuminating and - let's face it - entertaining.When the governor first began making his claims of improved schools last fall, WEAC reacted in the traditional manner - by drawing up talking points. One memo, dated November 29, is still posted on the web site of the West Allis-West Milwaukee Education Association. It's not unusual, until you get to the sample statement/press release that locals were supposed to use as a model. I repost it here in its entirety - warts and all:
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Jeremy Adam Smith, via a kind reader's email:
Instead of being kicked out for fighting, stealing, talking back, or other disruptive behavior, public school students in San Francisco are being asked to listen to each other, write letters of apology, work out solutions with the help of parents and educators, or engage in community service. All these practices fall under the umbrella of "restorative justice"--asking wrongdoers to make amends before resorting to punishment.The program launched in 2009 when the San Francisco Board of Education passed a resolution for schools to find alternatives to suspension and expulsion. In the previous seven years, suspensions in San Francisco spiked by 152 percent, to a total of 4,341--mostly among African Americans, who despite being one-tenth of the district made up half of suspensions and more than half of expulsions.
This disparity fed larger social inequalities: Two decades of national studies have found that expelled or suspended students are vastly more likely to drop out of school or end up in jail than those who face other kinds of consequences for their actions.
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Mayor Rahm Emanuel's school team is locked in a tense negotiation with the Chicago Teachers Union over a new teachers contract.The threat of a teachers strike looms; CTU President Karen Lewis says that an informal poll of members at 150 schools shows "overwhelming" support for a strike. Lewis told reporters that she has "never seen anything like the hostile climate that exists right now."
Strike talk in April. Before negotiations have even officially hit an impasse. Not a good sign.
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Are you concerned about growing income inequality in America? Are you resentful of all that wealth concentrated in the 1 percent? I've got the perfect solution, a modest proposal that involves just a small adjustment in the Federal Reserve's easy monetary policy. Best of all, it will mean that none of us have to work for a living anymore.andFor several years now, the Fed has been making money available to the financial sector at near-zero interest rates. Big banks and hedge funds, among others, have taken this cheap money and invested it in securities with high yields. This type of profit-making, called the "carry trade," has been enormously profitable for them.
So why not let everyone participate?
Buffett Rule is a Political Gimmick That Won't Work, and
Corruption Is Why You Can't Do Your Taxes in Five Minutes
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Today I'm going to hopefully beg a question which will incentivize the reader to share their views. Yes, I'm writing about English grammar and usage.Debates about linguistic norms typically set traditionalists against revisionists. The two sides are particularly entrenched because each is rooted in a fundamental truth: the traditionalists are right that the rules are the rules (for instance, pronouns do need to agree in number with their referents), and the revisionists are right that language does change over time (nouns can come to be used as verbs).
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LAST month, two kindergarten classes at the Blue School were hard at work doing what many kindergartners do: drawing. One group pursued a variation on the self-portrait. "That's me thinking about my brain," one 5-year-old-girl said of her picture. Down the hall, children with oil pastels in hand were illustrating their emotions, mapping where they started and where they ended. For one girl, sadness ended at home with a yummy drink and her teddy bear.Grappling so directly with thoughts and emotions may seem odd for such young brains, but it is part of the DNA of the Blue School, a downtown Manhattan private school that began six years ago as a play group. From the beginning, the founders wanted to incorporate scientific research about childhood development into the classroom. Having rapidly grown to more than 200 students in preschool through third grade, the school has become a kind of national laboratory for integrating cognitive neuroscience and cutting-edge educational theory into curriculum, professional development and school design.
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Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:
Finally, the troubling differences in levels of student learning that give rise to our achievement gap present an enormous challenge for our teachers. We as a District have long been committed to inclusive and heterogeneous elementary school classrooms. Consequently, given the gap, our teachers frequently lead classrooms with a number of high-achieving students and a number of struggling students. Imagine how much dedication and ingenuity it must take for our classroom teachers to provide a learning environment where all their students can thrive. It would be helpful to hear from teachers about how they think they can be most effective in teaching all students in classes with such a wide span of developed capabilities, given our resource limitations.Related: 60% to 42%: Madison School District's Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags "National Average": Administration seeks to continue its useEven test results as generally uninformative as the WKCE make clear the extent of our achievement gap in Madison. From the perspective of the WKCE and based on statewide averages, our white students on the whole seem to be doing just fine while our African-American students on the whole are struggling. This shouldn't come as news to anyone, but it does underscore what's at stake when over the next several weeks the School Board starts to decide what components of the superintendent's achievement gap plan we're actually willing to raise taxes to support.
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I read with interest Nathan Comps' article on the forthcoming 2012-2013 Madison School District budget. Board Vice President Marj Passman lamented:
"If Singapore can put a classroom of students on its money, and we can't even put our money into children, what kind of country are we?" asks Passman, Madison school board vice president. "It's going to be a horrible budget this year."Yet, according to the World Bank, Singapore spends 63% less per student than we do in America on primary education and 47% less on secondary education. The US spent $10,441/student in 2007-2008 while Madison spent $13,997.27/student during that budget cycle. Madison's 2011-2012 budget spends $14,858.40/student.
The Economist on per student spending:
Those findings raise what ought to be a fruitful question: what do the successful lot have in common? Yet the answer to that has proved surprisingly elusive. Not more money. Singapore spends less per student than most. Nor more study time. Finnish students begin school later, and study fewer hours, than in other rich countries.Rather than simply throwing more money (Madison taxpayers have long supported above average K-12 spending) at the current processes, perhaps it is time to rethink curriculum and just maybe, give Singapore Math a try in the Madison schools.In Finland all new teachers must have a master's degree. South Korea recruits primary-school teachers from the top 5% of graduates, Singapore and Hong Kong from the top 30%.
Related:
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As online education continues to grow, says Bill Tucker, the managing director of Education Sector, a Washington, DC, think tank, we need to strike a balance that encourages innovation while also holding schools and companies accountable for results. "I want the sector to have the space to grow," says Tucker, who specializes in education technology and virtual school issues. "At the same time, it would be foolish or naïve just to think, 'OK, let everybody do what they want and it will just naturally get better.'"When it comes to full-time virtual schools, the state is now trying to figure out how to strike that balance. Mitchell Chester, the state's education commissioner, says he thinks there is "a small percentage of the population for whom this mode of learning would be beneficial." But he says he is "very uncomfortable" with the provision of the 2010 reform law that allows districts to decide on their own to open virtual schools that enroll students statewide. The Greenfield-based school is "a statewide school with no role for the state," he says.
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First, let's break down the staggering $1-trillion in student debt that has become so familiar a number to all of us in the last year or so. First, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as quoted in Sheryl Nance-Nash's recent article in Forbes, "Unlike other consumer credit products, student debt keeps growing at a steady clip. Students borrowed $117-billion in just federal loans last year. And students continue to borrow private student loans, which lack the income-based repayment and deferment options of federal student loans." The average total loan debt for undergraduates is $26,000, with the debt for those choosing to attend law school, medical school, or business school obviously much greater.This enormous amount of debt has consequences for all of us since--although few economists discuss it at length--it represents a tremendous drain on the economy and is slowing our recovery from the recession that began in 2008. College graduates and postgraduates, instead of buying cars, buying houses, getting married, having children--in other words, becoming full-fledged consumers are, as Nance-Nash puts it, "running back home." That hurts us all.
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The Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association recently asked its members to voluntarily contribute a week's salary to help improve class sizes in Milwaukee Public Schools. The teachers overwhelmingly voted no.They had a right to do that. They are angry about the new laws enacted by Gov. Scott Walker that will affect them at the end of their current contract. They are angry about the attack on collective bargaining.
But it was teachers who said that, had they been asked to the table instead of attacked, they would have done the right thing. Could the recent vote make that claim now look like something less?
Many of the strongest proponents of the recall effort against Walker are MPS teachers. They were in Madison last spring during the protests and were well-represented at rallies and foremost in collecting recall signatures.
They have a right to be proud of their efforts. And it has been their voices that have been loud and clear about the harm they believe is being caused by the Walker administration to the very kids they teach - the kids who need more teachers and more resources.
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It's 8:45 on a weeknight and five students are gathered in a dimly lighted corridor of Waukesha West High School. They're dedicated. They're energized. They're getting ready to compete for a national championship. They're part of what may well be the most dominating high school team in Wisconsin.They're reading out loud parts of essays they have written about the impact of British colonialism in Africa and Asia between 1800 and 1900. They're critiquing each other. You spent much time lately interpreting Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella, "Heart of Darkness?" These kids have.
They've been doing activities like this almost every night after school since last fall. Last week, school was out for spring break, but they and their teammates were at school from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day.
This is the Waukesha West Academic Decathlon team. State champions 11 years in a row - can any sports team claim a run like that? They're getting ready to go to Albuquerque, N.M., at the end of this month for another shot at the national championship. The school won once, in 2002, and has finished in the top five repeatedly.
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Chicago Public School teachers work almost double their required daily instruction hours, according to a new study released Monday, and the findings worry some teacher advocates as the district gets ready to extend the school day.On average, public school teachers work 58 hours per week, according to the report, "Beyond the Classroom: An analysis of a Chicago Public School Teacher's Actual Workday."
The study-- put together by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Labor Education Program -- analyzed surveys from nearly 1,000 CPS teaches and found on a typical school day teachers work more than 10 hours.
Teachers can also rack up more than five additional hours during weekday evenings and on the weekend, according to the report.
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Three times a year, The Boston Globe (in the Athens of America) has a 14-16-page Special Supplement celebrating local "scholar-athletes" with pictures and brief write-ups. These are high school students who have taken part in soccer, tennis, golf, football, swimming, baseball, basketball, softball, wrestling, and what-have-you, and done well by various measures. Their coaches, too, get their pictures in the paper and sometimes a paragraph of praise. In addition to these supplements, hardly a day goes by during the school year when some high school athletes, team, coach or event doesn't get "covered" by The Boston Globe. A local philanthropic group has recently raised several million dollars to promote sports in our public high schools.
As we all know, sports involve students, parents, boosters and the like, and they build teamwork, discipline, character, equality (of a sort), ambition, competition, and attendance. Parents do not need to be dragged to games the way they do to school meetings or Parents' Night to talk to teachers. In many cases, they pay fees to allow their youngsters to participate in sports, and some even raise money as boosters for trips to games, tournaments, etc. Community involvement is fairly easy to get in sports, and there are very few edupundits who find work advising schools and communities on how to get parents and other community members involved when it comes to school sports. I know of no new initiatives or workshops to teach parents how to get involved in their children's sports programs. Athletes also enjoy rallies, cheerleaders, and coverage in their high school newspaper as well.
Recently a young student basketball player in Massachusetts, 6'10" and very good at his sport, "reclassified" himself (changed from a Junior to a Senior?), so that he could choose among the many colleges whose coaches want him to come play at their institutions. His picture not only appeared several times in his local school newspaper, but also showed up several times with stories in The Boston Globe (the Sports Section is one of only four main sections in the paper each day). Apparently we want to know who our good high school athletes are, and what they are achieving, and what they look like, etc.
There is another group in our high schools, which might be called not "scholar-athletes," but perhaps "scholar scholars," as their achievements are in the academic work for which, some believe, we build our schools with our taxes in the first place. But we tell those "scholar scholars" that we really don't want to know them. Their work does not appear in The Boston Globe. Their pictures and stories do not appear in the three-a-year Special Supplements or in the daily paper (there is no "academics" section in the paper of course), or even in their local high school newspaper.
Whenever the subject of students who do exemplary academic work in our schools comes up, our cliché response tends to be that "they can take care of themselves." But if we don't seem to feel that good high school athletes should have to get along in anonymity, why do we think that anonymity for our best high school students will serve them (and us) well enough, in our education system, and in the country, which is in a serious fight to stay up with other countries who take their best students and their academic achievement very seriously indeed.
Sometimes when I mention that it might serve us well if we gave some recognition to our best high school "scholar scholars" people say that I must be "against sports." I am not. I am just critical of the huge imbalance between our attention to athletes and what we give to scholars at the high school level. 100 to zero doesn't make the best balance we can achieve in recognizing them, in my view.
Of course, I am biased, because for 25 years I have been publishing exemplary history research papers by high school students (so far 1,022 papers from 46 states and 38 other countries) in a unique quarterly journal, and none of them ever gets mentioned for their history scholarship in The Boston Globe. Folks tell me this practice is not limited to the Athens of America, of course.
If we are worried about the performance of our student athletes, then the relentless coverage of their efforts might seem justified. I know we are worried about the academic achievements of our public high schools, yet when scholar scholars in the high schools get published in The Concord Review (and then go on to Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton (as about 35% of our authors do), or get to be Rhodes Scholars (as several have), they don't get mentioned in The Boston Globe. Actually one author, Jessica Leight from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, did get her picture in the paper when she got her Rhodes Scholarship, after being named Junior Eight Phi Beta Kappa and graduating summa cum laude at Yale, but no mention was made of her Emerson Prize-winning paper on Anne Hutchinson, which was published in that unique international journal when she was still in a local public high school.
So let's do continue to praise our local high school athletes and their coaches. But isn't it time at long last now to think about the message such publicity sends to our diligent and successful scholar scholars and their coaches (I mean their teachers--who are also ignored) about what we value as a society? Why has it been so important all these years to send them, when they are doing not only what we ask them to do in school, but well above and beyond what we have expected, the message that, sorry, but "We Don't Want to Know About You"?
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Erin Loury, via a kind Richard Askey email:
Monkeys banging on typewriters might never reproduce the works of Shakespeare, but they may be closer to reading Hamlet than we thought. Scientists have trained baboons to distinguish English words from similar-looking nonsense words by recognizing common arrangements of letters. The findings indicate that visual word recognition, the most basic step of reading, can be learned without any knowledge of spoken language.The study builds on the idea that when humans read, our brains first have to recognize individual letters, as well as their order. "We're actually reading words much like we identify any kind of visual object, like we identify chairs and tables," says study author Jonathan Grainger, a cognitive psychologist at France's National Center for Scientific Research, and Aix-Marseille University in Marseille, France. Our brains construct words from an assembly of letters like they recognize tables as a surface connected to four legs, Grainger says.
Much of the current reading research has stressed that readers first need to have familiarity with spoken language, so they can connect sounds (or hand signs for the hearing-impaired) with the letters they see. Grainger and his colleagues wanted to test whether it's possible to learn the letter patterns of words without any idea of what they mean or how they sound--that is, whether a monkey could do it.
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A new method of teaching is turning the traditional classroom on its head.
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WASHINGTON -- A long-held wish of many community colleges is on the verge of becoming reality: the Education Department has announced its plans to change how student success is measured in higher education, taking into account students who transfer, part-time students and students who are not attending college for the first time.The department outlined its plans Wednesday to carry out the recommendations of the Committee on Measures of Student Success, a federal panel that called for changing how data on completion rates and other measures at community colleges is reported in the Integrated Postsecondary Educational Data System, or IPEDS.
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A question asked in numerous stories a week ago was put best in a headline at the Atlantic: "Why Don't Young Americans Buy Cars?" A year or so ago, of course, the question was why young people don't read a newspaper; and before that it was something else young people don't do that we seem to expect them to. While it's been a great while since I sat inside dealerships to see exactly what the demographical makeup of their buyers was in any given month, it was fairly obvious decades ago that the makeup of car buyers was changing dramatically.The Atlantic story gave out a few important facts, including that only half of kids 19 or younger now hold a driver's license, down from "nearly two-thirds in 1998." Following that statistic the magazine covered CNW Marketing Research's study, which showed that young adults "between the ages of 21 and 34 buy just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America." And that was down by 11 percentage points from 1985.
The Automotive News, in a similar story, pointed out that in 1983 fully 94 percent of persons in their 20s held a driver's license as compared to just 84 percent today.y
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Dublin plans to remove hundreds of schools from the control of the Roman Catholic Church to reflect Ireland's increasingly diverse population, in the biggest shake-up of its education system in almost a century.Ruairi Quinn, Ireland's minister for education, said on Tuesday that there was a need to transfer the patronage of hundreds of Roman Catholic schools to provide more choice for people of other faiths and reflect changes that had taken place in Irish society.
The proposals come amid a bitter debate about the role of the Church in Irish society, prompted by revelations of clerical child sex abuse and subsequent cover-ups by the Church authorities. But they also follow a sharp rise in the number of foreign-born residents - which now account for 17 per cent of the Irish population, up from 6 per cent in 1991 - as well as a growing secularisation of society.
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A few weeks ago, I wrote a column lamenting the dismal state of America's local public sector pensions system. For with some $3,000bn (or more) of unfunded liabilities, the maths looks truly alarming - particularly given the gridlock besetting so much of the American political machine.But what my column did not address, for reasons of space, was what might fix these woes. So, in the spirit of spring (and Easter) cheer, it is worth noting one small example where a local American government is now attempting some fiscal rebirth - not least because it holds some intriguing lessons for investors, both in America and Europe.
The location in question is Rhode Island, the iconic north eastern US state. Three years ago, this epitomised everything wrong with American state finances: the public pension fund was underfunded by more than 50 per cent, and it looked as if the state would soon be using a third of all its annual tax revenue to meet claims. Big spending cuts loomed, and the unions and politicians were at loggerheads.
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On any given night in the U.S., there are approximately 60,500 youth confined in juvenile correctional facilities or other residential programs. Photographer Richard Ross has spent the past five years criss-crossing the country photographing the architecture, cells, classrooms and inhabitants of these detention sites.The resulting photo-survey, Juvenile-In-Justice, documents 350 facilities in over 30 states. It's more than a peek into unseen worlds -- it is a call to action and care.
"I grew up in a world where you solve problems, you don't destroy a population," says Ross. "To me it is an affront when I see the way some of these kids are dealt with."
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Public employees are working without contracts in cities and counties across New York State, as labor negotiations stall because local governments say they cannot afford to raise wages.But many union members are still taking home larger paychecks, thanks to a state law that allows workers to continue receiving longevity-based salary increases after their contracts expire.
The pattern is seen throughout the state. All labor contracts in Albany, New Rochelle and Yonkers have expired. So have seven of nine contracts in Syracuse, six of eight in Buffalo and most of the contracts in New York City.
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As a teacher and administrator for 28 years, I rebelled against the disastrous fad of constructivism that began in the 1980's. While its drumbeaters declared it was a higher form of intellectualism, it didn't seem all that "intelligent" to me. Frankly, I thought it would help create failures among all groups of students--regular, special, and gifted.For those who don't know what "constructivism" is, it is an educational theory that, in practice, looks like this in America's classrooms:
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For Bill Zandi, the son of Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi, enrolling as a student at a prestigious private institution like Wake Forest University was less surprising than the student's choice of major: philosophy."Originally I was going to follow in my dad's footsteps, but I've always been more interested in philosophical ideals," the younger Zandi said.
With the cost of higher education soaring, from Ivy League schools to community colleges, an increasingly loud chorus of voices is questioning whether the results justify the cost, and whether the traditional liberal arts education, with its ideal of shaping well-rounded lives, is outmoded in the contemporary world of high-tech work.
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Madison School District property taxes would increase 4.1 percent, or about $10 million, under superintendent Dan Nerad's proposed 2012-13 budget.Notes and links on the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 budgets.The increase would be a change from last year's $245 million school property levy, which was a slight decrease from the previous year.
The district estimates a $255 million levy would increase property taxes by $108 on an average Madison home. However, updated property assessments for the city won't be available until the end of next week, city assessor Mark Hanson said.
The $379.3 million proposed budget would increase total spending by $6.3 million, or 1.7 percent, from this past year's budget.
The district is increasing property taxes partly to keep up with state-imposed revenue limits and qualify for additional state aid, Nerad said.
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The recent draft release of a Common Core exemplar lesson on The Gettysburg Address caused quite a kerfuffle.Proponents of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) approach view the lesson as a strong example of good teaching. It's tightly scripted and focused on a particular view of "close reading" through instructions like the following:
"Refrain from giving background context or substantial instructional guidance at the outset.... This close reading approach forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge, and levels the playing field for all students as they seek to comprehend Lincoln's address."
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Teresa Watanabe and Howard Blume:
It's 7:30 a.m. and the chief of the Los Angeles Unified School District briskly launches a powwow on the sensitive topic of how to place the strongest math teachers with the weakest students.Supt. John Deasy leads two dozen administrators through statistics showing the schools where the district's most effective algebra instructors teach. They brainstorm incentives to get principals and teachers to buy into the plan, aimed at raising abysmal scores on state math tests. Some may believe it a waste to put their best with the worst, one administrator cautions, but Deasy's response is quick and characteristically blunt:
"You really shouldn't teach in LAUSD if you believe that," he says.
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Much of the anxiety around tweens and social media lies in the fear that they don't care about or understand privacy settings. Parents worry that kids will either willingly or unintentionally expose themselves to dangerous anonymous predators, or that they don't fully understand that the information they share about themselves can be used against them.But tweens are much more savvy about their privacy settings than adults give them credit for, even when it comes to subtleties of "frenemies" dynamics, according to a small, qualitative study by researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education that's forthcoming in the journal Learning, Media, & Technology.
"Tweens value privacy, seek privacy from both strangers and known others online, and use a variety of strategies to protect their privacy online," wrote researchers Katie Davis and Carrie James, who conducted in-depth interviews with 42 middle-school students for the study. "Tweens' online privacy concerns are considerably broader than the 'stranger danger' messages they report hearing from teachers."
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Bella Vista School teachers gathered on this last morning before spring break for a treat -- breakfast prepared by three retired teachers. The delicious repast included home fries, grits, donuts, and cheesy scrambled eggs. Tired staff, looking forward to the coming break almost as much as their students, took time to gather, enjoy the food, and spend some time together before the last day.Carolyn Matson, Louise Broome, and Karen Chin have always been generous when it comes to sharing their cooking gifts with the staff at Bella Vista; ask any member of the staff from the past four decades and she will remember a potluck (or several) featuring one of Mrs. Broome's tasty cooked treats, and for the past several years the social committee has been helmed by the dedicated, enthusiastic Mrs. Matson and Ms. Chin.
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Change is difficult in public education. There are many reasons for this but the way we finance our schools is one of the larger obstacles. Our school districts are not set up to fund innovation. They distribute funds based on staff positions, personnel benefits, and selected programs. These expenses repeat annually and, over time, become entrenched costs. Anything new or different is usually just layered onto the base. Simply adding new programs to existing services may be feasible in good economic times, but it is not an option when funding is scarce.
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I've written before about the absurdly low cost of California community colleges, and the resulting 30% class "drop rate." Here's a more national perspective on the widespread failure of community colleges to graduate students. It's even worse than I thought.
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Students like Delano Coffy are at the heart of brewing political fights and court battles over whether public dollars should go to school vouchers to help make private schools more affordable.He was failing in his neighborhood public elementary school in Indianapolis until his mother enrolled him in a Roman Catholic school. Heather Coffy has scraped by for years to pay the tuition for Delano, now 16 and in a Catholic high school, and his two younger siblings, who attend the same Catholic elementary as their brother did. She's getting help today from a voucher program, passed last year at the urging of GOP Gov. Mitch Daniels, that allows her to use state money for her children's education.
"I can't even tell you how easy I can breathe now knowing that for at least for this year my kids can stay at the school," said the single mother, who filed a petition in court in support of the law. The state Supreme Court is hearing a challenge to the law, which provides vouchers worth on average more than $4,000 a year to low- and middle-income families. A family of four making about $60,000 a year qualifies.
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Two new studies confirm what we have long suspected: Latin American companies cannot effectively compete in the world economy because their countries' educational systems are totally disconnected from reality.The Global Information Technology Report 2012, a 442-page report by the World Economic Forum and the INSEAD business school, places most Latin American countries far behind the world's most technologically connected countries in its ranking of "network readiness."
The index takes into account various measurements, including internet use and people's ability to use it productively, from international organizations and a survey of more than 15,000 executives worldwide.
According to the report, Latin America "continues to suffer from an important lag" in adopting information and communications technologies to improve countries' competitiveness in a hyper-connected world.
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The Government's flagship free schools are seriously damaging the education of children in neighbouring schools, according to research published today.Analysis of those free schools already approved by the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, reveals that many have been set up in areas where existing schools already have surplus places.
Their arrival has caused a loss of pupils for existing comprehensives - threatening their viability, says the report. In one school - an academy highly rated by Ofsted, the education standards watchdog - the headteacher estimated he will lose £1m a year as a result of a new free school being set up.
So far, 24 free schools have been opened by the Government - run by parents, teachers and faith groups. A further 70 will open in the next 12 months.
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Education Week reports on the growth of websites that attempt to provide parents with help in choosing schools, including rating schools according to testing results. The most prominent of these sites is GreatSchools.org. Its test-based school ratings could not be more simplistic - they are essentially just percentile rankings of schools' proficiency rates as compared to all other schools in their states (the site also provides warnings about the data, along with a bunch of non-testing information).This is the kind of indicator that I have criticized when reviewing states' school/district "grading systems." And it is indeed a poor measure, albeit one that is widely available and easy to understand. But it's worth quickly discussing the fact that such criticism is conditional on how the ratings are employed - there is a difference between the use of testing data to rate schools for parents versus for high-stakes accountability purposes.
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Human beings have all kinds of irrational fears and anxieties about everyday objects and situations: spiders and snakes, heights and enclosed spaces, airplanes and needles. Math.That last one, in fact, may be very common, just going by the number of adults who freely admit to hating math or being bad at it. That supposed dislike of math, scientists say, may be disguising a real phobia that probably begins at an early age.
Stanford researchers studying math anxiety in second- and third-grade students found that kids who were stressed about math had brain activity patterns similar to people with other phobias. When the children were faced with a simple addition problem, the parts of their brain that feel stress lit up - and the parts that are good at doing math deactivated.
Interestingly, the children with math anxiety weren't actually bad at math - they got about the same number of answers right as their anxiety-free peers - but it took them more time to solve the problems.
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Last year, I wrote a post about how Justin Snider, who teaches education at Columbia, asserted that "the best principals are PRESENT, constantly interacting with teachers, students, and parents." I was especially interested in his comment about an intriguing if rough measure of how well a principal is doing the presence thing:"[A] great back-of-the-envelope measure of whether a principal is generally doing a good job is how many students' names he or she knows. In my experience, there's a strong correlation between principals who know almost all students by name and those who are respected (and seen as effective) by students, parents and teachers."I thought of Jason's assertions about the power of presence after getting this depressing email from a middle school teacher about her horrible principal. This boss defines lack of presence. I have reprinted most of the story below in this teacher's words, as I found it most compelling. But note the key point: "She never comes out of her office, and never spends time in the building, seeing how it functions. I can literally go weeks without catching sight of her." Scary, huh?
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Federal agencies must report their progress this week in complying with the Plain Writing Act, a new decree that government officials communicate more conversationally with the public.Speaking plainly, they ain't there yet.
Which leaves, in the eyes of some, a basic and critical flaw in how the country runs. "Government is all about telling people what to do," said Annetta Cheek, a retired federal worker from Falls Church and longtime evangelist for plain writing. "If you don't write clearly, they're not going to do it."
But advocates such as Cheek estimate that federal officials have translated just 10 percent of their forms, letters, directives and other documents into "clear Government communication that the public can understand and use," as the law requires.
Official communications must now employ the active voice, avoid double negatives and use personal pronouns. "Addressees" must now become, simply, "you." Clunky coinages like "incentivizing" (first known usage 1970) are a no-no. The Code of Federal Regulations no longer goes by the abbreviation CFR.
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The ink on Madison School superintendent Dan Nerad's resignation letter is barely dry and already the hand-wringing over finding his replacement has begun.Much more, here.The applicant market is tight, the job is tough, other places offer more attractive terms, warn the school administrators professional association and executive search firms, who arguably have something of a vested interest in tight markets that drive up school administrators' salaries and require executive search firms to navigate.
Not that the locals are doing much of a sell job. I'd be pretty freaked out about applying for a position with the kinds of very high, yet mostly nonspecific, expectations voiced by the education and community bigwigs quoted in this paper on Sunday. (What exactly is a "bridge builder that can create a bold vision," as Michael Johnson, head of the county Boys & Girls Club, put it?)
Hiring Madison's superintendent in these days of shrinking state aid, uncertain labor rules and an embarrassing racial achievement gap is not to be taken lightly.
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Kevin Wanek was one semester away from graduation at Western State College of Colorado in 2010 when he found himself in a bind. He no longer wanted to be an accountant, the field he had studied, but owed more than $50,000 in student loan payments to Wells Fargo (WFC)and other private lenders. Reluctant to take on further debt and close to reaching his borrowing limit, he decided to drop out. Says Wanek: "I started adding up what I owed, and it really hit me."Since he was a college dropout, his career options were limited, but he found an entry-level job at iTriage, a Denver-based mobile health-care application company. In the past two years, he has become a self-taught computer programmer and received a promotion. He now wants to go back to school and finish his degree online, this time with a focus on technology and computer science. But with nearly all his disposable income going toward his $600 monthly student loan payments, Wanek, 24, worries he'll never be able to save enough money to complete his bachelor's degree.
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UK schools are segregated along class lines, leaving the poorest children struggling to achieve against poverty and deprivation, a teachers leader has warned.Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) said stratified schools are "toxic" for deprived youngsters as it means they fail to learn important qualities such as aspiration and effort from their richer classmates.
It is the coalition Government's "dirty little secret" that their education cuts and reforms are making the lives of the poorest children tougher, she suggested. And she raised concerns that schools are held up as the scapegoat for educational failure, accusing ministers and Ofsted of "seeking to wash their hands, like Pontius Pilate" of the problem.
In her speech to ATL's annual conference in Manchester, Dr Bousted said: "We have, in the UK, schools whose intakes are stratified along class lines. We have schools for the elite; schools for the middle class and schools for the working class.
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Knowledge is power.University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School hopes that knowledge is also a powerful branding message as it rolls out a new marketing campaign later this month.
The Philadelphia business school's new advertising tagline, "Knowledge for..." will be completed with a variety of words--"action," "global impact" and "life."
"There was a certain inconsistency" in the school's previous branding efforts, says Thomas Robertson, Wharton's dean and a marketing professor. The school's 20 research centers "weren't immediately identifiable as Wharton."
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Pennsylvania Property Taxpayers Cyber Coalition:
n November 15, 2011, David Baldinger, Administrator of the Pennsylvania Taxpayers Cyber Coalition, gave a presentation on the school property tax problem and the Property Tax Independence Act solution to a group of concerned taxpayers. This meeting, sponsored by the Citizens For Constitutional Government, was held at the Quakertown Public Library in Bucks County, PA.The event was attended by about fifty concerned taxpayers and was reported here in the Perkasie News-Herald.
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The Association of American Geographers (AAG) will undertake one of the most ambitious and potentially far-reaching publication projects in the recent history of the fields of geography and GIScience. This will be a 15-volume work, to be published both in hard copy and online, tentatively entitled The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology.This four-year project will engage geographers, GIScientists, and geographic societies around the globe, and its editors and contributors will reflect the international and interdisciplinary nature of our activities. The sheer scale of this undertaking, in terms of its length, depth, and international scope, has not, to my knowledge, been attempted before.
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In January, The New York Times released a front-page report on the iEconomy, Apple's vast and rapidly growing empire built on the production of tech devices almost exclusively overseas. The fascinating story created a wave of attention when it was published, and it's back in the news after NPR's "This American Life" retracted its story about working conditions at Foxconn, one of Apple's key suppliers of iPhones and iPads.The end of the "This American Life" episode includes a discussion (audio | transcript) between host Ira Glass and Charles Duhigg, the NYT reporter who wrote the iEconomy piece, on Apple's supply chain and the reason the tech giant doesn't produce its insanely popular devices in the U.S. Perhaps you thought the main reason was labor costs; Apple would have to pay American workers much more than the estimated $17 a day (or less) many Chinese workers at Foxconn make. That's part of it, but "an enormously small part," Duhigg told Glass.
Duhigg explained that, in terms of labor costs, producing the iPhone domestically would cost Apple an additional $10 (on the low end) to $65 (on the high end) more per phone. "Since Apple's profits are often hundreds of dollars per phone, building domestically, in theory, would still give the company a healthy reward," he wrote in the NYT piece.
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Gov. Dannel P. Malloy maintains that education reform is the "civil rights issue of our time."Yet, the Education Committee chairs recently passed a watered down version of the governor's original bill. The committee bill was heavily influenced and, many feel, was crafted by special interests behind closed doors.
There are provisions that all sides agree on such as the ability to hire teachers from other states by removing barriers; increased early childhood education slots for priority districts; and increasing grants for charter schools and non-Sheff magnet schools, but much more is left to be negotiated.
Areas still outstanding include:
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Joe Francica and Adena Schutzberg:
GIS and geospatial education are hot topics in 2012 as students try to find the right path to careers and employers try to select new contributing employees. These articles, podcasts and webinars reveal the variety of topics we covered in the first quarter of this year.
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Julia Angwin & Jeremy Singer-Vine:
Many popular Facebook apps are obtaining sensitive information about users--and users' friends--so don't be surprised if details about your religious, political and even sexual preferences start popping up in unexpected places.Not so long ago, there was a familiar product called software. It was sold in stores, in shrink-wrapped boxes. When you bought it, all that you gave away was your credit card number or a stack of bills.
Now there are "apps"--stylish, discrete chunks of software that live online or in your smartphone. To "buy" an app, all you have to do is click a button. Sometimes they cost a few dollars, but many apps are free, at least in monetary terms. You often pay in another way. Apps are gateways, and when you buy an app, there is a strong chance that you are supplying its developers with one of the most coveted commodities in today's economy: personal data.
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In the grand University of California system, the Berkeley and UCLA campuses have long claimed an outsized share of the public imagination. It's easy to forget that the state system has more than two great institutions of higher education. In the heart of the Central Valley, UC-Davis has grown in a hundred years from being the "university farm" to becoming one of the world's most important research universities. Now it's part of a process that may fundamentally redefine the credentials that validate higher learning.Throughout the 20th century, scientists at UC-Davis, a land-grant institution, helped significantly increase crop yields while leading research on plant genetics, water conservation, and pest control. When the present century began, Davis leaders knew the times called for not just production but conservation and renewal. So they created a new, interdisciplinary major in sustainable agriculture and food systems. Many different departments were involved in crafting curricula that range across life sciences, economics, and humanities, along with experiential learning in the field.
The university also conducted a detailed survey of practitioners, scholars, and students to identify the knowledge, skills, and experiences that undergraduates most needed to learn. The survey produced answers like "systems thinking," "strategic management," and "interpersonal communication." They sound like buzzwords--and they can be--but if taken seriously are nothing of the kind. Simultaneously understanding the intricacies of hydrology and plant DNA, the economics of federal agricultural subsidization, and the politics of community development is a high order of systems thinking. The first students enrolled in the program this past fall.
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A year ago, the notion that Smith College -- with a $1 billion endowment, high student demand, and frequently cited educational quality -- was raising existential questions, particularly about its economic model, seemed a fairly radical notion.But an idea that seemed striking in the past -- that elite liberal arts colleges might have to make significant changes in the next few years if they are to remain relevant (or present) in the current educational market -- is now the hottest topic in the sector.
A conference this week here at Lafayette College entitled "The Future of the Liberal Arts College in America and Its Leadership Role in Education Around the World," drew more than 200 college administrators, including about 50 college presidents, out of an invite list of U.S. News and World Report's list of top national liberal arts colleges. Judging by the turnout, the discussion, and the fact that several other conferences addressing these questions are scheduled over the next few months, it's clear that the questions are on everybody's mind.
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Successful schools don't have a formula, other than that teachers and principals are free to follow their instincts.Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman's 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club.America's schools are being crushed under decades of legislative and union mandates. They can never succeed until we cast off the bureaucracy and unleash individual inspiration and willpower.
Schools are human institutions. Their effectiveness depends upon engaging the interest and focus of each student. A good teacher, studies show, can dramatically improve the learning of students. What do great teachers have in common? Nothing, according to studies -- nothing, that is, except a commitment to teaching and a knack for keeping the students engaged (see especially The Moral Life of Schools). Good teachers don't emerge spontaneously, and training and mentoring are indispensable. But ultimately, effective teaching seems to hinge on, more than any other factor, the personality of the teacher. Skilled teachers have a power to engage their students -- with spontaneity, authority, and wit.
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I found this essay in the Fall '91 issue of Whole Earth Review. It finally clarified for me why American school is such a spirit-crushing experience, and suggested what to do about it.Before reading, please set your irony detector to the on position. If you find yourself inclined to dismiss the below as paranoid, you should know that the design behind the current American school system is very well-documented historically, in published writings of dizzying cynicism by such well-known figures as Horace Mann and Andrew Carnegie.
Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn't what I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are:
The first lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class where you belong." I don't know who decides that my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive.
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Global public health crisis and a fast-growing epidemic: these were the stark terms used by experts at an international summit held here last weekend to describe the cost of autism. The descriptions are backed up by grim figures. In South Korea, as many as one in 38 children are diagnosed as having autism spectrum disorders.The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reports prevalence at about one in 88 youngsters in the country. Hong Kong doesn't have an official estimate, but groups say the number ranges from 70,000 to 200,000, depending on the screening criteria.
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The Iowa Senate passed its version of education reform Monday, a significant step in what is becoming a legislative melee to find agreement between the governor and both parties in the final weeks before lawmakers go home.Unlike Republican versions, the Senate's doesn't address such issues as high school student testing that would mandate end-of-course exams be factored into graduation requirements.
There are also key differences on how teachers would be evaluated, how online schools would be limited in scope and if third graders who fail to accomplish key literacy goals would be able to advance.
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A US-based arts college, which sparked controversy when it won the right to use a heritage site ahead of local groups, remains short of its recruitment target, 18 months after it opened.The Hong Kong campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design, housed in the former North Kowloon Magistracy building in Sham Shui Po, cited an initial target of 300 students and an eventual enrolment of 1,500 in bidding for the site.
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SRI International, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), and the University of Maine have received a $3.5 million award from the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education to evaluate the effectiveness of an online tutoring system for mathematics homework. The research team will study seventh-grade mathematics students and teachers in more than 50 schools throughout Maine using WPI's ASSISTments system.ASSISTments aims to transform homework by giving students instant feedback and tutoring adapted to their individual needs. It also provides teachers with customized reports each morning on their students' nightly progress. Teachers in the study will receive training in how to use these reports to adapt their lesson plans to better suit students' needs.
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A teachers' union is calling for a boycott of a new phonics reading test, saying it risks making failures of five-year-olds.The government in England wants all children to be taught to read using phonics, where they learn the sounds of letters and groups of letters.
And it says the new "phonics check" for five and six-year-olds will help identify children who need extra help.
But the National Union of Teachers says it will not tell teachers anything new.
And the union fears the results could be used in league tables.
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All semester, TED Fellow Nina Tandon has been using TED Conversations as part of her class in bioelectricity at Cooper Union. Yesterday in the TED offices, she hosted a Live TED Conversation to answer questions about using TED Conversations in her class. Here are some highlights:Sarah Meyer: So your students asked questions of the TED community as they studied? Did any of their conversations get particularly good responses? Did you or your students learn anything from any of the comments?
Nina Tandon: We've been just blown away from the response -- our TEDinClass Conversations, for example, have been trending in the top five for 9 weeks straight, and each conversation is being viewed in up to 60 countries. And in total, the conversations are reaching about half a million Facebook users via shares. The students are also learning a ton content-wise through responding to comments. And then there's the more-difficult-to-measure but equally important lessons in poise and maturity that comes from leading. It's been amazing.
Emily McManus: What did you worry about most when starting this experiment, and how did you control for it?
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Critics, including a U.S. senator, are convinced that a main motivation behind a plan to merge Rutgers University's Camden campus into Rowan University is an effort to improve the Glassboro school's financial position.But Rowan officials say they don't yet know how the money would work out. And it's the same with the bond-rating agency that's often cited in the debate.
"So many things could change, it's hard to play the what-if game," said a vice president and senior credit officer at Moody's Investors Service, Edie Behr, who has studied the merger plans. "Who's going to be responsible for the payment of which bonds? Whether bonds will be refinanced are restructured, whether the state will help to offset the costs in some way."
Gov. Chris Christie is pushing for an agreement for the merger to be in place by July 1 as part of a bigger reconfiguration of the state's higher-education system.
In addition to combining the two southern New Jersey campuses into an institution that would be treated as the state's second comprehensive public research university, the University of Medicine and Dentistry would be broken up, with some of its schools being taken over by Rutgers and the remainder being renamed the New Jersey Health Sciences University.
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In the mid-1990s I set out to adopt a baby. I made phone calls to adoption agencies, and staff members asked warily if I'd consider a transracial adoption. I said yes. At one agency, the receptionist snapped: "Do you understand what transracial means?" Her tone startled me. "I think so," I said, parsing syllables, "adoption across races." Impatient, she said, "You'll get a black baby!"I lived in a small town without internet access and had done my research--on adoption laws, policy, advice--at a library twenty miles away. I'd found references to a 1972 position paper issued by the National Association of Black Social Workers that objected to transracial adoption as "cultural genocide," an understandable position, given the state of race relations in 1972. The few agencies that had been doing black-white adoptions stopped because of the position paper. I didn't find references to a time when agencies started doing transracial adoptions again because the Metzenbaum Act--passed in 1994 to address the fact that children of color were overrepresented in the child welfare system--had been amended, making "race-matching" as the sole determinant for the placement of a child unambiguously illegal.
Some staff members welcomed the change but weren't sure if adoptive parents would. Other staff members objected to the change--take the receptionist who'd thought I must not know what transracial meant based on my answer. In the end, I used an agency whose staff members were able to discuss race without anger or recoil.
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Scott Jaschik, via a kind reader's email:
Most elite colleges and universities describe their admissions policies as "holistic," suggesting that they look at the totality of an applicant -- grades, test scores, essays, recommendations, activities and so forth.Further discussion, here.But a new survey of admissions officials at the 75 most competitive colleges and universities (defined as those with the lowest admit rates) finds that there are distinct patterns, typically not known by applicants, that differentiate some holistic colleges from others. Most colleges focus entirely on academic qualifications first, and then consider other factors. But a minority of institutions focuses first on issues of "fit" between a college's needs and an applicant's needs.
This approach -- most common among liberal arts colleges and some of the most competitive private universities -- results in a focus on non-academic qualities of applicants, and tends to favor those who are members of minority groups underrepresented on campus and those who can afford to pay all costs of attending.
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I majored in English literature at Harvard, and had such wonderful professors as B.J. Whiting for Chaucer, Alfred Harbage for Shakespeare, Douglas Bush for Milton, Walter Jackson Bate for Samuel Johnson, and Herschel Baker for Tudor/Stuart Drama. In my one year at Cambridge after graduation, I had the benefit of lectures by Clive Staples Lewis, F.R. Leavis, Joan Bennett, and R.T.H. Redpath.
But in high school and in college I didn't read any history books and I didn't think twice about it. Many years later, when I was asked to teach United States History at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, I panicked. I read Samuel Eliot Morison's Oxford History of the American People to get started and I have been reading history books ever since (thirty years), but I never knew enough history to be as good a history teacher as my students deserved.
Since 1987, (I left teaching in 1988) I have been the editor of The Concord Review, the only journal in the world for the academic papers of secondary students, and we have now published 1,022 history research papers by high school students from 46 states and 38 other countries. This has only increased my understanding that high school students should be not only encouraged to read complete history books (as I never was in school) but assigned them as well. It is now my view that unless students in our high schools get used to reading at least one complete history book each year, they will not be as well prepared for the books on college nonfiction reading lists as they should be.
In addition, as adherents to the ideas of E.D. Hirsch know well, understanding what one reads depends on the prior knowledge of the reader, and by reading history books our high schools students will learn more history and be more competent to read difficult nonfiction material, including more history books, in college.
When I discuss these thoughts, even with my good friends in the education world, I find a strange sort of automatic reversion to the default. When I want to talk about reading nonfiction books, suddenly the conversation is about novels. Any discussion of reading nonfiction in the high schools always, in my experience, defaults to talk of literature. It seems virtually impossible to anyone discussing reading to relax the clutches of the English Departments long enough even to consider that a history book might make good reading material for our students, too. Try it sometime and see what I mean.
I realize that most Social Studies and History Departments have simply given up on having students read a history book, even in those few cases where they may have tried in the past. They are almost universally content, it seems, to leave the assignment of books (and too much of the writing as well) entirely in the hands of their English Department colleagues.
One outcome of this, in my view, is that even when the Common Core people talk about the need for more nonfiction, it is more than they can manage to dare to suggest a list of complete history books for kids to read. So we find them suggesting little nonfiction excerpts and short speeches to assign, along with menus, brochures, and bus schedules for the middle schoolers. Embarrassing.
Nevertheless, if asked, what history books would I suggest? Everyone is afraid to mention possible history books if they are not about current events, or civics, or some underserved population, for fear of a backlash against the whole idea of history books.
But I will offer these: Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough for Freshmen, Washington's Crossing by David Hackett Fischer for Sophomores, Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson for Juniors, and The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough for Seniors in high school.
Obviously there are thousands of other good history books, and students should be free to read any of these as they work on their Extended History Essays or the very new Capstone Essays the College Board is beginning to start thinking about. And of course I do realize that some history took place before 1620 and even in countries other than our own, but these books are good ones, and if students read them they will actually learn some history, but perhaps more important, they will learn that reading a real live nonfiction history book is not beyond their reach. I dearly wish I had learned that when I was in high school.
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The Board of Trustees at Santa Monica College voted Friday to postpone a two-tiered fee increase that led to angry campus protests where students were pepper-sprayed.The board decided at an emergency meeting to delay a plan to deal with budget cuts by offering high-demand core courses at about four times the regular price.
The 6-0 vote followed the recommendation of college President Chui Tsang, who circulated a memo before the meeting urging that the plan be put on hold at least for summer classes to allow more time for community input.
His request to the board also reflected the college funding woes that prompted the fee plan.
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The insidious thing about tests is that they seem so straightforward. I write a bunch of questions. My students try to answer them. And so I find out who knows more and who knows less.But if you have even a minimal knowledge of the field of psychometrics, you know that things are not so simple.
And if you lack that minimal knowledge, Howard Wainer would like a word with you.
Wainer is a psychometrician who spent many years at the Educational Testing Service and now works at the National Board of Medical Examiners. He describes himself as the kind of guy who shouts back at the television when he sees something to do with standardized testing that he regards as foolish. These one-way shouting matches occur with some regularity, and Wainer decided to record his thoughts more formally.
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Among the excellent benefits available to MTI members is the additional worker's compensation benefit provided by MTI's various Collective Bargaining Agreements.Wisconsin Statutes provide a worker's compensation benefit for absence caused by a work-related injury or illness, but such commences on the 4th day of absence and has a maximum weekly financial benefit.
MTI's Contracts provide one's full wage, beginning on day one of an absence caused by a work-related injury or illness, with no financial maximum. Also, under MTI's Contract provision, one's earned sick leave is not consumed by such an absence.
Although MTI is working to preserve this benefit, it is at risk due to Governor Walker's Act 10.
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American college students now owe more than $1 trillion on their student loans, more than total borrowing on credit cards or auto loans. Given how much people in our society like to drive cars and put their shopping bills on plastic, this is an astonishing sum. Borrowing for higher education used to be rare. Now students routinely leave college with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and, in the current job market, shaky prospects for paying it back.The average amount of student debt carried in the United States by graduating seniors? $25,000. But many owe more than twice that, and forget about it if you plan to get a professional degree.
This represents an inter-generational betrayal with far-reaching consequences for the shape of civic life. Basically, our parents have sold us out.
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After narrowly missing the cutoff last year to receive a share of $500 million to support early childhood education, Wisconsin has been offered another opportunity to apply for federal funding for its youngest learners, U.S. Education Department officials announced Monday.The pool of grant money -- $133 million -- is smaller this time, but Wisconsin's chances of winning are better than before because it would be competing against only four other states.
Department officials said the second round of the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge will be open to Wisconsin, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico and Oregon -- all states that barely missed the minimum score needed to receive funding in the first round.
Wisconsin's score sheet from the first round shows it received 234 points out of a possible 300, but department officials said Monday that score had been revised to 224. They said the scores were revised for five states because of "inconsistencies" the department noticed in its review of applicant and reviewer feedback. The revised scores did not affect the overall outcome of the first round of the competition.
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The Oklahoma Board of Education approved six public schools Monday that must work with the state Department of Education to improve student performance.The board chose the six as "priority schools," though delayed action on a seventh school that department officials wanted on the list.
The department initially identified 75 schools as the lowest-performing in Oklahoma in terms of student achievement, then cut the list to seven. The criteria included being in the bottom 5 percent in reading and math scores, having graduation rates below 60 percent and receiving federal School Improvement Grants.
The board agreed with the department to list Keyes Elementary, Farris Public Schools, Okay High School, McLain High School in Tulsa, and Shidler Elementary School and Roosevelt Middle School in Oklahoma City.
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Sometimes public education can be like the weather: Everybody wants to talk about it, but nobody ever does anything about it.The school-focused Planning for Greatness initiative in Madison aims for talking, yes; but especially, the project aims for doing things to improve and revitalize our public education system.
The effort launched back in November, followed by a series of large-group discussions involving educators and community leaders. Now, Planning for Greatness is entering a key "next phase" moment, as those initial discussions have produced a series of eight key topics.
One smaller "study group" session has already been held -- on the topic of early childhood learning opportunities -- and the other seven study group sessions designed to dig into the priority topics start Monday.
All the topics make sense, and are critical to any desire to rethink how we do public education, and how our community is involved in that process. Planning for Greatness is first on a deep fact-finding mission -- which is what the upcoming study groups are all about -- and ultimately will make recommendations and proposals for improving our schools and the school/community interaction.
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Rachel Louise Ensign & Melissa Korn:
So Harvard has put you--or someone you know--on its waitlist. Great news! Or maybe not.A spot on a waitlist from an elite school doesn't necessarily mean a candidate is closer to the finish line. Some may be waitlisted, for example, because though their grades weren't quite good enough or they didn't take enough advanced placement classes, they still piqued the interest of admissions officers. Others are offered spots purely out of courtesy, such as family members of alumni or children of donors who failed to make the academic cut.
Schools often pad their waitlists to protect their "yield," or the proportion of accepted students who choose to attend. They can admit fewer students on the first pass, to maintain their aura of exclusivity, then move on to the waitlist if accepted students turn them down.
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Laura De-Roche Perez, via a kind email:
On Monday May 7, 2012 from 12-130 pm, the Department of Educational Policy Studies at UW-Madison will host a brownbag on the topic "What is the Madison Metropolitan School District achievement gap -- and what can be done about it?" It will feature EPS faculty and affiliates Harry Brighouse, Adam Gamoran, Nancy Kendall, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and Linn Posey.Much more on Adam Gamoran, including a video interview, here.The brownbag will take place in the Wisconsin Idea Room at the Education Building, 1000 Bascom Mall.
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You may have seen that Harvard just set a record for low undergraduate admission rate. Only 5.9 percent of applicants for the class of 2016 were accepted. I was going to do one of my many rants on why we should wake up and see that being admitted to the Ivies and certain other schools is no more a sign of depth and brilliance than winning the Mega Millions lottery. I was going to point out that Harvard could admit a full class of its rejects that would be just as good as the students it accepted. But I already wrote a book about that, "Harvard Schmarvard." And yesterday I got an e-mail that says it better than I ever did.So I offer this as a theme for this week's discussion. The writer declined to be identified other than as "Concerned Student." I usually don't print anonymous contributions, but I am making an exception in this case since he speaks well for his college age group. Tell us what you think.
By "Concerned Student"
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WANTED: A K-12 schools leader with experience uniting a divided community, managing tight budgets and closing achievement gaps in an urban school setting.Much more on the Madison Superintendent search, here.PROBLEM: A shrinking pool of such dynamic leaders and a growing number of urbanizing districts like Madison seeking top talent.
"It is a tight market," said Dan Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. "The number of experienced superintendents that have done well in their districts and have the reputation of having done well -- those are relatively few and those are the ones that everyone is going after."
Madison will soon be conducting a search for a new schools chief after superintendent Dan Nerad announced he plans to depart by June 2013, when his current contract expires. He recently was named a finalist for a superintendency in Omaha, Neb., and though he wasn't selected, he hasn't ruled out moving to another job before the next school year starts.
Though Nerad's time in Madison will have been short-lived compared to his predecessor, Art Rainwater, who retired after 10 years, the average superintendent in a mid- to large-sized city holds the job for an average of 3.5 years, Domenech said.
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While you may find debatable much of Mark Brenner's editorial at Labor Notes, you will also find some important insights regarding the decision by the California Federation of Teachers to drop its "millionaire's tax" initiative and hammer out a deal with Gov. Jerry Brown and the California Teachers Association.It's worth reading in its entirety, but here a few excerpts:
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If you've never heard of the Common Core standards, it's time to take note: They could have a big effect on what students will learn - and maybe also on the tests that measure their progress.This attempt at creating uniform academic standards stringent enough to ensure that students in every state are ready for college or career has been years in the making. It is being pushed by the Obama administration, with help from organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The goal is to raise the bar nationally and make American students more competitive with those abroad.
Longtime proponents point out that individual state standards are all over the place in terms of rigor and expectations. They argue that clear standards for what students at each grade level should know and be able to do, drawn up by top educators and used nationwide, can benefit everyone. And they say it doesn't require dictating what happens in the classroom.
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Beloit has the state's highest unemployment rate at 12.5 percent, and property values in the Beloit School District averge $198,000 per student -- one of the lowest ratios in the state.But on Tuesday, voters in the southern Rock County school district approved one of the costliest referendums in state history.
The $70 million plan to renovate most schools in the district, build a middle school and a pool, is being called historic for the city. It will not only benefit education but, according to supporters, serve as a catalyst for economic development.
"From a marketing aspect, I shuddered every time I saw the figures. It's a heck of a lot of money," said Randy Upton, president of the Greater Beloit Chamber of Commerce, which publicly supported the plan. "By providing the facilities, it's going to make people proud and make people look at Beloit as a place to live and invest."
Beloit wasn't alone Tuesday in its referendum success.
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HARDLY a week goes by without an article or a book suggesting the newest, best -- or oldest, but still best -- way to raise a child. The most recent fixation is with the supposed superiority of the French.I have been reading with great nostalgia Pamela Druckerman's musings on the calmness of French parenting in "Bringing Up Bébé." I too was a parent in France, having given birth to my son there some 15 years ago, after having a daughter, now 20, in England, and her sister, now 16, in Belgium.
In fact, it wasn't until 18 months ago, when my husband and I finally returned to the States, that I first experienced motherhood in America. Until then, all I knew were the joys of European parenting as presented by Ms. Druckerman, from the way my children ate everything from coq au vin to kedgeree to our tranquil family life of weekend walks, nightly dinners and relaxing vacations.
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Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Gregory Thornton was fired up when he spoke recently to a crowd of about 250 at a north side church. I need your help, he told the audience. Help me tear down MPS and build up a better one.I don't think I'd ever heard a school superintendent say he wants to tear down the system he heads, but I understand where Thornton was going. The status quo in MPS is not so thrilling. Some things have to go if you want to get to a better place.
But I have a serious concern that, because of circumstances mostly beyond Thornton's control, things may be going better on the "tearing down" side of Milwaukee Public Schools than on the "building up" side.
What does it take to have a successful school system? Let's focus on a few key ingredients: People, money and a unifying, energizing sense of mission.
People, both in terms of quality and numbers. MPS is in a precarious state on these scores. When teachers voted a week ago by a decisive margin not to give up a week's pay next year to ease cuts in classroom services, they played a serious part in the unfolding plot for 2012-'13 to be a grim year for MPS.
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2012 newest students Exam Cheating MP4 Watch AD668 from the supplier of factory
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In the stagnant days of the Carter administration, when inflation was approaching 13.5% and interest rates were peaking at 21.5%, income was more evenly distributed than in any period in 20th-century America. Since the days of that equality in misery, the measured income of the top 1% of income tax filers has risen over three and a half times as fast as the income of the population as a whole.This growth in income inequality is largely the result of three dynamics:
1) Changes in the way Americans pay taxes and manage their investments, which were a direct result of reductions in marginal tax rates.
2) A dynamic shift in the labor-capital ratio, resulting from the adoption of market-based economies around the world.
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How well does a college teach, and what do its students learn? Rankings based on the credentials of entering freshmen are not hard to find, but how can students, parents and policy makers assess how well a college builds on that foundation?What information exists has often been hidden from public view. But that may be changing.
In the wake of the No Child Left Behind federal education law, students in elementary, middle and high schools take standardized tests whose results are made public, inviting anyone to assess, however imperfectly, a school's performance. There is no comparable trove of public data for judging and comparing colleges.
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In other words, MPS had a surplus of teachers because older teachers were not retiring so as not to lose state pension benefits. Hence, a second pension to offset any loss was created. However, since 1982 the early retirement penalty for teacher has been reduced or eliminated, turning the second pension into an additional benefit which MPS states it had "no intent to establish."Much more, here.The survival of the second pension long past its justifiable usefulness is a result of a collective bargaining process that rarely gives back established benefits (see, for example, MTEA's 2011 rejection of concessions that would have saved teacher jobs). Former MPS superintendent Howard Fuller, school choice advocate George Mitchell, and former WPRI staffer Michael Hartman did a good job documenting in a 2000 book chapter (see figure one) the dramatic growth of the MPS/MTEA contract from an 18 page document in 1965 to a 232 page document in 1997. The most recent published contract? 258 pages.
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Leaders of a national education reform movement, including Joel I. Klein and Michelle Rhee, the former schools chancellors in New York and Washington, have formed a statewide political group in New York with an eye toward being a counterweight to the powerful teachers' union in the 2013 mayoral election.The group, called StudentsFirstNY, is an arm of a national advocacy organization that Ms. Rhee founded in 2010. Like the national group, the state branch will promote the expansion of charter schools and the firing of ineffective schoolteachers, while opposing tenure.
Led by Micah Lasher, who is leaving his job next week as the director of state legislative affairs for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, the campaign is beginning while advocates of reform have an ally in the mayor. But their eyes are focused on 2014, when a new mayor -- most likely one who is more sympathetic to the teachers' union than Mr. Bloomberg has been -- enters office.
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Here is arguably the most startling statistic you have heard this year: It is likely that there are at least as many adult Americans with student-loan debts outstanding as there are living bachelor's degree recipients who ever took out student loans. That's right: as many debtors as degree holders! How can that be? First, huge numbers of those borrowing money never graduate from college. Second, many who borrow are not in baccalaureate degree programs. Three, people take forever to pay their loans back.Let's do the math. Recent data suggest there are about 40 million holders of student-loan debt. The New York Fed in a study puts the number a little lower, but estimates by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) suggest a somewhat higher figure. There are, give or take a million, roughly 60 million college graduates. Yet a good proportion, somewhere around one-third, of college graduates, never borrowed money to go to college (that is probably doubly true of graduates in the early 1990s). In other words, at most 40 million adults with four-year degrees borrowed money. Bottom line: an awful lot of people borrow to go to college and never graduate, and/or take forever to pay off their student loans.
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Traditionally, for-profit colleges have operated on the lowest rungs of America's educational ladder, catering to poor and lower-middle-class students looking for a basic, convenient degree or technical training. Aspiring Ivy Leaguers have remained far out of the industry's sites.That is, until now.
This week, the Minerva Project, a startup online university, announced that it had received $25 million in seed financing from Benchmark Capital, a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm known for its early investments in eBay, among other successful web companies. Minerva bills itself as "the first elite American university to be launched in a century," and promises to re-envision higher education for the information age. The chairman of its advisory board: Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and Harvard president. Among others, he's joined on the board by Bob Kerry, the former United States senator and president of The New School.
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Schools could be hit by fresh waves of strikes from this summer after two teaching unions put the government on notice that they intend to continue their campaign against the government's planned reforms to their pensions.The National Union of Teachers passed a resolution behind closed doors at its annual conference in Torquay seeking fresh walkouts as early as this summer amid concerns over the government's changes to public sector pensions.
The resolution was passed just hours after the NASUWT, which is holding its conference in Birmingham, agreed to step up its industrial action campaign against what they see as a series of attacks on pay, pensions, working conditions and job losses - raising the possibility of strikes in the autumn term.
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This memo is follow up to a discussion of MMSD high school completion rates and on track status from February. Highlights of this follow up are:Revised on track calculations still indicate a decline among Hispanic, black and ELL students. However, the decline is not as pronounced as it was once the numbers for 2009-10 presented in February were revisited.
- Preparedness matters. Results from the Kindergarten Screener are predictive of a student's likelihood of completing high school. Of students starting their school years unprepared, over 25% will drop out and nearly half will take longer than four years to complete high school.
- Attendance matters. Over half of the students with a high school attendance rate less than 80% will drop out.
- Credits matter. Students not earning the required number of credits in Grade 9 are less likely to complete high school. Students earning one credit or less face a dropout rate of 63%.
- Tenure matters. The length of time a student is with MMSD or in one of its high schools has an impact on the likelihood he or she will earn a diploma or equivalency. Getting a student to attend longer than his or her first year is critical.
- Behavior matters. Students with one or more suspensions per year complete high school only one third of the time.
The Board had also asked about the characteristics of certain students. Students enrolled less than four years with MMSD are more likely to be black, Hispanic, low income, and ELL. They are less likely to have earned 5.5 credits in Grade 9 and are less likely to have high attendance. Interestingly, they are less likely to be identified as special ed and are less likely to have been suspended. These may reflect the shorter duration of their enrollment with MMSD.
Black students known to be continuing beyond four years in high school are more likely to be low income, special ed, enroll in SAPAR, and have at least on out-of-school suspension. They are also less likely to have earned 5.5 credits in Grade 9.
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Omaha's new school superintendent is no stranger to controversy, having survived nepotism charges as the schools' chief in Des Moines.Nancy Sebring's tenure presiding over 31,000 Des Moines students since 2006 has been controversial at times - particularly when her twin sister was hired as director of Des Moines' first charter school 15 months ago.
Despite questions about how her sister got the job, Sebring has said she had nothing to do with an advisory board's decision. The charter school's launch has been rocky. It opened six months behind schedule and enrollment has not met projections, with 40 percent of students leaving its first year. The school has not provided quarterly reports as required and its budget is nearly twice as big as projected, according to the Des Moines Register.
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Math nerds and historians, it's time to get excited. Minds of Modern Mathematics, a new iPad app released Thursday by IBM, presents an interactive timeline of the history of mathematics and its impact on society from 1000 to 1960.The app is based on an original, 50-foot-long "Men of Modern Mathematics" installation created in 1964 by Charles and Ray Eames. Minds of Modern Mathematics users can view a digitized version of the original infographic as well as browse through an interactive timeline with more than 500 biographies, math milestones and images of relevant artifacts.
IBM hopes that classes and students will use the app, provoking more people to pursue math, science or technology-related educations and jobs.
"Careers of the future will rely heavily on creativity, critical thinking, problem solving and collaboration -- all themes that were core to the 'Minds of Modern Mathematics' movement and remain equally relevant today," Chid Apte, IBM Director of analytics Research and Mathematical Sciences said in a press release. "What better way than a mobile app to reintroduce this timeless classic to inspire a new generation of learners?"
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A teachers' union leader has accused ministers of being "like Pontius Pilate", seeking to avoid responsibility for the "educational failure over which they . . . have more control than anyone else".Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said on Wednesday that schools cannot close attainment gaps on their own: "If we are to raise educational standards we need to look at our schools, yes. But that is not enough."
The ATL is the third-largest teachers' union in the UK with 160,000 members. It is renowned for its moderate stance and is the largest union in independent schools. The ATL went on strike for the first time last year over pension rights.
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Daniel A. Nerad, Nancy Yoder, Sally Schultz:
To meet the goal of "100 percent graduation," the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) provides a mix of educational choices as diverse as the students and families it serves. The Alternative Education system is designed to give a wider range of appropriate education options to students. These alternatives provide a continuum of choices that allows students to develop skills and successfully transition to their next learning environment, whether that is a regular education classroom, another alternative setting, a post-secondary program, or an adult work setting.Students with disabilities are eligible to attend any of the MMSD Alternative Programs. These students must meet eligibility criteria like any other student and go through the appropriate referral processes. An IEP [blekko clusty google] committee must recommend a change of placement before the student can attend. Some programs are designated for special education students, for students involved in the court system, for students in a specific high school attendance area or for students who meet
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Dr. Nerad recently announced his retirement effective June 30, 2013. Consequently, over the next few months this Board will be required to begin its search for the next District leader. While some members of the Board were Board members during the search that brought Dr. Nerad to Madison, many were not. A number of members have asked me to provide some background information so that they may familiarize themselves with the process that was used in 2007. Consequently, I have gathered the following documents for your review:Dave Zweiful shares his thoughts on Dan Nerad's retirement.1. Request for Proposals: Consultation Services for Superintendent Search, Proposal 3113, dated March 19, 2007;
2. Minutes from Board meetings on February 26,2007, and March 12,2007, reflecting Board input and feedback regarding draft versions ofthe RFP;
3. Contract with Hazard, Young and Attea;
4. A copy of the Notice of Vacancy that was published in Education Week;
5. Minutes from a Board meeting on August 27, 2007, which contains the general timeline used to complete the search process; and,
6. Superintendent Search- Leadership Profile Development Session Schedule, which reflects how community engagement was handled during the previous search.
It is also my understanding that the Board may wish to create an ad hoc committee to handle various procedural tasks related to the search process. In line with Board Policy 1041, I believe it is appropriate to take official action in open session to create the new ad hoc. I recommend the following motion:
Related: Notes and links on Madison Superintendent hires since 1992.
Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater's recent public announcement that he plans to retire in 2008 presents an opportunity to look back at previous searches as well as the K-12 climate during those events. Fortunately, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web, we can quickly lookup information from the recent past.2008 Madison Superintendent candidate public appearances:The Madison Superintendent position's success is subject to a number of factors, including: the 182 page Madison Teachers, Inc. contract, which may become the District's handbook (Seniority notes and links)..., state and federal laws, hiring practices, teacher content knowledge, the School Board, lobbying and community economic conditions (tax increase environment) among others.The Madison School District's two most recent Superintendent hires were Cheryl Wilhoyte [Clusty] and Art Rainwater [Clusty]. Art came to Madison from Kansas City, a district which, under court order, dramatically increased spending by "throwing money at their schools", according to Paul Ciotti:
Superintendent Nerad's reign has certainly been far more open about critical issues such as reading, math and open enrollment than his predecessor (some board members have certainly been active with respect to improvement and accountability). The strings program has also not been under an annual assault, lately. That said, changing anything in a large organization, not to mention a school district spending nearly $15,000 per student is difficult, as Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman pointed out in 2009.
Would things improve if a new Superintendent enters the scene? Well, in this case, it is useful to take a look at the District's recent history. In my view, diffused governance in the form of more independent charter schools and perhaps a series of smaller Districts, possibly organized around the high schools might make a difference. I also think the District must focus on just a few things, namely reading/writing, math and science. Change is coming to our agrarian era school model (or, perhaps the Frederick Taylor manufacturing model is more appropriate). Ideally, Madison, given its unparalleled tax and intellectual base should lead the way.
Perhaps we might even see the local Teachers union authorize charters as they are doing in Minneapolis.
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Nancy Kober and Alexandra Usher, via a kind Richard Askey email:
The 2012 Public Education Primer highlights important and sometimes little-known facts concerning the U.S. education system, how things have changed over time, and how they may change in the future. Together these facts provide a comprehensive picture of the nation's public schools, including data about students, teachers, funding, achievement, management, and non-academic services.
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Polish Prime Minister Office yesterday accepted „Digital School program" with „Digital Textbooks" component included. With 45 million PLN (approx. 15 million USD) funding it has been the biggest governmental Open Educational Resources initiative in Poland so far. The government has decided to fund creating full set of educational materials for grades 4-6 (9-11 year olds). All those resources will be available under CC BY license, which is fully free license according to the Definition of Free Cultural Works.„Digital School" program (with „Digital Textbooks" component) was initially drafted and proposed to the Prime Minister Office by Jarosław Lipszyc (Modern Poland Foundation), Piotr Pacewicz, Alicja Pacewicz (Center for Civic Education), Alek Tarkowski (Creative Commons Poland) with cooperation of Witold Przeciechowski (Prime Minister Office). All those organizations are members of Open Education Coalition, a network of NGOs and educational institutions promoting OER in Poland. This draft was accepted by Ministry of Education, but at a later stage of preparations the free licensing requirement was left out. Both Open Education Coalition and Modern Poland Foundation took part in the public consultation process; their comments in support of free licensing were taken on board in the very last minute. The final version of this program was yesterday accepted by the Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
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Undergraduate business majors are a dime a dozen on many college campuses. But according to some, they may be worth even less.More than 20% of U.S. undergraduates are business majors, nearly double the next most common major, social sciences and history.
The proportion has held relatively steady for the past 30 years, but now faculty members, school administrators and corporate recruiters are questioning the value of a business degree at the undergraduate level.
The biggest complaint: The undergraduate degrees focus too much on the nuts and bolts of finance and accounting and don't develop enough critical thinking and problem-solving skills through long essays, in-class debates and other hallmarks of liberal-arts courses.
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When a little girl, who I'll call Tina, arrived in a pre-kindergarten program in Washington, D.C. she was unable to recognize any sounds or letters. By the time she left for kindergarten she knew all her letters and more sounds than D.C.'s standards require. Now, six years later, Tina's teachers say she's "on a roll" in school.There are plenty of legitimate debates about what works in education, but the importance of early-childhood education is not one of them. High-quality early-childhood programs help kids in school and in life. Why? Research shows that good programs can improve a variety of outcomes and University of Chicago economist and Nobel Laureate James Heckman points out that dollars invested early are higher leverage than later remediation. But it's also common sense. Tina's teachers say that until she learned behavioral and participatory skills she was simply unable to engage with and benefit from instruction at school. It's good for parents, too, because good programs teach them about how to be involved and advocate for their child's education.
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Last week, the nation's top public school officials gathered in Washington, D.C. for the annual legislative conference of the Council of Chief State School Officers.The hot topic, unsurprisingly, was the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary. Several attendees -- charged with implementing the law in their respective states -- have applied for federal waivers from this law.
Some school officials have found it difficult to meet the law's standards requiring that every student -- even those that are poor or in minority groups -- make progress each year.
NCLB might need some tinkering. As the discussion about reauthorization continues, it's vital for students and the future of this country that the core principles of accountability, transparency and equality be preserved.
The George W. Bush Institute recently released ten "principles" that serve as guidance for state accountability. These principles show how to build on the foundation established by NCLB and then further improve the key areas of standards, student groups, parental choice, and college and career readiness.
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Public education is under attack around the world, and in response, student protests have recently been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Taiwan and elsewhere.California is also a battleground. The Los Angeles Times reports on another chapter in the campaign to destroy what had been the greatest public higher education system in the world: "California State University officials announced plans to freeze enrollment next spring at most campuses and to wait-list all applicants the following fall pending the outcome of a proposed tax initiative on the November ballot."
Similar defunding is under way nationwide. "In most states," The New York Times reports, "it is now tuition payments, not state appropriations, that cover most of the budget," so that "the era of affordable four-year public universities, heavily subsidized by the state, may be over."
Community colleges increasingly face similar prospects - and the shortfalls extend to grades K-12.
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More than ever, Chinese students have their sights set on U.S. graduate schools.Application volume from that country rose 18% for U.S. master's and doctoral programs starting this fall, according to a new report from the Council of Graduate Schools that provides a preliminary measure of application trends. Specific programs of interest include engineering, business and earth sciences.
That is on top of a 21% jump last year and a 20% rise in 2010--and is the seventh consecutive year of double-digit gains from China, according to the graduate-school industry group. Applications from China now comprise nearly half of all international applications to U.S. graduate programs.
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JENNIFER LEVITZ, MELISSA KORN and SCOTT THURM:
Laura Marino, a senior at Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J., was spooked last year when a recent graduate there was accepted to only a couple of colleges, despite having top grades and strong test scores.So Ms. Marino spread applications far and wide, adopting an increasingly common strategy among prospective college students, many of whom have learned the fate of their applications in recent weeks. She applied to 14 colleges, including 1,177-student Haverford College in Haverford, Pa.; University of Michigan, with more than 27,000 undergraduates; and six of the eight Ivy League schools.
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Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam is likely in the coming days to sign into law a bill requiring that public schools allow science teachers to discuss purported weaknesses of theories such as evolution and global warming in their classrooms.Supporters, including a socially conservative organization in the state and supporters of creationism, say the law allows teachers and students to critique scientific theories they believe have flaws. They point out the bill says the law "shall not be construed to promote any religious or non-religious doctrine."
No major cases of Tennessee science teachers being punished for questioning widely held theories have come to light, but the bill's proponents argue it will provide a safeguard for those who want to raise questions.
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How did this happen? How did conservatives come to find themselves glaring across the battleground at tens of thousands of Wisconsin's teachers? In the long run, the confrontation is not one that is likely to end well for conservatives.Too often conservatives fall into the trap of equating teachers with the teachers' unions. While hostility toward the unions might be justified - after all, they have reflexively opposed conservative school reform ideas for decades and have inappropriately intruded into classroom activities with the passive concurrence of union supported school board members - this hostility should not be transferred to teachers themselves. Anyone who ignores the distinction between teachers and teachers' unions does so at their own peril.
There are several arguments supporting this reasoning; I offer up two of the better ones here.
First, there's no getting around it, teachers are the people who need to, well, teach. While a handful of misguided teachers might drag their ideology into the classroom, most do not. When the bell rings, nearly all teachers set about doing their best to attain the same goal espoused by every educational reformer: to improve the performance of the students in their charge. Some are better at their job than others, but these are not malicious people.
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Wisconsin State Journal Editorial
Congratulations to all of Tuesday's spring election winners -- especially those willing to take on the challenges facing our public schools.First-time candidate Mary Burke and incumbent Arlene Silveira won big in their bids for Madison School Board.
They and their opponents (Michael Flores and Nichelle Nichols, respectively) deserve credit for leading a community conversation on the future of Madison schools during their high-profile campaigns.
Now comes the time for action. And something bold is needed to boost dismal graduation rates for blacks and Latinos. The status quo isn't working for a huge portion of minority students.
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Notes: Fund Balance is a District's reserve cash/assets. The Madison School District's fund balance, or equity declined significantly during the mid-2000's, but has grown in recent years.
*The most recent survey was conducted by the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators and used a different format. The other surveys were conducted by the Wisconsin Education Association Council. WEAC didn't respond to questions about whether it had results for the 2008-09, 2009-10 or 2010-11.SOURCE: WASDA/WEAC surveys with comments from local newspaper reporter Matthew DeFour & Clay Barbour:
Wisconsin superintendents survey last fall found state budget cuts prompted school districts to eliminate thousands of staff positions, increase class sizes, raise student fees and reduce extracurricular offerings this school year.But this week, Gov. Scott Walker's office said those results don't tell the full story and that similar surveys from past years show school districts fared better after his education changes went into effect.
Further, the governor's office contends the organizations that conducted those surveys -- the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators and the Wisconsin Education Association Council -- were unhelpful, and in WEAC's case actually worked against the administration as staff tried to compare recent results to past surveys.
"It's unfortunate that WEAC stands in the way of survey data that they have released in the past, which shows the governor's changes are working and are good for their members and the state's schoolchildren," said Cullen Werwie, Walker's spokesman.
The older surveys show more school districts increased class sizes, reduced extracurricular programs, raised student fees and tapped reserves to balance their budgets in each year between 2002 and 2008 than they did in 2011-12.
In past years, about two-thirds to three-quarters of districts reported increasing student fees each year. This year, 22 percent of districts reported doing so.
Related: WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators, Sparks fly over Wisconsin budget's labor-related provisions and Teachers Union & (Madison) School Board Elections.
Describing the evil effects of revolution, Thucydides writes, "Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them." (P. 199 of the Landmark edition)
Politics and the English Language by George Orwell (1946).
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Madeline Edison, James Kindle, Alicia La Croix & Sarah Schultes, via a kind Rick Kiley email:
A heavy burden rests on our shoulders as teachers: Alleviate Minnesota's large achievement gaps, accelerate learning gains, and get all children college- and career-ready. We're up to the challenge.Teachers are the No. 1 in-school factor affecting student success. Research says a highly effective teacher can help students achieve as much as an additional year's worth of academic gains over one school year compared with a less effective teacher.
That's why it is so disheartening to see great teachers let go without regard to their performance.
Consider what happened late last month, when nearly 50 teachers in Eden Prairie received layoff notices.
These particular teachers were not laid off because they were bad teachers, because they had failed their students, or because parents, students or administrators wanted them to go. They were laid off because of a simple number: their number of years teaching in the district.
It's become a common scene across the state, and it will repeat itself in the coming weeks and months because of the "last in, first out" teacher layoff policy, or LIFO. The policy requires school districts to look solely at the length of time a teacher has worked in the district when making layoff decisions, without any consideration of performance.
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The panelists charged with rewriting federal teacher-preparation rules faced a grueling day today during which major tension points emerged with little resolution, all of which served to call into question whether they will be able to reach consensus by Thursday.You don't have to take my word for it: During some of the breaks, I spoke to a handful of negotiators--they all, reasonably, wanted to speak on background since the process isn't finished yet--and by and large, they weren't optimistic:
"It seems doubtful." "Probably not good." "I don't know." "I think the answer is probably no."
If the panelists don't reach a final consensus, the U.S. Department of Education gets to go it alone when writing the regulations.
Some of the tensions that emerged today have been brewing under the surface for a while, but as of the last session, there at least seemed to be agreement on the Education Department's proposal to classify their teacher-preparation programs into four categories: "low performing," "at risk," effective," and "exceptional," based on a mix of input- and output-based measures.
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The Milwaukee Teachers Education Association (MTEA) Children's Week concept was a noble one. The idea was to have Milwaukee teachers, as well as high-profile business and community members, donate a week of their salary to the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). Union members, however, rejected the idea on a 2,296 to 1,635 vote.Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman's 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club.I call the effort noble for several reasons. First, it would have put a little more money into classrooms at a time when MPS' budget situation is dire. The district soon will be paying almost $50,000 per-employee in health care benefits for current employees and retirees. The legacy costs in particular are responsible for a perverse situation where MPS' per-pupil costs (over $14,000 according to DPI) far exceed what a classroom or school actually receives for education purposes. MTEA's proposed gesture would have at least given classrooms additional resources next year.
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I've always struggled with calculating students' participation grades. I have experimented with rubrics for students to fill out for themselves, or ways for them to track their participation grades daily or weekly. I've tried ditching it altogether and just grading students for distinct speaking activities.Often, I settle for making up a participation grade for each student at the end of the period. I tend to criticize myself for this imprecise method, but this time, I had an idea. What goes through my head when I "make up" this grade? I thought. If I could just find a way to put that down on paper for my students to understand...
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Omaha's new school superintendent is no stranger to controversy, having survived nepotism charges as the schools' chief in Des Moines.Nancy Sebring's tenure presiding over 31,000 Des Moines students since 2006 has been controversial at times - particularly when her twin sister was hired as director of Des Moines' first charter school 15 months ago.
Despite questions about how her sister got the job, Sebring has said she had nothing to do with an advisory board's decision. The charter school's launch has been rocky. It opened six months behind schedule and enrollment has not met projections, with 40 percent of students leaving its first year. The school has not provided quarterly reports as required and its budget is nearly twice as big as projected, according to the Des Moines Register.
Then 53 laptop computers were not returned by students last year, and the school was dinged by police for not tracking the computers, according to the Register. Despite calls for a new director, Sebring's sister remains in the job.
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During the 20th century, the American college held a vaunted position. It was the mark of a successful upbringing, and the launching pad from a bright childhood to a promising future. In the past few years, however, the idea of college seems to have lost its way. With rising tuition, the need to attain specialized knowledge earlier and earlier, and the massive funding cuts to state institutions, college has become more precarious, isolated and marginal. While undergraduate students will exceed a record 20 million within five years, only a small fraction will experience college in the traditional sense. Most will either attend online or vocational programs, and, at most, only 40 percent will get a degree -- and, on average, a college graduate will incur more than $25,000 in student debt. In his new book, "College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be," Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco acknowledges that the hour is late, but there's still time to save this valuable institution.By tracing the history of the American college back to its founding by Protestant congregations looking to fashion constructive members of the community, to its transition to forgotten parts of larger universities, Delbanco illustrates how fundamental college has been to the prosperity of the country. He laments the ways that colleges have ceased to make substantial attempts to offer an education to students of every socioeconomic background, and how more often than not, they just mirror the existing hierarchy. At times a history lesson, an elegy, and a call-to-arms, "College" looks to jump-start a discussion of the importance of a liberal arts education, and why Americans still need the time in life to contemplate a meaningful life.
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2011 WISCONSIN ACT 166, via a kind reader:
Section 21. 118.19 (14) of the statutes is created to read:Related:118.19 (14) (a) The department may not issue an initial teaching license that authorizes the holder to teach in grades kindergarten to 5 or in special education, an initial license as a reading teacher, or an initial license as a reading specialist, unless the applicant has passed an examination identical to the Foundations of Reading test administered in 2012 as part of the Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure [blekko]. The department shall set the passing cut score on the examination at a level no lower than the level recommended by the developer of the test, based on this state's standards.
(c) Any teacher who passes the examination under par. (a) shall notify the department, which shall add a notation to the teacher's license indicating that he or she passed the examination.
and....
115.28 (7g) Evaluation of teacher preparatory programs.
(a) The department shall, in consultation with the governor's office, the chairpersons of the committees in the assembly and senate whose subject matter is elementary and secondary education and ranking members of those committees, the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System, and the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, do all of the following:
1. Determine how the performance of individuals who have recently completed a teacher preparatory program described in s. 115.28 (7) (a) and located in this state or a teacher education program described in s. 115.28 (7) (e) 2. and located in this state will be used to evaluate the teacher preparatory and education programs. The determination under this subdivision shall, at minimum, define "recently completed" and identify measures to assess an individual's performance, including the performance assessment made prior to making a recommendation for licensure.
2. Determine how the measures of performance of individuals who have recently completed a teacher preparatory or education program identified as required under subd. 1. will be made accessible to the public.
3. Develop a system to publicly report the measures of performance identified as required under subd. 1. for each teacher preparatory and education program identified in subd. 1.
(b) Beginning in the 2013-14 school year, the department shall use the system developed under par. (a) 3. to annually report for each program identified in par. (a) 1. the passage rate on first attempt of students and graduates of the program on examinations administered for licensure under s. 115.28 (7) and any other information required to be reported under par. (a) 1.
(c) Beginning in the 2013-14 school year, each teacher preparatory and education program shall prominently display and annually update the passage rate on first attempt of recent graduates of the program on examinations administered for licensure under s. 115.28 (7) and any other information required to be reported under par. (a) 1. on the program's Web site and provide this information to persons receiving admissions materials to the program.
Section 18. 115.28 (12) (ag) of the statutes is created to read:
115.28 (12) (ag) Beginning in the 2012-13 school year, each school district using the system under par. (a) shall include in the system the following information for each teacher teaching in the school district who completed a teacher preparatory program described in sub. (7) (a) and located in this state or a teacher education program described in sub. (7) (e) 2. and located in this state on or after January 1, 2012:
1. The name of the teacher preparatory program or teacher education program the teacher attended and completed.
2. The term or semester and year in which the teacher completed the program described in subd. 1.
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Kaleem Caire, via a kind email:
Dear Friends & Colleagues.Related:
With one of the most competitive and expensive school board races in the history of the Madison Metropolitan School District now behind us, it is time for us to get to work on strengthening public education in our capital city and ensuring that every single one of our children have the schools and tools they need to succeed in education and in life.
We congratulate Mary Burke and Arlene Silveira for their success in securing three-year terms on the Madison Board of Education. They will bring significant experience and business acumen to the School Board. We also give great respect to their challengers, Nichelle Nichols and Michael Flores, for stepping up, taking a stand for children and ensuring that the voices of parents and children of color were front and center during the campaign. They ensured that the discussion remained focused on the alarming racial achievement gap that exists in our schools, and we deeply appreciate them for it.
As the Board of Education moves forward, we expect they will remain focused on our community's five greatest priorities: (1) eliminating the racial achievement gap; (2) establishing world class schools that attract enrollment and prepare all children to thrive and succeed in college and work after high school; (3) empowering parents and engaging them in their children's education; (4) developing a highly talented and skilled workforce that is more reflective of the students our school district now educates; and (5) aligning the District's employee handbook to the priorities, needs and goals of students, staff and schools.
The Board of Education can start by focusing their efforts on hiring an outstanding new Superintendent who possesses significant leadership skill/experience and business acumen, a proven track-record of successfully leading urban schools with significantly diverse student populations; and a strong, clear and compelling vision and plan for public education and our children's future.
Rather than deciding too quickly on approving an achievement gap plan that was rushed in its development, we hope the Board of Education will avoid getting too far ahead of the next Superintendent in implementing plans, and instead focus their attention on existing efforts where the District can make a difference in the next six months, such as:We look forward to working with YOU, the Board of Education, our community partners and the leadership of our public schools to implement immediate opportunities and solutions that will benefit our children TODAY.
- Implementing the Common Core Standards and related common curriculum in literacy, English/language arts and mathematics in all elementary schools in grades K-5 (to start), with additional learning support for students who are significantly behind or ahead academically;
- Re-establishing and aligning the District's Professional Development Program for all educators and support staff to the curriculum, standards and needs/interests of students;
- Implementing Wisconsin's new Educator Effectiveness evaluation and assessment program;
- Providing a full-time principal and adequate staffing for Badger Rock and Wright Middle Schools;
- Requiring greater collaboration and alignment between the District's safety-net, student-support programs such as Schools of Hope, AVID/TOPS, Juventud/ASPIRA, PEOPLE/ITA Program and ACT Prep Academies to ensure more effective and seamless identification, support and progress monitoring of students who need or are enrolled in these programs;
- Partnering with local businesses, educational institutions and community organizations to recruit, hire, acclimate and retain a diverse workforce, and appropriately assign all staff to schools according to their skills and interests and the needs of students;
- Engaging parents more effectively in the education of their children through community partnerships; and
- Partnering with the United Way, Urban League, Boys & Girls Club, Centro Hispano, Hmong Education Council and other agencies to effectively build awareness and educate the community about local and national best practices for eliminating the achievement gap and preparing all youth for college and work.
Onward!
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Phone: 608-729-1200
Assistant: 608-729-1249
Fax: 608-729-1205
www.ulgm.org
Thanks to the four citizens who ran.
The Silveira/Nichols race was interesting in that it was the first competitive school board election involving an incumbent in some time. Lawrie Kobza and Lucy Mathiak defeated incumbent candidates during the mid-2000's. Perhaps the "success recipe" requires that the insurgent candidate have a strong local network, substantive issues and the ability to get the word out, effectively.
Arlene is a different incumbent than those defeated by Kobza & Mathiak.
That said, she has been on the board for six years, a time during which little, if any progress was made on the MMSD's core mission: reading, writing, math and science, while spending more per student than most Districts. Perhaps the Superintendent's looming departure offers an opportunity to address the core curricular issues.
I wish the new board well and congratulate Mary and Arlene on their victories.
Paraphrasing a friend, it is never too early to run for the School Board. Three seats are up in 2013, those currently occupied by Maya Cole, James Howard and Beth Moss.
A reader emailed a link to this M.P. King photo:
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Chinese students are increasingly heading to western universities for both undergraduate and postgraduate educationDu Jinxiu is only 16, but she knows exactly what she wants - to go to university overseas after she finishes secondary school in China.
"I am going to study actuarial science at Wharton Business School," says the girl, one of 30 in a special class created by Shijiazhuang's No 42 Middle School, for those who want to study abroad.
Jiao Bowen, one of her classmates, has his sights set on film school in Los Angeles, while Li Ying is determined to study in the UK because she loves Pride and Prejudice.
The Communist party is preparing to hand its leadership reins to a group of men who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, when higher education was demonised and exchanges with the west were cut. But now, just as the top echelons of the party battle over whether to continue down a path of reform, China's youth are voting with their feet and getting western educations in rapidly rising numbers, possibly setting the stage for a fundamental shift in values as they return home.
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An eleven-year-old Dutch boy has stolen the limelight in a UK-organised prize competition on breaking up the eurozone with a scribbled cartoon scheme for ejecting Greece that seemed at least as plausible as some proposals by his grown-up rivals.Jurre Hermans was awarded a special €100 gift voucher for his pictorial plans in the Wolfson Economics Prize, which invited economists to propose the best ways of dismantling Europe's 13-year old monetary union.
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This spring, Hal David, principal at Cedartown High School in northwest Georgia, has spent a lot of time thinking about evening gowns."Unacceptable," he has labeled some dresses shown on posters plastered in the hallways to publicize the school's first dress code for prom. The signs also show styles deemed "acceptable" for the event, set for April 21 at the local country club. "It's a picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words kind of deal," says Mr. David. "We don't want somebody to spend a lot of money on a dress and then show up and there be an issue."
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Last Wednesday, the New York City Department of Education (DoE) began holding public meetings for the 33 Transformation and Restart Schools that Mayor Bloomberg announced he would close in his State of the City speech. At the start of each meeting, a Deputy Chancellor reads out a prepared script which purportedly makes the case for closure. For 19 of those 33 schools, nearly 3 in 5, there is a glaring omission in the Orwellian accounts of their "deficiencies": these schools do not meet the DoE's own well-established standards for closure.When the Scho0l Progress Reports were introduced five years ago, the NYC DoE decreed that the decision on whether or not to close a school would be henceforth be made on the basis of the school's grade. Only those schools which received a "failing grade" -- 'F,' 'D' or three consecutive 'C's -- would be considered for closing. That scale cut a remarkably wide swath, as the Bloomberg-Klein DoE wanted an ample supply of schools to close: where else would consecutive 'C's constitute a failing grade? But whatever else you could say about this policy, it was a fixed and clear standard. Even when the DoE announced that it would grade elementary schools and middle schools on a curve, as too many were scoring 'A's and 'B's, it still held to this standard. (Since 85% of the grades for elementary and middle schools were derived from student scores on New York State's standardized ELA and Math exams, school grades rocketed during the period of grade inflation on those exams.)
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State money spent on education should "follow the student" and not an institution, according to the argument often voiced by supporters of Gov. Bobby Jindal's bill enabling the state to pay private school tuition for some students who want out of low-quality public schools. Critics of the Jindal-backed tuition voucher legislation, however, say there's a problem: Some of the money following that student is local money, approved by local voters for their local public schools.They say that's an issue that could wind up in court.
The Jindal administration says the issue was cleared up with an amendment when the House approved the bill, but the matter arose again this past week during a Senate Education Committee hearing. It could spark more arguments Monday when the Senate Finance Committee discusses the measure.
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That quote just had to be a headline. It's from Louisiana's state superintendent of education, John White, responding this week in the Baton Rouge Advocate to letters from teachers complaining about ed reform. Sometimes an op-ed is worth printing word for word:The Advocate has recently published several letters to the editor on public education. I have to say as an educator, I'm disappointed with the prevailing tone and content of those letters opposing change.Here are some passages that illustrate a common thread:
"We, the public school teachers of East Baton Rouge schools, can't educate children who don't want to be educated. We can't educate children whose parents don't care and are not involved."
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As many know, the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) came onto the scene between 2006 and 2009, but got greater momentum when adopting the still-under-development standards became a criterion for states seeking grant funding under the US DOE's Race to the Top contest in 2009-10.Similar pushes for national standards, driven by various DC-based trade organizations, including Marc Tucker's National Center on Education and the Economy, the Council of Chief State School Officers, the National Governors Association, and Clinton administration education officials who later migrated to Achieve, Inc., had been attempted in the 1990s and failed.
This recent drive for national standards reinvigorated a collection of unsuccessful DC-based players; and was fueled by more than $100 million from the Gates Foundation. A few years ago, I blogged on the Common Core convergence. Since then, it's become increasingly clear that the push for national standards is an illegal, costly, and academically weak effort by D.C. trade groups, the Gates Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education to impose a one-size-fits-all set of standards and tests on the country. And the effort goes beyond that: With the tests come curricular materials and instructional practice guides.
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When the first expansion of a grammar school in more than half a century was approved last week, the result surprised even those parents who had fought so hard to achieve it.A campaign in the Kent commuter town of Sevenoaks, which has no grammar school of its own, to provide for its brightest children had raised a petition of 2,600 names.
At present 1,120 of the town's children have to travel to selective schools in nearby towns. The county council's decision means an annexe associated with these schools can be built in Sevenoaks. "People power is alive and well," said Mike Whiting, the Tory county councillor in charge of education in Kent.
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Martin West and Guido Schwerdt, via a kind Brian S. Hall email:
As compared to students in K-8 elementary schools, middle school students also score lower on achievement tests. Losses amount to as much as 3.5 to 7 months of learning.The paper can be viewed here.A new study of statewide data from all Florida public schools finds that moving to a middle school in grade 6 or 7 causes a substantial drop in student test scores relative to those of students who remain in K-8 schools, and increases the likelihood of dropping out of high school.
In the past ten years, urban school districts such as New York City, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Charlotte-Mecklenburg have reorganized some middle schools along the once-prevalent K-8 model. The study's findings support these school conversions and "are also relevant to the expanding charter school sector, which has the opportunity to choose grade configurations" when schools are established. An article presenting the research, "The Middle School Plunge: Achievement tumbles when young students change schools," is available at www.educationnext.org and will appear in the Spring, 2012 issue of Education Next.
Data on state math and reading test scores for all Florida students attending public schools in grades 3 to 10 from the 2000-01 through 2008-09 years were analyzed. The researchers also conducted a test-score analysis separately for schools in Miami-Dade County, which is Florida's largest district (345,000 students) and offers a wide range of grade configurations up through grade 8. They find that "the negative effects of entering a middle school for grade 6 or grade 7 are, if anything, even more pronounced in Miami-Dade County than they are statewide."
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I've had 4 years of undergraduate math courses, two years of graduate math courses, and I have taught graduate level math courses. I had never seen the "lattice" method, the Egyptian method, or any of these other alternative algorithms until last year when I looked at Everyday Math homework. Students don't need them, and those methods will not help a student move onto higher mathematics.I would have been laughed out of my college classes if I used the "partial sums" method to add. I wouldn't have been able to take differential equations if I hadn't mastered long division. There is a reason why traditional algorithms (the math methods you learned in school to add, subtract, multiply and divide) are needed. Traditional algorithms are needed to understand higher mathematics in college. It is extremely important that they are practiced until they are mastered. In fact, the new Common Core State math standards recommend teaching the standard algorithms.
You might think there is no reason not to offer alternative algorithms, as long as they also teach the traditional methods, but I have three reasons why the teaching of alternative programs is a problem.
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"When I was younger," a remarkably self-assured, soft-spoken 15-year-old kid named Aaron tells the camera, "I suffered from bullying because of my lips--as you can see, they're kind of unusually large. So I would kind of get [called] 'Fish Lips'--things like that a lot--and my glasses too, I got those at an early age. That contributed. And the fact that my last name is Cheese didn't really help with the matter either. I would get [called] 'Cheeseburger,' 'Cheese Guy'--things like that, that weren't really very flattering. Just kind of making fun of my name--I'm a pretty sensitive kid, so I would have to fight back the tears when I was being called names."It's hard not to be impressed with--and not to like--young Aaron Cheese. He is one of the kids featured in the new Cartoon Network special "Stop Bullying: Speak Up," which premiered last week and is available online. I myself am a former geekish, bespectacled child whose lips were a bit too full, and my first name (as other kids quickly discovered) rhymes with two of the most-popular slang terms for male genitalia, so I also identified with Mr. Cheese. My younger years were filled with precisely the sort of schoolyard taunts that he recounts; they led ultimately to at least one fistfight and a lot of sour moods on my part.
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If you were going by the current public relations efforts from Connecticut's teacher unions or charter school advocates, you would either think that charter schools are union-busting, anti-labor bastions, or that teacher unions are the biggest obstacle to education reform. But that's not the case at two schools in southeastern Connecticut, where charter school teachers are themselves union members.At both New London's Interdistrict School for Arts and Communication (ISAAC) and Norwich's Integrated Day Charter School (IDCS), the school's teachers are part of a union affiliated with the Connecticut Education Association.
ISAAC's teachers joined the CEA in 2005, eight years after opening. IDCS opened in 1997 and at the time was one of only six charter schools in the country endorsed by the National Education Association, the national affiliate of the CEA.
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As we begin the month of April, people all over the United States are eagerly anticipating the arrival of Spring; a time for renewal and starting over. Although the winter in the East was milder than in winters past, just the sensibility of not feeling trapped indoors is enough to inspire anyone.The Wait
For high school seniors, it's probably one of the most important times of their lives; a time for starting over as high school draws to a close and plans are made for what comes next. For those who want to attend college, it's around now that most letters of acceptance or decline have been sent and decisions need to be made. For those top performers, with entrance exams and grade point average considerations, it usually is a decision among several of their choice colleges.
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To what degree is academic freedom being geographically unsettled - deterritorialized, more accurately - in the context of the globalization of higher education? This was one of the issues I was asked about a few days ago when I spoke to a class of New York-based Columbia University students about the globalization of higher education, with a brief case study about Singapore's global higher education hub development agenda. Some of the students were intrigued by this debate erupting (again) about Yale's involvement in Yale-NUS College:
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If you thought my column two weeks ago about a struggling fifth-grader was an indictment of the Prince George's County school system, please read the flood of comments to my blog about that.The issue I discussed -- some teachers being unable or unwilling to help a bright child with a learning disability -- is not a Prince George's problem, the responses show. It is every district's problem.
If that is not the case, then why were there so many complaints about insensitive teachers from Montgomery County, which unlike Prince George's is one of the wealthiest and highest-performing districts in the country? One Montgomery mother said the staff members at her daughter's high school forgot their own promises and a psychologist's recommendation to give the girl reminders when assignments were due. "They wouldn't implement a plan for her because her test scores were too high," the mother said.
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EVERYBODY'S got a hungry heart," Bruce Springsteen sings. Really? Is that so? At the risk of offending the Boss, I want to register some doubts.Granted my human sample is not large -- but it's not so small either. I've been teaching now for 35 years and in that time have had about 4,000 students pass my desk. I'm willing to testify: Not all students have hungry hearts. Some do, some don't, and having a hungry heart (or not) is what makes all the difference for a young person seeking an education.
There's been a lot of talk lately about who should go to college and who should not. And the terms that have guided this talk have mainly been economic. Is college a good investment? Does it pay for a guy who is probably going to become a car mechanic to spend $20,000 to $30,000 going to a junior college for a couple of years? (I'm including the cost of room and board here.) He's probably going to leave with a pile of debt that will take him years to work off. What's more, the current thinking goes, he didn't need that associate degree to end up with his job in the garage. Something similar is true for the young person who is going to become a flight attendant, a home health care aide, a limo driver or a personal security guard. It's not a good investment, we're told. It's not the right way to spend your dough.
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Madison schools' Superintendent Dan Nerad's announcement that he will resign by June 2013 has given the April 3 School Board election new meaning. In addition to addressing the achievement gap and educational budget cuts, the Board will also be responsible for hiring Nerad's replacement. Madison Commons talked to the four candidates to find out what makes them uniquely qualified for the position, and how they plan to tackle the problems facing the district.Seat 1 Candidates:
Nichelle Nichols
www.nichols4schoolboard.org
email: nnichols4mmsd@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira (incumbent)
www.arleneforschoolboard.com
email: arlene_Silveira@yahoo.com
Seat 2 Candidates:
Mary Burke
www.maryburkeforschoolboard.net
email: maryburkewi@gmail.com
Michael Flores
www.floresforschoolboard.org
email: floresm1977@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira & Michael Flores Madison Teachers, Inc. Candidate Q & A
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Tonight Madison School Board candidates are making a last minute push for votes.Seat 1 Candidates:4 people are battling for 2 seats with some big decisions looming.
Candidate Nichelle Nichols says, "I think it's really important that people are paying attention."
It is a much different political world in Madison than we've seen in years past.
Incumbent Arlene Silveira says, "I've never seen quite this much attention before but I think it's great"
At this point the arguments are coming fast and furious.
Candidate Mary Burke says, "I sort of have about 20 years more of experience."
Silveira says, "I think I'm the candidate who has actually made changes."
Nichols says, "I don't know that the incumbent is always as honest about areas where we need to improve."
One of the two battles is between incumbent and 6 year board member Silveira and newcomer Nichols.
Silveira says her experience is important.
Nichelle Nichols
www.nichols4schoolboard.org
email: nnichols4mmsd@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira (incumbent)
www.arleneforschoolboard.com
email: arlene_Silveira@yahoo.com
Seat 2 Candidates:
Mary Burke
www.maryburkeforschoolboard.net
email: maryburkewi@gmail.com
Michael Flores
www.floresforschoolboard.org
email: floresm1977@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira & Michael Flores Madison Teachers, Inc. Candidate Q & A
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The educators' biases have held sway for decades. But a new coalition is trying to find a way to make sure prospective teachers have some instruction in what decoding strategies are and why they are effective.Related:The latest action has been in Wisconsin. The state Legislature passed a bill that will help ensure that teachers no longer receive inadequate training in their preparation and professional development. The Wisconsin Reading Coalition, the Wisconsin branch of the International Dyslexia Association, and a group of parents, educators, psychologists and other professionals supported the measure. I was among the many experts submitting testimony for it.
The group had begun looking carefully at beginning instruction after noting Wisconsin children's stagnant reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, and comparing those results with the scores in Massachusetts.
Why Massachusetts? Because children there are doing better than pupils in most other states on reading tests.
.......
As noted by Kathleen Porter-Magee in a 2012 Fordham Institute analysis of the impact of high standards on student achievement, the 2009 NAEP reading tests showed that "students scoring in Massachusetts's bottom 25 percent score higher than students in the bottom 25 percent of any other state in the nation. And students scoring in the top 25 percent perform better than students in the top 25 percent of any other state."
She attributed this performance to the effective implementation of its highly rated English-language-arts standards, first adopted in 1997 and then re-adopted in a slightly revised form in 2001.
But the Wisconsinites zeroed in on a more specific explanation for the Massachusetts results: the state's licensing test, in place since 2002, for all aspiring teachers of elementary-age children. The content of the test includes knowledge of code-based beginning-reading instruction.
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Dean Anderson in support of Nichelle Nichols:
We need nothing short of wholesale change in the Madison public schools. In a city full of well-educated, so-called progressives, the graduation rate for blacks and Latinos should be considered an embarrassment.If education is to be both a civil right and a social justice issue, we need to treat it as such.
The only real power voters have lies with School Board elections.
Please send a clear message to the school district power brokers by voting for Nichelle Nichols. She will stand up for all students and bring hope back to the school district.
Bob and Nan Brien in support of Arlene Silveira:
Trusted leadership is needed now, more than ever, on the Madison School Board. Arlene Silveira has provided, and will continue to provide, that leadership.Under her direction, this community passed a $13 million referendum, with two-thirds of voters approving, to allow the district to weather significant cuts in state aid without devastating programs.
Silveira spearheaded efforts to begin early education for all Madison youngsters, and made sure federal dollars offset the cost for local property taxpayers.
She knows that a significant effort must be directed at improving graduation rates for all Madison students, that our highest achieving students must be challenged, and this all must be accomplished while respecting taxpayers.
Silveira is a leader we can trust to move the district forward. And she will do so in collaboration with the city, county and community organizations like the United Way (Schools of Hope) and Dane County Boys and Girls Club (AVID/TOPS).
David Leeper in support of Mary Burke:
I started school at Randall School in 1958. My family moved to Madison in large part because of its excellent schools. My three children have benefited from Madison's public schools, and my wife is currently teaching there.We are facing a serious crisis in our public schools. Mary Burke recognizes this crisis. She has the courage to name this crisis, and has put in countless volunteer hours for the last decade seeking to address it.
Madison needs the hard work and strategic planning experience that Burke will bring to the Madison School Board. Goodwill and genuine concern are important, but they are not enough. Madison's schools need dynamic leadership to go beyond this crisis to a better day. Mary Burke can provide that leadership.
Karen Vieth in support of Michael Flores:
Recently, my Saturdays have been spent meeting with people with the common vision of electing Michael Flores to the Madison School Board. We are amateurs, but that doesn't stop the level of inspiration.Flores' campaign has been a feet-on-the-ground, coffee-at-the-kitchen-table, grassroots campaign.
This is one way I fight for our public schools. I do it because I believe Flores can unite our community and empower our students.
I was shocked when I learned that Mary Burke had spent $28,000 on her campaign. That parallels how much I made my first year teaching.
This makes one difference very clear -- Burke has put forth financial resources to get her word out to the community. Meanwhile, Flores' campaign has come from the heart of our community.
Michael Flores is the change we need on our Madison School Board.
Seat 1 Candidates:
Nichelle Nichols
www.nichols4schoolboard.org
email: nnichols4mmsd@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira (incumbent)
www.arleneforschoolboard.com
email: arlene_Silveira@yahoo.com
Seat 2 Candidates:
Mary Burke
www.maryburkeforschoolboard.net
email: maryburkewi@gmail.com
Michael Flores
www.floresforschoolboard.org
email: floresm1977@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira & Michael Flores Madison Teachers, Inc. Candidate Q & A
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In 2010, just five black and 13 Hispanic graduating seniors in the Madison Metropolitan School District were ready for college, according to data from the district and Urban League of Greater Madison. These statistics should make your heart race. If they don't, and you're white, you may be suffering from what anti-racism educator Tim Wise calls "the pathology of white privilege." If you do get it and don't take action, that is almost worse.Related:The issue affects all of us and fell a little harder into my lap than it does in most white middle-class families when my daughter told me last summer that I was going to have a biracial grandson. My response? "Not in this school district."
The dismal academic record of minorities has long been apparent to me, through my own experiences and the stories of others. But many people only hear about the statistics. To help humanize these numbers I asked students and parents who are most affected to share their stories so I could tell them along with mine. The experiences are anecdotal, but the facts speak for themselves.
Overall student performance improved in math and dipped slightly in reading across Wisconsin compared with last year, while in Madison scores declined in all tested subjects.Perhaps change is indeed coming, from a state level initiative on reading.
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Zhang Yonghong sits on the floor of a busy Beijing subway, a few thin cushions his only protection from the cold ground. Surrounded by hundreds of paper cuttings, he leans forward with a knife, his face creased with concentration. He carefully carves folk images out of a piece of bright red paper. Zhang is 38 years old but no taller than a toddler, the result of a condition the Chinese call the glass doll disease, so-named because sufferers have bones that break easily and they are generally shorter than normal. Unable to walk and confined to a wheelchair, Zhang struggles to make a living selling his artwork, spending his days on the streets of Beijing battling hot, humid summers and bitingly cold winters, and the ever-vigilant Urban Management Corps, a unit whose job it is to keep people such as Zhang out of sight.On this bitterly cold day, Zhang is wearing a pair of children's padded pyjamas and several layers of jumpers. His Sponge Bob backpack sits at his side. People stop to glance at the handicapped man's artwork, some buying a few pieces, others dropping small bills into a red donation box. Many stare at a large plastic sheet on the floor which tells the story of the Shaanxi province native and includes a picture of his four-year-old daughter, Tianyu, who suffers from the same disease. Also on display are Zhang's recent divorce papers - his wife ran off with another man. In the photo, the little girl lies on a bed crying, casts on one of her arms and a leg. A headline proclaims: "I use my skills to save my daughter."
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About 50 high school students at Frederick Douglass Academy in Detroit were suspended Thursday after walking out of classes to protest a host of issues at the all-boys school.More, here.The concerns included a lack of consistent teachers and the removal of the principal.
The boys, dressed in school blazers, neckties and hoodies, chanted, "We want education!" as they marched outside the school.
Parents organized the walkout because they fear for the school's future. As recently as last month, students spent weeks passing time in the gym, library or cafeteria due to a lack of teachers, parents said.
Worries escalated after district offices moved into part of the building in January, and the school was not listed as an application school for next year. Current students had to apply to attend Douglass.q
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So what was new in all the data released last week summarizing results of the standardized tests, known as the WKCEs, that were taken last fall by more than 400,000 students from Kenosha to Superior?Related:Not much.
Some things a little better, most things the same, the state of meeting our educational needs pretty much unchanged.
But for every answer like that, I have a dozen questions (and lots of sub-questions).
Here they are:
1. Do we have the patience to pursue solid, significant improvement in how our students are doing?
The highflying schools I know of all took years to reach the heights.
Are we willing to do the steady, thoughtful work of building quality and resist the rapidly revolving carousel of education fads?
2. Do we have the impatience to pursue solid, significant improvement in how our students are doing?
At the same time we've got to be steady, we've got to be propelled by the urgency of improving.
Especially outside of Milwaukee, an awful lot of people are complacent about how Wisconsin's kids are doing, and that complacency is often not well justified.
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Instead of saving up for their sons' college education, Bill Dunham and his wife are taking out loans for high school. Their eldest son will begin ninth grade at a school in Boston where annual tuition runs around $10,000 -- and they already pay $5,000 a year for their younger child. A project manager for a mechanical construction company, Dunham says the schools referred him to lenders who specialize in pre-college education loans. He's taking a loan to cover his son's full high school tuition, which he plans to repay over two years. "If we had the money, we'd pay it now," he says.
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Minnesota lawmakers are considering a bill that would give school districts the choice to start the academic year before Labor Day, a measure that has sparked a perennial debate over whether an early school start hurts tourism.Minnesota is one of a handful of states that, in most cases, doesn't allow schools to start classes before Labor Day. The long summer is a hit with Minnesota businesses that depend on late-summer trips by families.
Keith and Cherste Eidman, for example, take their active family on at least one week-long Minnesota camping trip every summer.
Their children -- 11-year old Martha, 9-year old Sophie and Spencer, 6 -- also take part in a number of day camps during the summer months.
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Public charter schools are a key to closing the achievement gap between urban and suburban schools, so it's no wonder that Gov.Dannel P. Malloyhad proposed increasing funding for charters in his education reform bill this year.Unfortunately, the legislature's education committee, apparently at the beck and call of teacher unions, has voted to dial back the increases.
The vote was yet another attempt by majority Democrats to rally around the status quo -- at the expense of students who deserve better.
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The push to raise achievement for minority and low-income students in Madison Metropolitan School District remains "a work in progress," said Superintendent Daniel Nerad.Related:Work has been done on Nerad's watch, such as drafting a new strategic plan and a multifaceted, $106 million proposal for programs aimed at shrinking test score gaps between students of different races and income levels.
As for results, Nerad and Madison school board member Ed Hughes say there hasn't been enough progress.
"We certainly haven't seen, overall, the kind of improvement that we would like to see in reducing the achievement gap," Hughes said. "But we need to look at whether the steps are being put in place that would give us some hope or confidence that we will see those gaps narrowing in the future."
Hughes thinks Madison is on the right track.
Overall student performance improved in math and dipped slightly in reading across Wisconsin compared with last year, while in Madison scores declined in all tested subjects.Perhaps change is indeed coming, from a state level initiative on reading.
A look at the numbers:
Omaha spends substantially less per student than Madison. The Omaha 2011-2012 adopted budget will spend 468,946,264 for 46,000 students: $10,194.48/student. Madison's 2011-2012 budget spends $369,394,753 for 24,861 = $14,858.40/student, 31.4% more than Omaha.... Green Bay (Superintendent Nerad's former position) spent about 10% less than Madison, per student.
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Our K-12 system has been overly centralized for some time. I asked the three 2008 Madison Superintendent candidates if they planned to continue on this path, or simply focus on hiring the best teachers and let them teach...."If your goal is innovation and competitive ability, you don't want either excessive unity or excessive fragmentation. Instead, you want your country, industry, industrial belt, or company to be broken up into groups that compete with one another while maintaining relatively free communication--like the U.S. federal government system, with its built-in competition [among] our 50 states." -- Jared DiamondJared Diamond reaches this conclusion in the 2003 Afterword to his magisterial analysis of the evolution of human societies, "Guns, Germs, and Steel." Diamond argues that a primary reason that Europe and China proceeded along different developmental lines followed from their relative degree of central organization. China, due to a friendly geographic layout, was able to become consolidated as a political entity under unified rule. Europe, in contrast, was broken up by its terrain to create smaller, more competitive states.To Diamond, the political fragmentation of Europe produced greater innovation as states competed for goods and power, even as transportation routes opened up avenues of exchange and communication. China, in contrast, operated according to a chain-of-command that suppressed innovation in service of conformity to a broad, centrally administered national culture. These two political orientations led to very different degrees of technological advance and its consequences, with the more competitive social arrangement producing the circumstances most conducive to invention and advantage.
Of course, teachers must have content knowledge.
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Today's Washington Post front pager on some realignment among urban mayors, teachers unions, and ed reform is the kind of article (and situation) that a decade or 15 years ago just a few were saying was on the horizon. But still a long way to go. Politically the big problems that I see are twofold. First, this is a hard conversation for union leaders to have. For every sensible statement like Randi Weingarten's in today's article:"We have made mistakes," [AFT President Randi Weingarten] said. "You have to really focus to make sure you're doing everything you can so that kids are first. Tenure, for example. Make sure tenure is about fairness and make sure it's not a shield for incompetence."There is another example of her, or someone else, denying these issues and calling the whole thing a right-wing plot, "so called reformers" etc...That speaks to the challenge of moving large organizations along - especially in a contentious time. But, second, it also speaks to how polarized our national debate about education (and most things) is. There are very few places you can go and have a conversation that allows for the political space to acknowledge two things that are true today and fuel these politics. First the unions need to mend their ways and change some key policy positions. Second, there are people who just want to do unions in and for whom this isn't fundamentally about policy.
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On this lazy Saturday I've been browsing the internet and in my search came across "The Greatest Story Ever Written." You see, a foolhardy college professor had his students write a "tandem story." Pairing them up randomly he had them write a story together, one paragraph at a time, via email. Rebecca and Bill's story, which is the "Greatest Story Ever Written," is particularly disastrous and hilarious (you should definitely read it!). It reminded me of the worst creative writing class I've ever taken (yep, with the same teacher who made me answer three pages of pointless questions about an already published short story).It was my senior year of high school. I'd already taken Creative Writing once before, my sophomore year with Ms. Hosner. Her class was amazing. I grew so much as a writer and felt that taking her class once again could only improve my writing more. But the idiots who decided who taught what classes had given Creative Writing to another teacher (who I'll leave unnamed to avoid libel). Her creative writing class was a complete waste of time in every way. The greatest offense, of her many offenses, is that she was continually making us do group assignments. Group Creative Writing? That's right.
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A conversation over lunch with the violinist Leonidas Kavakos - maybe Greece's most gifted classical performer since Maria Callas - made me reflect more generally on the relationship between Greece and gifts. The most famous saying about Greeks and gifts is of course the line from Virgil's Aeneid, "I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts" (timeo Danaos et dona ferentes), but nowadays this might be reversed. The Greeks have good reason to fear the gifts in the form of bail-outs - designed to bail out creditors, not Greek citizens - that have reduced the country to a province in the European empire controlled, at least as to its purse strings, by Germany.But Kavakos is not disposed to self-pity à la Grecque. He seems a rather tough-minded character who believes Greeks deserve much of the punishment they are getting. What he finds most unforgivable is the way Greece, or its political class, has betrayed its incomparable legacy of culture, philosophy and art. He reserved especial scorn for a certain Greek politician who decreed that the Greek language should be reduced from 6m words to 600,000. That was an entirely avoidable form of self-impoverishment.
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Gil Kessler, self-described math enthusiast, always carries a four-color ballpoint pen. A former math teacher, he has found the pen to be a helpful tool in channeling his love for numbers and symbols."I tell the kids at the very beginning, 'Anything we do, you can write in your notebooks in black or blue,'" he said. "'But if it's really interesting, use red. And if it's unbelievably interesting, then use green.'"
Mr. Kessler taught math in New York City schools for 30 years, first at Seward Park High School on the Lower East Side, then at South Shore High School in Canarsie, Brooklyn, and finally at Canarsie High School. All the schools are now closed.
At 75, he is now retired. And when he's not making up new math problems, playing classical piano or square dancing -- one of his hobbies -- he conducts math workshops for fellow teachers as part of the New York Math Circle, a non-profit organization that holds courses for both teachers and students. Most classes are held at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.
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In case you have not been paying attention, the mayor is vowing to dismantle about 30 school communities for reasons that pretty much no one can figure out. In fact, things have reached such a level of absurdity in New York that there are very few New Yorkers who actually believe that the campaign against our schools has anything to do with "school quality" or a desire to make things better for at-risk kids.I mention this because in the face of such a situation, it seems ridiculous for me to continue my private crusade to correct the DOE's misrepresentations about the schools that close and the new ones that rise up in their midst. The DOE mask, truly, is off. Still, even though no one in New York believes the mayor, New York City mayors often have national ambitions. It can't hurt to set the record straight.
So, let's look at a few big old schools and the new ones that replaced them in the same building. In particular let's look at the schools' comparative reading levels and comparative math. Until very recently, I didn't have these files, and until very recently I didn't think about same-building schools (called campus schools) too much, either. But then, the DOE made an inaccurate and unsupported claim about one of these campuses, and a few weeks later, Communities for Change set the record straight. The DOE's claim was the usual one ("similar" kids, astronomically better results). But the report from Communities for Change, showed that campus schools across the city were serving much lower concentrations of high-need special education students than the schools that they replaced. Before the old Seward shut down, for example, the concentration of self-contained students was 9%. In 2011, the new campus schools served 0%. Seward Park campus is in Manhattan, and the new schools earned As and Bs.
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Scores of professors and researchers from 16 universities throughout the Chicago metropolitan area have signed an open letter to the city's mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and Chicago school officials warning against implementing a teacher evaluation system that is based on standardized test scores.This is the latest protest against "value-added" teacher evaluation models that purport to measure how much "value" a teacher adds to a student's academic progress by using a complicated formula involving a standardized test score.
Researchers have repeatedly warned against using these methods, but school reformers have been doing it in state after state anyway. A petition in New York State by principals and others against a test-based evaluation system there has been gaining ground.
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President Obama is a snob for insisting higher education should be everyone's goal. Some of us blame high-school dropout rates on students tuning out the pro-college assemblies and loudspeaker announcements.It was that way in 1943 when an Army survey found that only 7 percent of enlisted men expected to go back to school full-time after the war and only 17 percent wanted to go part-time. Even when the new G.I. Bill -- the most generous education law ever passed -- began paying full tuition and some living expenses, few seemed interested. Only 15,000 veterans were using it 15 months after it passed.
The Saturday Evening Post declared it a failure, said Suzanne Mettler, in her book "Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation." The magazine said: "The guys aren't buying it. They say 'education' means 'books,' any way you slice it, and that's for somebody else."
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