| School Information System |
 | Sponsorships |
|
|
Madison School District 600K PDF:.
I recently attended the third annual update to the 2009 Madison School District Strategic Plan. You can follow the process via these notes and links.
I thought it might be useful to share a few observations on our local public schools during this process:
Less than 24 hours after I attended the MMSD's Strategic Plan update, I, through a variety of circumstances, visited one of Milwaukee's highest performing private/voucher schools, a school with more than 90% low income students. The petri dish that is Milwaukee will produce a far more robust and effective set of schools over the next few decades than the present monolithic approach favored here. More about that visit, soon.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The substitution of technology (which is cheap) for labor (which is expensive) can vastly increase access to an elite-caliber education.At the recent news conference announcing edX, a $60 million Harvard-MIT partnership in online education, university leaders spoke of reaching millions of new students in India, China and around the globe. They talked of the "revolutionary" potential of online learning, hailing it as the "single biggest change in education since the printing press."
Heady talk indeed, but they are right. The nation, and the world, are in the early stages of a historic transformation in how students learn, teachers teach, and schools and school systems are organized.
These same university leaders mentioned the limits of edX itself. Its online courses would not lead to Harvard or MIT degrees, they noted, and were no substitute for the centuries-old residential education of their hallowed institutions. They also acknowledged that the initiative, which offers free online courses prepared by some of the nation's top professors, is paid for by university funds--and that there is no revenue stream and no business plan to sustain it.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Haeyound Park, via a kind Rick Kiley email
College graduates are more unevenly distributed in the top 100 metropolitan areas now than they were four decades ago. More adults have bachelor's degrees, but the difference between the most and least educated metro areas is double what it was in 1970. Full List of Metro Areas:Related: Adults With College Degrees in the United States, by County.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Let's say we were trying to evaluate a teacher's performance for this academic year, and part of that evaluation would use students' test scores (if you object to using test scores this way, put that aside for a moment). We checked the data and reached two conclusions. First, we found that her students made fantastic progress this year. Second, we also saw that the students' scores were still quite a bit lower than their peers' in the district. Which measure should we use to evaluate this teacher?Would we consider judging her even partially based on the latter - students' average scores? Of course not. Those students made huge progress, and the only reason their absolute performance levels are relatively low is because they were low at the beginning of the year. This teacher could not control the fact that she was assigned lower-scoring students. All she can do is make sure that they improve. That's why no teacher evaluation system places any importance on students' absolute performance, instead focusing on growth (and, of course, non-test measures). In fact, growth models control for absolute performance (prior year's test scores) so it doesn't bias the results.
If we would never judge teachers based on absolute performance, why are we judging schools that way? Why does virtually every school/district rating system place some emphasis - often the primary emphasis - on absolute performance?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
More than half of the young children in the U.S. now have access to an iPad, iPhone or similar touch-screen device. For parents, their children's love of these devices raises a lot of questions.Kids for years have sat too close to the television for too long or played hours of Madden on family room game players. But pediatric neuroscientists and researchers who have studied the effects of screen-time on children suggest the iPad is a different beast.
A young child will look away from a TV screen 150 times an hour, says Daniel Anderson, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Massachusetts. His studies over the past 30 years also showed children have trouble knowing where on a TV screen to look.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The number of Steiner schools is set to expand, thanks to state funding via the coalition's 'free schools' policy. Their alternative approach is appealing, but do they offer a rounded education?The school run resembles the exodus from a festival. There are vans with hippyish bumper stickers - Homeopathy Heals, says one - bouncing down a track to the sprawling car park, where women in ponchos hug their babies and chat.
Inside the Steiner Academy Hereford, which occupies a renovated Victorian school and converted farm buildings in the village of Much Dewchurch, it's a picture of pastoral charm. There's a babbling water feature in a courtyard lined with potted shrubs, and a pleasingly old-fashioned wooden staircase leading up to classrooms.
The kindergarten is just that - a triangular garden fringed with pine, apple and cherry trees laden with blossom where children in woolly hats sit on the ground making mud pies.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Wisconsin DPI Connected email:
Wisconsin’s alignment of Teaching Channel videos to new mathematics standards is so useful it’s being recommended on the national level.For each of the eight skills of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematical Practice, the creators of DPI’s Mathematical Literacy website found at least one video to help teachers visualize how to address it in their classrooms.
Wisconsin’s site was created by Diana Kasbaum, the DPI’s mathematics education consultant, along with Jackie Herrmann and Becky Walker of the Appleton Area School District and Jeff Ziegler of the Madison Metropolitan School District. The Council for Chief State School Officers recommended the site in a nationwide email to help educators implement the Common Core.
The website simultaneously addresses the Common Core State Standards requirement of Disciplinary Literacy—the idea that students need subject area educators to teach them ways to read, write, think, listen, and speak that are specific to those fields. In mathematics, a team of Wisconsin educators found that the Mathematical Practice standards effectively address disciplinary literacy as well.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
But both are deeply concerned about what the school district's ability to serve children, and the achievement gap is on the front burner. In the wake of a bitter fight over Madison Preparatory Academy -- a proposed but ultimately rejected charter school aimed at fighting that gap -- Nerad proposed a detailed achievement gap plan of his own. Even after scaling it back recently, it would still cost an additional $5.8 million next year.Related:And then there are the maintenance needs. "It's HVAC systems, it's roofs, it's asphalt on parking lots," Nerad says. "It's all those things that don't necessarily lead to a better educational outcome for young people, but it ensures that our buildings look good and people feel good about our buildings, they're safe for children."
He pauses, and adds, "My point is that we have a complex set of issues on the table right now."
Madison teachers made about $20 million in voluntary pay and benefit concessions before the anti-collective bargaining law was enacted, according to district figures. But Nerad says state school support has been in relative decline for more than a decade, long before Walker's campaign against teacher rights.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
How does California's budget compare to other states? California represents the ninth-largest economy in the world and its 38 million residents give it the largest population in the United States. California is not alone in its fiscal challenges.It was reported that for the 2012 fiscal year, 42 states and the District of Columbia will have a combined $103 billion shortfall. States that do not anticipate a budget shortfall include Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Indiana, Montana, North Dakota, West Virginia, and Wyoming (according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities). California's projected deficit of $9.2 billion represents 10 percent of its total General Fund budget of $92.6 billion.According to the Tax Foundation, California's total state and local tax burden in 2009 ranks 6th, at a rate of 10.6% of per capita income compared to the national average of 9.8%. According to the California Budget Project, we ranked 10th in 2007-08 for total state and local taxes. According to the California Department of Finance, the state ranks 19th in state and local taxes and fees, at $16.42 per $100 of personal income.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Past attempts to improve student assessment in Wisconsin provide reasons to view current efforts with caution. The promise of additional funds, the political cover of broad committees, and the satisfaction of setting less-than ambitious goals have too often led to student assessment policies that provide little meaningful information to parents, teachers, schools and taxpayers. A state assessment system should provide meaningful information to all of these groups.Related: www.wisconsin2.org.Data on student progress can make the work of teachers, students, parents, administrators and policymakers more effective. It can ensure that during the course of the school year, students make progress toward their own growth targets and those who do not are flagged and interventions are done to get those students back on track. It should not come as a surprise that to have meaningful, timely data, one must administer meaningful, timely tests, and Wisconsin is falling short in this department in a number of ways.
School-level value-added analyses of student test scores are already being calculated for all schools with third- to eighth-graders statewide by a respected institution right here in Wisconsin. This information should be used by schools and districts to raise school and teacher productivity. We should continue to explore the use of value-added at the classroom level, a necessary step to implementing the new teacher-evaluation system proposed by the DPI that is statutorily required for implementation in 2014-'15.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In the 1990s, the term "digital divide" emerged to describe technology's haves and have-nots. It inspired many efforts to get the latest computing tools into the hands of all Americans, particularly low-income families. Those efforts have indeed shrunk the divide. But they have created an unintended side effect, one that is surprising and troubling to researchers and policy makers and that the government now wants to fix.
As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show. This growing time-wasting gap, policy makers and researchers say, is more a reflection of the ability of parents to monitor and limit how children use technology than of access to it.
"I'm not antitechnology at home, but it's not a savior," said Laura Robell, the principal at Elmhurst Community Prep, a public middle school in East Oakland, Calif., who has long doubted the value of putting a computer in every home without proper oversight. "So often we have parents come up to us and say, 'I have no idea how to monitor Facebook,' " she said.
The new divide is such a cause of concern for the Federal Communications Commission that it is considering a proposal to spend $200 million to create a digital literacy corps. This group of hundreds, even thousands, of trainers would fan out to schools and libraries to teach productive uses of computers for parents, students and job seekers. Separately, the commission will help send digital literacy trainers this fall to organizations like the Boys and Girls Club, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Some of the financial support for this program, part of a broader initiative called Connect2Compete, comes from private companies like Best Buy and Microsoft.
These efforts complement a handful of private and state projects aimed at paying for digital trainers to teach everything from basic keyboard use and word processing to how to apply for jobs online or use filters to block children from seeing online pornography. "Digital literacy is so important," said Julius Genachowski, chairman of the commission, adding that bridging the digital divide now also means "giving parents and students the tools and know-how to use technology for education and job-skills training."
F.C.C. officials and other policy makers say they still want to get computing devices into the hands of every American. That gaps remains wide -- according to the commission, about 65 percent of all Americans have broadband access at home, but that figure is 40 percent in households with less than $20,000 in annual income. Half of all Hispanics and 41 percent of African-American homes lack broadband.
But "access is not a panacea," said Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft. "Not only does it not solve problems, it mirrors and magnifies existing problems we've been ignoring." Like other researchers and policy makers, Ms. Boyd said the initial push to close the digital divide did not anticipate how computers would be used for entertainment. "We failed to account for this ahead of the curve," she said.
A study published in 2010 by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that children and teenagers whose parents do not have a college degree spent 90 minutes more per day exposed to media than children from higher socioeconomic families. In 1999, the difference was just 16 minutes.
The study found that children of parents who do not have a college degree spend 11.5 hours each day exposed to media from a variety of sources, including television, computer and other gadgets. That is an increase of 4 hours and 40 minutes per day since 1999. Children of more educated parents, generally understood as a proxy for higher socioeconomic status, also largely use their devices for entertainment. In families in which a parent has a college education or an advanced degree, Kaiser found, children use 10 hours of multimedia a day, a 3.5-hour jump since 1999. (Kaiser double counts time spent multitasking. If a child spends an hour simultaneously watching TV and surfing the Internet, the researchers counted two hours.)
"Despite the educational potential of computers, the reality is that their use for education or meaningful content creation is minuscule compared to their use for pure entertainment," said Vicky Rideout, author of the decade-long Kaiser study. "Instead of closing the achievement gap, they're widening the time-wasting gap." Policy makers and researchers say the challenges are heightened for parents and children with fewer resources -- the very people who were supposed to be helped by closing the digital divide.
The concerns are brought to life in families like those of Markiy Cook, a thoughtful 12-year-old in Oakland who loves technology. At home, where money is tight, his family has two laptops, an Xbox 360 and a Nintendo Wii, and he has his own phone. He uses them mostly for Facebook, YouTube, texting and playing games. He particularly likes playing them on the weekends. "I stay up all night, until like 7 in the morning," he said, laughing sheepishly. "It's why I'm so tired on Monday." His grades are suffering. His grade-point average is barely over 1.0, putting him at the bottom of his class. He wants to be a biologist when he grows up, he said. Markiy attends Elmhurst Community Prep, located in a rough area (the school has a tribute hanging in its hallway to a 15-year-old girl recently stabbed to death by the father of her baby). Thirty-five percent of the students, like Markiy, are black, and most of the rest are Hispanic.
Alejandro Zamora, 13, an eighth grader, calls himself "a Facebook freak." His mother, Olivia Montesdeoca, said she liked the idea of him using the computer (until it recently broke) but did not have much luck getting him to use it for homework. "He'd have a fit. He'd have a tantrum," she said, adding that she really did not understand some of what he did online. "I have no idea about YouTube. I've never even heard of a webcam." Ms. Robell, the principal, said children needed to know how to use technology to compete, but her priorities for her students were more basic: "Breakfast, lunch and dinner."
Many lower-income families take great pains to manage how their children use their devices. In Boston, Amy and Randolph Ross, neither of them a college graduate -- she works in a hospital and he at a bookstore -- recently bought their twin 15-year-old girls laptop computers as a reward for good grades. The parents make sure the computers are used mostly for homework or for the girls to explore their interest as budding musicians. "If you just buy the computer and don't guide them on the computer, of course it's going to be misused," Ms. Ross said.
Her mother-in-law, Edna Ross, the matriarch of their African-American family who lives nearby in Dorchester, Mass., feels the same way. She got a new Hewlett-Packard computer last year through a project funded by the National Institutes of Health intended to provide both access and nine months of digital literacy training.
Edna Ross is strict about how her grandchildren use the computer when they visit. One of her grandsons once sneaked onto the computer and put a picture of himself on his Facebook page making an obscene gesture. She told him if he could not control himself, he could not use the computer. Training, she said, is crucial. "If you already have a child who feels like anything goes and you put a computer in his hand," she said, "he's going to do the first negative thing he can find to do when he gets on the computer."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A 16-year-old has managed to crack puzzles which have baffled the world of maths for more than 350 years.Shouryya Ray has been hailed a genius after working out the problems set by Sir Isaac Newton.
The schoolboy, from Dresden, Germany, solved two fundamental particle dynamics theories which physicists have previously been able to calculate only by using powerful computers.
His solutions mean that scientists can now calculate the flight path of a thrown ball and then predict how it will hit and bounce off a wall.
Shouryya only came across the problems during a school trip to Dresden University where professors claimed they were uncrackable.
'I just asked myself, 'Why not?',' explained Shouryya.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In the 30 years I have been studying the growth of Advanced Placement and other college-level courses in American high schools, no development has been more surprising or controversial than what I call the "Catching Up Schools."That is my label for about three dozen schools across the country in low-income neighborhoods that offer an unusual number of AP classes despite the fact that very few of their students are able to pass the difficult three-hour final exams.
Each year, I rate local and national high schools based on AP test participation. My latest rankings appeared this week. In 2008, I removed schools from the main lists of what we call the "High School Challenge" if their passing rates were below 10 percent. I put them on a separate "Catching Up" list. I calculated that once a school with high participation rates reached a 10 percent passing rate, it was producing as many successful AP students as a school with average participation and passing rates.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"Public Money Finds Back Door to Private Schools" (front page, May 22) doesn't mention facts and data showing that more choices in education lead to increased student achievement without doing harm to traditional public schools.School choice programs increase student achievement and graduation rates, while costing only one-quarter of the money per child that conventional public schools do. Scholarships and tax-credit programs stimulate healthy competition that yields dramatic improvement in achievement among students of every income level.
Contrary to the article, choice programs are embraced by the largest and most diverse coalition in recent history -- a coalition that includes Republican and Democratic legislators, civil rights leaders, business leaders, local officials and educators. Most important, it includes parents who want and deserve the power to choose the best school for their child.
JEANNE ALLEN
President
Center for Education Reform
Washington, May 24, 2012
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Here are a few of the ways that Ronald P. Stewart, co-founder and headmaster of the York Preparatory School, thinks his school is different from other New York City private schools:It has no board of directors ("why would I hire someone who could fire me?"). It accepts more than half the students who apply ("we do not seek to be the most exclusive school in Manhattan"). And after York takes $36,000 or more from parents each year, Mr. Stewart has no qualms about telling them to back off. "The student is our client," he says.
Even the school's origin is evidence that it is a different species. While many schools have century-old histories that began with educational or religious visionaries, Mr. Stewart, a British barrister who once defended Charles Kray, an infamous London mobster, founded the school with his wife because they wanted to work together and have their summers free to spend at a camp in Maine.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Ahmed Mohamed al-Hassan hit an educational glass ceiling. He needed a higher-education degree to move up the ladder at Aspire Logistics, the company that manages Doha's massive sports complex. Although he had graduated from high school a decade before, his grade-point average was too low to enroll at Qatar University."There were no options," said Mr. Hassan, 31. "If I wanted to study, I would have to leave my job."
That changed in September 2010, however, when Qatar partnered with Houston Community College and opened the Community College of Qatar, the country's first such college. Now, Mr. Hassan is the first in his family to go to college, mostly taking night classes as he continues to work full time.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Jennifer Radcliffe and Silvia Struthers:
Officially, 817 Hispanic students in HISD's class of 2010 dropped out of high school.That's one in every nine Hispanic students in the Houston Independent School District, but it's a figure experts say doesn't begin to shed light on the actual number of Latinos who fail to graduate, often hampering their futures and burdening the city.
More than 1,400 other Hispanic students disappeared from class under the auspice of enrolling in private school, starting home school or leaving the state or country.
A stunning 8 percent of all Hispanic students in the class are listed as having returned to their "home country," according to state records.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Solidarity Newsletter by Madison Teachers, Inc. (PDF):
MTI President Kerry Motoviloff addressed the Board of Education at its May 21 general meeting. At issue is the District's plan to introduce more new programs into elementary teachers' literacy curriculum, including Mondo and 3 new assessments. At the same time, elementary teachers are being told that they will be losing release days for the administration of K-2 testing.Related:Motoviloff listed more than 13 current K-5 assessments, explaining to Board members that each assessment comes with a set of non-comparable data or scores. She noted that the District has introduced more than 18 programs and initiatives for elementary teachers since 2009.
Motoviloff stressed that all teachers are concerned about the achievement gap, and that the District needs to walk its own talk relative to ensuring fidelity in the curriculum process. She challenged the District to prioritize essentials, instead of swamping teachers with initiatives while reducing teachers' time to implement the curriculum with fidelity, and emphasized the need to include time not only for assessments, but also time for teachers to analyze and plan. She also urged the District to stop pitting professional development against planning/prep time.
I don't see how more than 18 programs and initiatives can be implemented successfully in just a few years. I'm glad MTI President Kerry Motoviloff raised this important issue. Will the proposed "achievement gap plan" add, replace or eliminate programs and spending?
Meanwhile, Superintendent Dan Nerad's Madison tenure, which began in 2008, appears to be quickly coming to an end.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I always say "please" and "thank you." I tip at least 20 percent. I never abuse editors or waiters. Many people have told me that I am a nice guy.Wisconsin Schools that were included on the list can be found here.So why do so many private schools these days treat me like a loathsome intruder? They don't actually say they wish I would drop dead, but it is clear that they don't want to hear from me. I am asking them for information -- how many graduates and Advanced Placement tests they had last year -- that they consider none of my business. Thousands of public schools have provided the same data to me for the past 14 years.
For the first time, I am including a sampling of private schools in my annual high school rankings, just posted. Most people think the main difference between public and private schools is that the latter charge tuition, sometimes exceeding $30,000 a year. That's true, but there is also a great gap in accountability to the public -- particularly for parents trying to find the best school for their children -- because most private schools withhold vital data about their academic programs.
Middleton (1285) and Memorial (1385) were the only two Madison area high schools to make the list. Both were far, far down the roster.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
When I read about education in Finland, where they accept only one of every ten applicants for teacher training, require those to earn a master's degree in a (content) subject area, and then support them and trust them to do professional work, I have to agree with Diane Ravitch that our practices--of accepting anyone into teacher training, putting them through several years of edubabble on pedagogicalisticalism, and then treat them like untrustworthy assembly line workers whose jobs hang on each year's student scores on bad tests--are mistaken.
We do mistrust and mistreat the teachers we have, and we have lost sight, in the race to the bottom of "objective" tests, of some very simple facts, such as that classes usually differ in their performance from year to year, even with the same teacher, and that students bear the main responsibility for their own learning.
Our teachers have responded to this dismal situation, on many occasions, by saying that the current punch-card, standardized regimens for curriculum and "assessment" (if you want to dignify it with that label) are limiting the time and opportunity for them to exercise their creativity in teaching.
Now, who, other than Samuel Johnson, who wrote that "The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a-while, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest, but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted...," could be against creativity in teaching?
The question for me, however, is how do so many seem to want to apply that creativity? Too often, in my view, it is in the service of FUN, and "hands-on" (and brains-off?) activities to entertain students in an age-appropriate and "relevant" way, to make everyone feel good about themselves, no matter how little they know and how little academic competence they have achieved.
The Chief Academic Officer of a major educational publisher recently spoke in an interview about all the Summer reading activities that could help students lose less knowledge and skill in that gap. But the emphasis, along with using a stopwatch to keep track of "reading minutes" (shades of industrial management practice), was on digital games to provide FUN.
Education.com has a regular feature of suggested activities for high school students, and for some reason, they never suggest that students read a complete nonfiction book or work on a long serious history research paper, as some of their more diligent peers are doing. Instead, they recommend group games which they hope will provide, above all, relevance to teen lives, and, of course, FUN.
For comparison, think about the approach taken by high school coaches with their athletes. It is true that sometimes they urge their athletes to "have fun out there," but it is always after hundreds of hours of grueling and un-fun training and practices. They may want their players to be "loose" and upbeat, but they mostly want them to know what they are doing and to be as competent as possible at doing it. One local sports shop where I live sells sweatshirts for high school athletes, which say "Work all Summer, Win all Fall!" And it means training work-outs, not summer employment.
I am not sure where our educators' obsession with FUN comes from. Where went the old view that "hard work never hurt anyone"? Is it the result of laying aside the time-honored authority and role of "The Old Battleaxe," who represented to students the goals and hopes of the community, and whose academic expectations and standards were not only high, but remembered for years after graduation, usually with profound gratitude? Perhaps too many now seek to be a good friend to students instead? They should try to remember that friends don't let friends drive drunk, and they don't put FUN before a teacher's job to take academic work seriously practically all the time.
The sad thing is that usually Education Lite, with its digital games, etc. turns out not to be much FUN, and, in the end, students really do want to grow up and gain a good deal of knowledge and competence, in academics as well as in sports.
If educators labor to keep it Lite, they will rightfully earn, not the friendship of their students, but their contempt, for laying down their responsibilities, and they lose the respect of the community, as well. In Finland, a Lower Education teacher is held in high regard by the society, just a bit behind that for doctors. In the United States, it is otherwise. Where I taught, in Concord, Massachusetts, it was quite clear that while parents and others in the town thought "the world" of their teachers, they would definitely not want their son or daughter to be one, or to marry one.
Keep in mind the Disney version of Pinocchio, where he is led off to a place where he could have nothing but FUN, and was turned into a jackass. It would be nice if our teachers used their creativity on serious academic work with students, and let somebody else do the "friendly and FUN" work of turning our students into jackasses.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Critics say public charter schools have an unfair advantage over regular public schools because they are less likely to have students with learning disabilities. That is not always true. Consider one D.C. charter management organization, DC Prep, with more than 1,000 students.Its Edgewood Middle Campus, a fourth-through-eighth-grade middle school, has a larger portion of special education students than the District's average. Seventeen percent receive services and are showing progress.
I do not mean to disparage regular D.C. schoolteachers who are doing special education work. I have seen enough programs for students with learning disabilities to know that fine work can be found at schools otherwise labeled as failing because of their low test averages.
Emily Lawson, founder and chief executive officer of DC Prep, describes her school's methods this way:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Tyrese Graham is a second-year science teacher at John Marshall Metropolitan High School on the West Side of Chicago. When he started teaching there, Marshall was among the worst public schools in the city.When Graham walked into his first class, he could hardly speak over the noise of the students. He tried to make a point by not talking.
"I'll let you finish, but realize, every moment that I'm not talking and providing you instruction, you guys will be giving that back to me," he told them.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
They reflect a growing interest in many areas of the country to go beyond work that is college-level and try college itself.At their school, Gaithersburg High, that's easier to do than at most places, with eight courses taught this spring by professors in the same classrooms where students take high school English and algebra. More than a third of the class of 2012 has taken at least one college course. "It's a boost of confidence when they say, 'Oh, I can do this,' " said Principal Christine Handy-Collins.
Early college opportunities are often overshadowed by the immense popularity of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses, which teach college-level material and can lead to college credit when students test well on exams. But college courses in high school are on the rise in many states, said Adam Lowe of the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Math is so popular at Ritter Elementary School in Watts that kids arrive before the morning bell and line up to do extra work before class, but it's not the subject that's the real attraction as much as the method--computers."It's a lot more fun this way," said 8-year-old Erica Quezada, fitting colorful cubes into a shape on her screen as another third-grader leans over to point out another way she can solve the problem.
Stand-and-deliver is increasingly giving way to point-and-click in schools across California and elsewhere as computers are being used to supplement, and in some approaches, supplant textbooks and teachers.
Known as "blended learning," the concept has been particularly embraced by charter and independently run schools as a way to boost student achievement quickly at time when dwindling state dollars are resulting in larger class sizes and fewer programs. But it's also generated some controversy as critics see it as a ploy to reduce teachers.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The figure above shows the average undergraduate GPAs for American colleges and universities from 1991-2006 based on data from: Alabama, Appalachian State, Auburn, Brown, Bucknell, Carleton, Central Florida, Central Michigan, Centre, Colorado, Colorado State, Columbia, Cornell, CSU-Fullerton, CSU-Sacramento, CSU-San Bernardino, Dartmouth, Duke, Elon, Florida, Furman, Georgia Tech, Georgetown, Georgia, Hampden-Sydney, Harvard, Harvey Mudd, Hope, Houston, Indiana, Kansas, Kent State, Kenyon, Knox, Messiah, Michigan, Middlebury, Nebraska-Kearney, North Carolina State, North Carolina-Asheville, North Carolina-Chapel Hill, North Carolina-Greensboro, Northern Iowa, Northern Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State, Pomona, Princeton, Purdue, Roanoke, Rutgers, Southern Illinois, Texas, Texas A&M, Texas State, UC-Berkeley, UC-Irvine, UCLA, UC-Santa Barbara, Utah, UW-Oshkosh, Virginia, Washington State, Washington-Seattle, Western Washington, Wheaton (IL), William & Mary, Winthrop, Wisconsin-La Crosse, and Wisconsin-Madison. Note that inclusion in the average does not imply that an institution has significant inflation. Data on the GPAs for each institution can be found at the bottom of this web page. Institutions comprising this average were chosen strictly because they have either published their data or have sent their data to the author on GPA trends over the last 11-16 years.Mark Perry has more.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
After spending more than three decades working within the Madison Metropolitan School District, Colleen Lodholz is retiring next month.Lodholz, who came to Madison 31 years ago and started her career as a speech and language clinician in special education, has served as principal of Sennett Middle School for the past nine years. In between she worked as a program support teacher in special education, picked up a second master's degree and was an assistant principal at La Follette High School.
Before Lodholz, who is a native of Antigo, Wis., wraps up her career, she sat down with the Cap Times to share her thoughts on Madison schools, the achievement gap and political upheaval in the state, among other topics. Following is an edited transcript:
The Capital Times: What's the biggest change you've noticed in the Madison schools over the past 30 years?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Okay, let's suppose - for the moment - that the money behind the charter school initiative is successful at both getting it on the ballot and getting it passed. So now Washington State has a charter school law as outlined in this document. I really encourage folks to read this document and learn what the new rules may soon be. You'd be surprised what strategies present themselves once you know the rules. If you know how to look for them, you'll see some holes in this proposal that create opportunities to subvert the whole deal.I don't know if the Washington State Charter School Initiative provides much accountability, but it sure does have a lot of process. First there are authorizers. The Authorizers are the folks who can review and approve applications for the creation of charter schools and then must provide those schools with oversight. They get 4% of the school's operating budget for these services. The law creates a new state commission which will be an authorizer. School districts, if they want to participate in their own destruction, can apply to the commission to also be authorizers.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
About 100 parents of Madison schoolchildren looked toward a longtime superintendent on Saturday for answers on how to fix the achievement gap plaguing the district.Paul Vallas, the superintendent of the Bridgeport, Conn., school district, previously led New Orleans schools during the recovery after Hurricane Katrina. The Boys and Girls Club of Dane County brought him to La Follette High School to help answer questions about the shortcomings of Madison schools.
Parents asked questions on several topics, but mostly focused on the minority achievement gap.
"They want perfection, and the achievement gap is that one big hurdle that they're struggling to get over," Vallas said in an interview after the two-and-a-half hour town hall. "This is a community that cares and sometimes when people care strong enough and have different viewpoints they have a tendency to shout at each other."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
That's what is just beginning to happen. It all became official when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology appointed as its new president the guy who is responsible for MITx, the school's free online education program.
What makes MITx so interesting is that it isn't just a bunch of lectures posted online. It also includes discussion groups and coursework and a certification program for completion of the work. My first thought when they launched MITx was that it's a little unclear how such a "certificate" differs from a "degree." In turn, that raises questions about how universities are going to be able to keep on jacking up their tuition every year and expecting that students go $100,000 in debt, when so much top-quality education is becoming available for free.The article notes that the new president's main job will be to raise money: "Left unspoken were the unquestionable expectations for Mr. Reif as a powerhouse fund raiser. MIT raised $3 billion over the course of Ms. Hockfield's presidency, and the university is preparing to embark on a new capital campaign." Well, that's one potentially viable new business model: raise billions in donations so that you can use the Internet to offer a top-quality education to a huge number of people for free.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Many parents hope to give their children Ivy League or Oxbridge educations. For some, such as Karen Leung, nothing else would do. A chartered accountant, Leung was far more upset than her son was when his teachers at Island School said that his academic record didn't look strong enough to get him admitted into the law faculty at Oxford. Her son's grades were just above average, and they had to be top-notch to get him in."I lost 5kg," she says.
However, Leung refused to give up and enrolled her son in Arch Academy, a coaching centre that helps students get into top colleges in the US and Britain. She paid HK$15,000 to enrol him in a 10-session programme covering topics such as how to write a personal statement to go with his university application. It was money well spent: last year her son won a full scholarship to study law at Oxford.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Education officials have been urged to review their policy of using Putonghua to teach Chinese language and literacy in Hong Kong, amid fears that Cantonese is becoming marginalised and is at risk of dying out within generations.More than 160 of the city's 1,025 government primary and secondary schools are using Putonghua in Chinese language lessons after a government policy encouraging a switch was introduced in 2003. Before that Cantonese had been used.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Leon Neyfakh, via a kind reader's email:
On a recent Friday morning, a classroom of teenagers at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School broke up into small groups and spent an hour not answering questions about Albert Camus's "The Plague." It wasn't that the students were shy, or bored, or that they hadn't done the reading. They were following instructions: Ask as many questions as they could, and answer none of them.The kids wrote in rapid fire on sheets of butcher paper. "Why is everyone acting normal when people are dropping dead?" "Are the doctors aware of this great danger?" "Is there any benefit from the plague? Will it help anyone change or grow?" By the end of the exercise, the class had generated more than 100 questions and exactly zero answers.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
RECENTLY, as I heard my daughter, a junior in high school, and her friends discuss their plans for the prom, I had a vaguely troubling thought: can a 16-year-old be a cougar?Her best friends wanted to take boys younger than themselves (much younger ... two entire grades younger) to the prom. And one of those boys just happened to be my ninth-grade son.
Back in my prom days (when the big slow dance was still "Stairway to Heaven"), I went with a boy who was not just taller than me, but older as well. O.K., I was only a few months younger than him, but that still mattered to my friends and me. We would never have even considered venturing out to the prom, let alone the school parking lot, with a boy in a lower grade, unless we were baby-sitting him.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
What is the lawsuit filed by students against LAUSD and its policy to fire based on seniority, not quality is won?"According to Troy Senik in the Los Angeles Times,
... teachers in California -- even terrible ones -- are virtually never fired. A tiny 0.03% of California teachers are dismissed after three or more years on the job. In the last decade, the L.A. Unified School District, home to 33,000 teachers, has fired only four. Even when teachers are fired, it's seldom because of their classroom performance: A 2009 expose by this newspaper found that only 20% of successful dismissals in the state had anything to do with teaching ability. Most involved teachers behaving either obscenely or criminally."
In LAUSD it will cost up to a million dollars to fire a teacher charged with being a pervert. Dozens of teacher for years sit in a "rubber room" at district HQ reading newspapers, playing computer games and getting full pay and benefits.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Apparently not even President Barack Obama could run as a Democrat in Washington's 1st Legislative District. In a blistering email to a candidate who filed as a Democrat in a suburban King County district, Nicholas Carlson, chairman of the 1st District Democrats, says no one who supports charter schools can ever consider himself a true Democrat. And he tells candidate Guy Palumbo to get out and stay out."I demand you cease campaigning as a Democrat immediately," he says.
It's the kind of email that might make you wonder how much room there is for dissent within Democratic party ranks - at least in the area surrounding Seattle, where the party is strongest. A copy of the email, obtained by Washington State Wire, is presented in full below.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"Education reform is really a fight for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party," said Derrell Bradford, who runs a political group in New Jersey that recently helped elect two union-defying Democrats to the state legislature.The reform movement's goals include shutting down low-performing public schools; weakening or eliminating teacher tenure; and expanding charter schools, which are publicly funded but often run by private-sector managers, some of them for-profit companies.
Wealthy Democrats have joined Republicans in pouring millions into political campaigns, lobbying and community organizing to try to advance these goals nationwide. They can count on their side several influential Democratic mayors, including Newark's Cory Booker and Chicago's Rahm Emanuel.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Troy Senik, via a kind reader's email:
In 1962, as tensions ran high between school districts and unions across the country, members of the National Education Association gathered in Denver for the organization's 100th annual convention. Among the speakers was Arthur F. Corey, executive director of the California Teachers Association (CTA). "The strike as a weapon for teachers is inappropriate, unprofessional, illegal, outmoded, and ineffective," Corey told the crowd. "You can't go out on an illegal strike one day and expect to go back to your classroom and teach good citizenship the next."Fast-forward nearly 50 years to May 2011, when the CTA--now the single most powerful special interest in California--organized a "State of Emergency" week to agitate for higher taxes in one of the most overtaxed states in the nation. A CTA document suggested dozens of ways for teachers to protest, including following state legislators incessantly, attempting to close major transportation arteries, and boycotting companies, such as Microsoft, that backed education reform. The week's centerpiece was an occupation of the state capitol by hundreds of teachers and student sympathizers from the Cal State University system, who clogged the building's hallways and refused to leave. Police arrested nearly 100 demonstrators for trespassing, including then-CTA president David Sanchez. The protesting teachers had left their jobs behind, even though their students were undergoing important statewide tests that week. With the passage of 50 years, the CTA's notions of "good citizenship" had vanished.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A primer of why Greece is in a tough situation (more in future videos)
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
There is a parable about a rich man who was asked how much money he had. He answered with a large amount. But, the questioner said, you have more than that.The rich man said the amount was how much he had given away to others. That money never will be taken away from him, he said. It was his real wealth. Everything else he had he could lose in an instant. He didn't count money as his until he donated it.
It's been six years since Marty Stein died, and I'm sitting in a Boys & Girls Club meeting room with nine students who are part of the Stein Scholars program that the club has been running for five years. Two of them graduated from Marquette University a week ago. The seven others are graduating from high school this spring and heading to college. There are more than 100 others in the program who have completed high school and gone on to higher education.
They are an important part of Marty Stein's real wealth.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
THE charter schools ballot initiative proposed for the November election was born out of parental frustration with the Legislature's failure to move on a key education reform.The effort is not a Democratic strategy, although many in the party support it, but an educational strategy acknowledging that our schools aren't working for all students. Let lawmakers and the state teachers union argue about money and control. The bottom line: Our schools need new and creative approaches.
You may soon be stopped while shopping and asked to sign the charter-schools petition. Whether you agree or disagree, help start the conversation by adding your name. Nearly 250,000 valid signatures must be collected by July 6.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Every few weeks, a group of education reform advocacy organizations (ERAOs) gathers in Washington, D.C., to compare notes and plot strategy in what is (half in jest) referred to as "fight club." Like the subject of the 1999 David Fincher movie, this fight club sees itself as the underdog in an epic struggle for freedom and equality. While the target of the film's ire is consumerism, these national ERAOs and their counterparts at the state level are focused on enacting sweeping education policy changes to increase accountability for student achievement, improve teacher quality, turn around failing schools, and expand school choice. As Terry Moe documents in his recent book, Special Interest, for decades the politics of school reform have been dominated by the education establishment, the collection of teachers unions and other school employee associations derisively called the "blob" by reformers. But the past two years have witnessed an unprecedented wave of state education reforms, much of it fiercely opposed by the unions. The ERAOs played an active role in pushing for these changes, and it is clear that they are reshaping the politics of school reform in the United States in important ways. But does the reform blob really stand a chance of defeating the education blob?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
First, I want to thank Adam Schaeffer of the Cato Institute for his engaged dialogue on the vital subject of tax credit scholarship program design. I also want to say that I have been an admirer of Cato for over a decade, and even attended its wonderful "Cato University" in the late 1990's.The main point of my response is this: as someone who is trying to pass, grow and protect parental choice laws in Florida and across the country, I live in the real world of legislation and politics. We are trying to change something that has been the same for 150 years. Those who don't want change are extremely powerful, well-funded, and have willing allies in the press. We have to fight hand-to-hand legislative and political combat state by state. And we can't hand our opponents grenades with which to blow us up.
Adam is absolutely correct that you can only drive so much excellence through top-down accountability. Our scholarship organization's president, Doug Tuthill, and I constantly talk about the "new definition" of public education we would love to see -- a transformation from "East Germany" (pre-Berlin Wall fall) to "West Germany." We see a system where end users allocate resources and choose among many providers and delivery methods - public or private. Of course I understand, as Adam asserts, that such a system will produce better results. I'm a businessman! Or at least I used to be, before this movement took most of my time. But we can't wave a magic wand and create that transformation overnight. And as in any free market system, there is a role -- though many will argue over the extent - to be played by government.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The dress code is meant to protect students and to preserve the academic atmosphere of Stuyvesant- or so it seems. Ever since the beginning of the school year, countless students, both male and female, have clashed with the administration regarding these requirements. The conflicts have not been a result of a conscious student rebellion against the code. Rather they were an expected outcome of the administration's faulty, subjective enforcement of the policy. Here are the experiences of a few students:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
368%: The jump since 2007 in the measure of consumer credit held by the government comprised primarily of student loans.If a student loan bubble were to pop, the government, not private banks, would be the one standing around with gum in its hair.
Issuance of student loans has soared in recent years, hitting $867 billion at the end of 2011, according to an analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, more than credit cards or auto loans. The jump has led some to classify the student-lending market as a bubble, comparing it with the housing mess that nearly brought down the banking system in 2008.
But there are some big differences between student loans and housing. For starters, mortgage credit absolutely dwarfs lending for higher education -- by nearly a 10-to-1 ratio. Troubles in an $8 trillion market pose a much higher systemic risk.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Barrett first floated the idea of a mayoral-appointed MPS school board in 2003, and actually took a serious crack at making it happen in 2009 and 2010. That effort, which was well chronicled by Alan Borsuk, could politely be described as a political train-wreck. Despite the support of Barrett, Governor Doyle, the two most powerful Democrats in the Milwaukee legislative delegation, and the editorial page of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the proposal never made it to the floor of the legislature.At the time I failed to see much point in a governance change. Predictors of the success of such reforms, such as unity of purpose among relevant actors, were absent in Milwaukee. More troubling to me was the failure of anyone to articulate what a mayoral-appointed board could do differently than an elected one. No matter how board members came to serve, they were severely constricted by state and federal mandates as well a union contracts.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Kai Ryssdal: Ahhh, the high school science fair. For most of us, it was no more than your baking soda volcano.But for the big one -- the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair -- the competition is fierce. And the prizes are big: $75,000 in scholarship money to the winner and about $12,000 in cash.
The grand prize this year went to Jack Andraka, high school freshman from Crownsville, Md. It's only a little bit of a stretch to say he's trying to cure cancer by finding it early.
Hey Jack, how are you?
Jack Andraka: Great, how about you?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
CONNECTICUT'S HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES AREN'T READY FOR COLLEGE:66% of students attending Connecticut State Universities and 73% of students attending community colleges require remedial math and/or English.
THERE ARE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES FOR NOT PREPARING ALL STUDENTS IN CONNECTICUT FOR COLLEGE + CAREERS:Dropouts of the Connecticut high school class of 2011 will lose more than $1.4 BILLION in lifetime earnings because they lack a high school diploma.
Posted by Jim Zellmer at 5:30 AM | Comments (0) Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom:
Kelley Williams-Bolar is giving a speech in the dark. The Ohio mom is rattling off the standard remarks she's delivered in public appearances since being catapulted onto the national stage last year. It's an unseasonably warm day and the lights in the room are off, her face lit only by the glow of the computer screen in her father's home. The address on the door outside is the one she used on her now-famous falsified documents--the ones that landed her in jail for nine days for illegally enrolling her daughters in a neighboring public school district."First, I talk about how I received my indictments, and then I give the laundry list of stipulations for my probation," says Williams-Bolar, who is halfway through her two-year sentence. The 42-year-old single mother, with an otherwise spotless criminal record, is not allowed to drink, must submit to drug tests and reports monthly to a probation officer. She had to perform 80 hours of community service and pay $800 in restitution, as well as the cost of Summit County's prosecution against her.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
As teachers of the 21st century, we are all familiar with the buzzword "differentiation," but is it just "buzz" ? I regularly hear teachers ponder the effectiveness of differentiated instruction. They raise questions such as, "Are we setting them up for success in the real world?" and "Is it worth the extra time spent to create the differentiated lesson?" These are both valid questions that could open up a lengthy debate in any crowd of teachers. My answer to both of these questions is YES!Preparing students for success in college and the real world is a consistent focus in our field. When we think about other accomplishments in our lives that we prepared for, there was always a learning curve or ramp-up, if you will. For example, when we learned to ride a bicycle, we started with a tricycle, then went to a bike with training wheels, then a bike with an adult holding the back steady ... then, voila, we were riding a bicycle.
A similar learning path should be considered when acquiring knowledge in the classroom. We all need "training wheels" to some degree when learning a new skill or idea. These training wheels can translate in the classroom to something that makes the information more accessible to us. This can be through entry points, modified tasks, mini-lessons or scaffolding.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Gloria Romero is a Democrat. She was elected to the California Assembly as a Democrat and later to the state Senate. She served as Democratic leader of the Senate, the first woman to do so. Ben Austin is a Democrat too. He worked in the White House under President Clinton and was an ardent supporter of Barack Obama. Both Austin and Romero support reform of the nation's education system, and when Romero helped found an organization to push that effort, she and her co-founders (fellow Democrats) called it Democrats for Education Reform.Eric Bauman chairs the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, and he takes offense at that name. It creates confusion, he says, especially when the group supports a candidate. Specifically, he cites the group's endorsement of Brian Johnson, who is running as a Democrat (though not the only Democrat) in the June primary for the Assembly in the 46th District. Bauman says the endorsement by a group with the word "Democrats" in its name suggests that the party itself is behind Johnson, whereas it hasn't endorsed any candidate.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
My own belief is that educational quality is the next great frontier. If we can put a man on the moon in the 1960s, surely with four years and $120K we can turn a reasonably able and motivated 22 year old into a critical thinker who can reliably communicate, collaborate, gather facts, assess data, lead, follow, and approach problems with both empathy and objectivity. Further, improving quality changes the debate from "how much does higher education cost?" to "how much is higher education worth?" And if the worth is sufficiently high, both public and private employers would be willing to subsidize it in exchange for preferred access to graduates.The only barrier is institutional focus. To make this happen, a university has to take an "Apollo Project" approach that focuses purely on education. After figuring out the "how high" and "how fast" possibilities, an institution could then focus on controlling costs through process improvements and building modules. First quality (worth), then cost. This is not trade school education; this is about fully exploring human potential.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
As Jim Anchower says, "I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya..." Sometimes you need a break; expect more soon.Much more on Paul Vallas's visit, here.Paul Vallas will be featured at a "school reform town hall meeting" this Saturday, May 26, 1:00 PM at LaFollette High School. The announcements feature "Madison Metropolitan School District, Verona Area School District, United Way of Dane County, Urban League of Greater Madison & Boys & Girls Clubs of Dane County" as "collaborating" hosts, but as reported by Matt DeFour the United Way "has requested that our name be removed from all upcoming communications related to the event, but will attend to hear the conversation from all those involved."
Attempts to clarify MMSD's role have not yielded a response. You can try yourself: Board of Education: board@madison.k12.wi.us, Supt. Dan Nerad: dnerad@madison.k12.wi.us. I've been told unofficially that MMSD is donating the space, which would mean that your tax dollars and mine are being used (see the district facilities rental policy here). It would really be a shame if our district collaborated in bringing Vallas here, there is very little in his version of school reform that our community, or any community will benefit from.
ACLU on freedom of speech.
Related: 60% to 42%: Madison School District's Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags "National Average": Administration seeks to continue its use?
How long will our community tolerate its reading problem? Bread and circuses.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:
I know how the issue would appear to me if I were on the McFarland school board and I were considering whether to revoke the school's charter or decline to renew it on the basis of the school's abysmal graduation rates.Are traditional public schools, budgets and staff held to the same standards?On the one hand, continuation of the arrangement and hence of the income stream from K12 would mean that the district could spend at least $150 more per student on the education of the kids who actually live in McFarland, which is a not insignificant sum. On the other hand, revocation of the charter would mean that K12 would shop around for some other relatively small school district in the state that would be willing to host the virtual school, cash K12's checks and provide even less oversight. K12 wouldn't miss a beat and nothing would be accomplished. On top of this, as the McFarland superintendent pointed out, no one's complaining. I suspect that I wouldn't be leading the charge to revoke the charter and kiss away that very handy K12 money.
Much more the rejected Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A relative newcomer on New York City's private-school scene will open the city's first international high-school boarding program as it looks to boost enrollment and its reputation among elite competitors.About 40 students from at least three continents will enroll in Léman Manhattan Preparatory School this autumn, officials said. They will share studio apartments at 37 Wall Street, a luxury building several blocks from the high school building.
"Certainly, the time has come--probably it's past due," said Drew Alexander, the head of school at Léman Manhattan Preparatory School. "New York City is such a tremendous destination, has such an international flavor and is such a highly sought-after location."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The mantra of "graduating our students ready for college and the workplace" is so ubiquitous these days that people have begun to forget the underlying question: What do we really want our students to know and be able to do when they graduate from high school? We hear a lot of talk about a 21st century education. What does that mean? How is a 21st century education related to our college preparation? What sort of workforce do they need to be ready for?I went to a presentation by the chief economist of a major bank last week. It was interesting to hear him talk about understanding changes in sectors such as manufacturing when making investment decisions. He talked about more and more manufacturing in the U.S., but with robots, not people. And the fact that many companies currently making big profits have a large global presence or put a sexy spin on ordinary items. Housing was mentioned, as well as the emerging trend for young families to move back to the city for shorter commutes and smaller lawns. He called it the "new realities," a seismic shift in priorities.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
What sort of senior military officers are the U.S. military creating with its system of professional military education (PME)?If one were to examine the curricula of the war colleges, one would likely discover three types of military professionals that they are attempting to develop: service professionals, joint professionals, and national security professionals. Unfortunately, the difference between these three types of professionals is vast and expecting an officer to master all three in 10 months is a tall order. The faculties and services ought to recognize this and use it as an opportunity to revamp the war college system, re-instituting the differentiated missions that Admirals Leahy and King and Generals Marshall and Arnold envisioned in the aftermath of the Second World War.
A military professional is an officer who is an expert in the management of violence. This is not the same as being an expert in the application of violence. Although many war college students have been "operators" and "trigger-pullers" for substantial portions of their careers, and have achieved their current rank by demonstrating their mastery of tactical engagement and command of those immediately engaged in tactical applications of force, this is not what their service expects of them once they reach the rank of lieutenant colonel or colonel.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Last week I spoke at my alma mater's Class Day ceremony, which at Columbia College serves as the central event for seniors, even though Columbia University, of which it's a part, conducts the formal commencement and awarding of degrees on the next day. I won't reprise my speech since I'm reluctant to promote a contribution to a genre of public speaking that many people equate with sedatives. (It is available on Harpers.org.) As my fellow Columbia graduate Tom Vinciguerra wrote in Newsday, "The days of memorable, even historic, end-of-academic-year speeches are long gone," replaced mainly by "throwaway sentiments equally trite and hortatory--e.g., 'seize the day,' 'don't forget to give back,' 'dare to be different.' "
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
This morning, Urban Strategies Council released a series of reports about the experience of black boys in the Oakland school district: one on out-of-school suspensions, one on chronic absenteeism, and lastly, an analysis of numerous factors to estimate how many children are on track to graduate high school -- beginning in elementary.There is so much data here that the short story in today's Tribune (which is long by today's standards) and blog post can't do it justice. Each school will receive a data profile to further the district's African American Male Achievement initiative. These reports were produced in partnership with OUSD as part of the initiative.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The long rumored Mitt Romney education doomsday weapon was revealed today. And it's basically President George W. Bush's education policy - but without the accountability.Let's take the major parts quickly. The emphasis on school choice is politically smart but unlikely to have a big impact given how much it is fundamentally a state by state issue. Mostly, this will help Romney draw contrasts with the President, which will help at the margins with independents and certainly help with his base. In the early 1980s when Nation At Risk was being published someone told President Reagan that the report would outrage the teachers union and other vested interests. Another presidential aide apparently responded something to the effect of 'that's fine, the Democrats can have them, we'll take the parents.' This is an extension of the logic of those politics, leave Democrats with the stakeholder adults, take everyone else.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Districts already have some picture of what will happen in terms of cuts and layoffs. When we did an in-depth look at 17 Milwaukee-area districts about the impact of the budget and its many changes, we also asked about how they are situated for the future.It is one of many issues that are at the center of the debate between Walker and his June 5, 2012, recall opponent, Democrat Tom Barrett.
A PolitiFact Wisconsin survey of 17 school districts found some officials have deep concerns about how state funding cuts past and future will affect education long-term.
But officials don't see fiscal calamity in their 2012-'13 budgets and say the freedom provided by Walker's union limits will provide new or continued chances to trim back employee costs from school ledgers.
Those controversial changes were a result of Walker and Republican legislators curtailing collective bargaining for most public employees in the budget, allowing districts to force employees to pay more for pensions and health care. The limits will extend to additional districts in 2012-'13, as more labor contracts expire.
But some aren't eager to push for deeper compensation cuts after many got significant budget relief already.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The University of Rhode Island colleagues each had a problem.Hermann Viets, then dean of engineering, felt strongly that his students needed international experience to be competitive in a globalizing job market--and, like many engineering majors, they weren't getting it. His fellow administrator and next-door neighbor, John M. Grandin, associate dean of arts and sciences at the time, saw the writing on the wall with declining numbers in his German language and literature
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
From rockets to stock markets, many of humanity's most thrilling creations are powered by math. So why do kids lose interest in it? Conrad Wolfram says the part of math we teach -- calculation by hand -- isn't just tedious, it's mostly irrelevant to real mathematics and the real world. He presents his radical idea: teaching kids math through computer programming.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Parents are furious after a Bangkok high school at the centre of bribery claims overturned its earlier agreement to accept all the 57 students it had previously rejected.Office of the Basic Education Commission (Obec) secretary-general Chinnapat Bhumirat said Bodindecha (Sing Singhaseni) School has admission regulations and education management standards to uphold and cannot accept as many students as it had agreed.
The move reversed an agreement between Pornpichit Sukannan, an adviser to Education Minister Suchart Thada-Thamrongvech, and parents on Monday that the school would enrol all 57.
Obec's decision follows a meeting yesterday between parents, Obec representatives and the education minister.
The decision sparked uproar from parents. One left a note in the meeting room accusing the Education Ministry of leaving the children scarred.
"Obec has more than 2,000 schools under its supervision.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Contests for the presidential and U.S. Senate nominations are at the top of primary ballots, but it's important that voters pay attention to races down the ballot this year especially those for the State Board of Education.Because of redistricting last year, all 15 seats on the board are now up for grabs in the May 29 Republican and Democratic primaries and the November general election.
That means voters this year have a unique opportunity to shape public education policy in Texas for a generation.
By approving curriculum standards and textbooks, the board determines what millions of students learn in Texas public schools.
In fact, candidates elected to the state board this year will decide in 2013 and 2014 which science, social studies and math textbooks will be used in most public schools for perhaps the next decade. Additionally, recent changes in law have given districts much more control over the instructional materials, both hardbound and technology-based, than before.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
As you know, the College has experienced significant financial and liquidity difficulties and has missed its last 3 payrolls. The Board and a special Restructuring Committee of the Board has retained Bridgepoint Consulting as a restructuring advisor and appointed Dawn Ragan as Chief Restructuring Officer ("CRO"). The CRO is responsible for the day to day operation of the college and for making decisions relative to continued operations and exploring various potential restructuring alternatives. Given insufficient cash flow, the college cannot continue to employ personnel and further cannot allow employees to continue to work even on a "volunteer" or unpaid basis. Your loyalty to the College, and especially to the Mission, is very much appreciated, but unfortunately due to the current circumstances all employment by the College is hereby terminated on the earlier to occur of either immediately as of 5.22.12 or the last day worked prior to 5.22.12, subject to confirmation where appropriate, excluding a minimal core group. Vacation accruals, pursuant to company policy, are extinguished upon termination of employment.
In any case where an employee or other representative may have been extended campus housing or other room/board type benefits, those benefits are also hereby terminated, and the employee/tenant will be provided 10 (ten) days to vacate.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
School officials are outraged by a flyer that's calling some of its teachers "radical" and suggesting they're bringing their politics into the classroom.Matthew DeFour:"I was flabbergasted. I was outraged that they would have that flyer. I was really surprised," said Dr. Karen Schulte, the Janesville School District superintendent.
About 2,500 copies of the flyer went out to people in Janesville over the weekend.
It asks how much WEAC teachers make in the Janesville School District, then lists the names of more than 300 teachers and their salaries, ranging from $59,000 to $75,000.
"It does affect teachers' morale. I think it affects all of our morale when educators are being vilified in this manner," Dr. Schulte said.
Janesville teachers and their supporters expressed outrage this week after an anonymous group distributed fliers listing their salaries and urging parents to request their child be assigned to a "non-radical teacher" next year.The fliers, which included the names, titles and salaries of the 321 highest-paid Janesville teachers, also urged readers to go to iverifytherecall.com to determine if the teachers signed the petition to recall Gov. Scott Walker.
Orville Seymer, an open records specialist with the conservative Milwaukee-based activist organization Citizens for Responsible Government, said the group responsible for the flier has asked to remain anonymous "for obvious reasons."
On behalf of the anonymous group, Citizens for Responsible Government filed an open records request with the Janesville School District seeking teacher names, salaries and titles. Seymer provided the information to the anonymous group, but was not involved in drafting or distributing the fliers, he said. No other requests of a similar nature have been filed with other districts, Seymer added.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
We've heard pundits and politicians weigh in on Gov. Scott Walker's nearly $1 billion cuts to Wisconsin schools. But what do Walker's policies look like to the people most affected by them -- the kids sitting at their desks with No. 2 pencils and hope for the future?Matthew DeFour:Now we know. A group of precocious students at Madison's West High School have created a political action committee called Students for Wisconsin and duly registered it with the state's Government Accountability Board. They have an impressive website that lays out issues and goals and encourages visitors to get involved (extra credit for the Lyndon Johnson quote about the vital importance of education).
United Way president Leslie Howard said the talk was initially billed as "a very informal event." But when it learned of the public policy issues that would be raised, Howard said, the charity determined it didn't have time to put the the matter before its board to review, so it backed out.Howard stressed that the United Way was not taking a position on Vallas' views, pro or con.
"We take very seriously and are extremely judicious on taking a position on any public policy issue related to the issues we're concerned about," Howard said. "We just weren't in a position to go through the process."
T.J. Mertz, a local education blogger and liberal activist, contacted the United Way last week with concerns about the organization's involvement.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
When I first moved to France 11 years ago, intending to make my career as a novelist, I spoke barely a word of French. And, though my wife was French, I never made any particular effort to remedy that. Apart from attending one five-week intensive course, understanding and fluency came to me through a process of osmosis: family mealtimes or post-football conversations as important as reading Proust and Camus. So it was not until I discovered, as many authors had before me, that novels alone are rarely a sufficient source of income, that I began to consider translation as an option.There is no set way to become a literary translator. I was lucky: I contacted my publishers Faber to say I would be interested in providing readers' reports on French novels, and was given a "rush job" to do - Laurent Binet's HHhH had won a Prix Goncourt and my editor needed a report within 48 hours because various publishers were about to bid for it. I read the book in a frenzy and loved it - more than I had loved any novel for years. I wrote an ecstatic report and, though the rights were bought not by Faber but by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US and by Harvill Secker in the UK, I emailed those editors to say I was interested in translating the book. I was told that more than a dozen translators had said the same thing, and was asked to send in a sample translation of about 30 pages. I did so, and was thrilled to be given the job. My translation, the result of six months' labour, was published last week.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
My friends Howard Fuller and Andrew Coulson started a needed discussion regarding the direction of the parental choice movement. Dr. Fuller has been quite outspoken in his opposition to universal choice programs in recent years, and Coulson raised a number of interesting and valid points in his redefinED piece. The parental choice movement has suffered from a nagging need to address third-party payer issues squarely. It's a discussion that we should no longer put off. The example of American colleges and universities continues to scream a warning into our deaf ear regarding the danger of run-away cost inflation associated with education and third-party payers.Howard Fuller and Andrew Coulson also indirectly raise a more fundamental question: where are we ultimately going with this whole private school choice movement? Dr. Fuller supports private choice for the poor and opposes it for others. He has concerns that the interests of the poor will be lost in a universal system. I'm sympathetic to Howard's point of view. I view the public school system as profoundly tilted towards the interests of the wealthy and extraordinarily indifferent to those of the poor. We should have no desire to recreate such inequities in a choice system.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Patrick McQuinn of Drew University has an important article in EducationNext that asks, "are advocacy organizations" - like Democrats for Education Reform, 50Can, Students First, Foundation for Excellence in Education - "changing the politics of education?" The short answer, is "yes," in spite of historical and overwhelming opposition from teacher unions and other organizations committed to maintaining the education establishment.McQuinn notes that the ERAO's (education reform advocacy organizations) tend to be bipartisan, but integration with the Democratic Party is particularly complicated.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Kai Ryssdal: The Obama administration's signature education program Race to the Top added another leg today. The Education Department actually calls it the third heat of the competition for federal school funding. The first two were for the states; this one will let individual school districts compete for a share of $400 million in grants.Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad says that the District may apply for these funds.From the Marketplace Education Desk at WYPR in Baltimore, Amy Scott reports.
Amy Scott: The latest contest will reward districts that move away from teaching everybody the same thing at the same time, so students can learn in their own way at their own pace. Here's Education Secretary Arne Duncan at an event announcing the details today.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
On Monday, just days after the FCAT writing fiasco that forced state education officials to grade the test on a curve so that almost three-fourths of students who took the exam wouldn't flunk it, Tallahassee launched a public relations extravaganza.The Florida Department of Education rolled out the FCAT 2.0 Call Center for parents to call with questions. (The toll-free line is 866-507-1109). It also created an email address for parents to contact state education officials, along with a "Path to Success" website.
"The purpose of this effort is to help parents understand Florida's assessment and accountability system, increased standards, and how these changes will help prepare our K-12 students for college, career and life," the DOE said.
About time.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Americans have forgotten the reason why we educate children in America. As a result our children, schools, communities, and the nation are suffering.It's the season of commencement speeches and interviews with beaming young graduates. High schools will graduate 2.7 million students this year, and colleges and universities will confer 3.4 million degrees. We are inundated with messages declaring that the purpose of education is to get a great job, make lots of money, and become personally independent. "Fulfill your dreams," is the oft-echoed refrain. Why aren't we exhorting graduates to be responsible citizens?
We have forgotten that there is only one purpose for an education system in a republic: to educate citizens. Anything that distracts us from that singular objective is destructive to our children and the nation. What passes for civic education (if our children actually get any civic education -- many don't) is an overview of process. Textbooks describe federalism and the differences between local, state, and national governments. Students read chapters about the checks and balances of the separate branches of government. "Process" is not responsible citizenship, nor is it exciting teaching.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Kirp calls for a return to integration. "If we're serious about improving educational opportunities, we need to revisit the abandoned policy of school integration."I haven't seen those studies. I would like to see how they controlled for certain factors. Was there something different about the parents of African-American children who got their kids into those integrated schools? Did white students maintain their education advantage, because their parents put them in private schools or relocated to another town? Still, I'm pretty sure that their findings are accurate. Many other studies have shown the importance of peer group influences and the impact of wealth of a community on education outcomes.
Kirp is right in some ways. Creating larger, more diverse schools would definitely improve outcomes of more children. However, he has little sympathy or understanding for the forces that stymie the efforts of reformers.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The former chief executive of Yahoo, a UW-Madison alum, advised new graduates Sunday to look past the headlines that warn about the lackluster economy and the bleak jobs picture.Watch Bartz's address via this video."Don't believe that the events of today are the only ones that are going to shape your future," Carol Bartz, 63, said in one of the university's four graduation ceremonies at the Kohl Center.
"Your work life is very long. In fact, you are the first generation that's preparing for a 50-year career," she said to nervous laughter from graduates and their family members.
"That sounds like an eternity, but you have to work for 50 years, because everybody else in the audience needs Social Security," Bartz said to loud applause.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Without diminishing learning outcomes, automated teaching software can reduce the amount of time professors spend with students and could substantially reduce the cost of instruction, according to new research.In experiments at six public universities, students assigned randomly to statistics courses that relied heavily on "machine-guided learning" software -- with reduced face time with instructors -- did just as well, in less time, as their counterparts in traditional, instructor-centric versions of the courses. This largely held true regardless of the race, gender, age, enrollment status and family background of the students.
The study comes at a time when "smart" teaching software is being increasingly included in conversations about redrawing the economics of higher education. Recent investments by high-profile universities in "massively open online courses," or MOOCs, has elevated the notion that technology has reached a tipping point: with the right design, an online education platform, under the direction of a single professor, might be capable of delivering meaningful education to hundreds of thousands of students at once.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Excessive specialization has created a culture of expertise that has distorted higher education and had a negative impact on faculty members, students and the broader society.While global transportation, communications and information technologies have created interconnection, academic disciplines and fields have, paradoxically, become more fragmented and isolated. Universities boast of their global expansion and vision, but they are mostly siloed institutions ill-adapted to a networked world.
While academic specialization has long been decried and ridiculed, insufficient attention has been paid to the influence that narrowly defined research has had on undergraduate teaching and the structure of colleges and universities. With online education taking off at traditional institutions, the hope is that learning breaks out of these cocoons. But as we have already discovered in the political arena, increased connectivity can create new divisions that deepen social discord. The rise of online learning may create more rifts in fields and curricula, or it may reorganize higher education for the better.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
After thirty years of teaching a university course in something called advanced prose style, my accumulated wisdom on the subject, inspissated into a single thought, is that writing cannot be taught, though it can be learned--and that, friends, is the sound of one hand clapping. A. J. Liebling offers a complementary view, more concise and stripped of paradox, which runs: "The only way to write is well, and how you do it is your own damn business."Learning to write sound, interesting, sometimes elegant prose is the work of a lifetime. The only way I know to do it is to read a vast deal of the best writing available, prose and poetry, with keen attention, and find a way to make use of this reading in one's own writing. The first step is to become a slow reader. No good writer is a fast reader, at least not of work with the standing of literature. Writers perforce read differently from everyone else. Most people ask three questions of what they read: (1) What is being said? (2) Does it interest me? (3) Is it well constructed? Writers also ask these questions, but two others along with them: (4) How did the author achieve the effects he has? And (5) What can I steal, properly camouflaged of course, from the best of what I am reading for my own writing? This can slow things down a good bit.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A few months ago, Bill Gates wrote an Op-Ed article in this newspaper objecting to New York City's plan to make public the performance rankings of its teachers. His central point was that this kind of public shaming was hardly going to bring about better teaching.In the course of the article, Gates mentioned that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which spends around $450 million a year on education programs, had begun working with school districts to help design evaluation systems that would, in his words, "improve the overall quality of teaching."
That caught my attention. Wanting to learn more, I went to Seattle two weeks ago to talk to Bill Gates about evaluating teachers.
Although the Gates Foundation is perhaps best-known for its health initiatives in Africa, it has long played an important role in the educational reform movement here at home. It was an early, enthusiastic backer of charter schools. Around the year 2000, it also became enamored with the idea that students would do better in smaller schools than bigger ones.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The size, scope, and impact of this problem is an enormous anchor weighing down our next generation and our nation's economy.
Make no mistake, this anchor is not only impacting thousands of students and families but is also having an equally burdensome impact on colleges and universities nationwide.Embedded within a very recently released Bloomberg commentary is a study by Richard Kneedler, President Emeritus of Franklin & Marshall College. In light of the economic crisis that hit our shores and continues to envelop our nation, in early 2009 Kneedler released a very granular review of the economic condition of close to 700 private colleges and universities. For anybody with even a passing interest in this issue, Kneedler's work, is a MUST read. What do we learn?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A photography darkroom with trays of chemicals is a strange concept to most youth today who are familiar with digital photos.So fifth-grader Wilson Kilmer was excited to get the chance to see photos, captured with pinhole cameras, developed in a makeshift darkroom at Thoreau Elementary School.
"We had not used any electricity and nothing mechanical," said Wilson, 11. "It's by far the coolest thing we've done in school."
Fifth-grader Sam Schumann, 11, also liked seeing the film develop.
"It was just really neat seeing it going from really fade to really good detail," he said.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Gloria Romero is a Democrat. She was elected to the California Assembly as a Democrat and later to the state Senate. She served as Democratic leader of the Senate, the first woman to do so. Ben Austin is a Democrat too. He worked in the White House under President Clinton and was an ardent supporter of Barack Obama. Both Austin and Romero support reform of the nation's education system, and when Romero helped found an organization to push that effort, she and her co-founders (fellow Democrats) called it Democrats for Education Reform.Eric Bauman chairs the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, and he takes offense at that name. It creates confusion, he says, especially when the group supports a candidate. Specifically, he cites the group's endorsement of Brian Johnson, who is running as a Democrat (though not the only Democrat) in the June primary for the Assembly in the 46th District. Bauman says the endorsement by a group with the word "Democrats" in its name suggests that the party itself is behind Johnson, whereas it hasn't endorsed any candidate.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Gov. Scott Walker and his recall critics may as well be on different planets when it comes to describing how local schools fared under his budget.Walker tells audiences that most schools got far more savings from his controversial collective bargaining limits -- money-saving "tools" in Walker's phrasing -- than they suffered in cuts from his budget.
Democratic Party officials and their allies say schools all over the state suffered "devastating" aid cuts, and Walker recall opponent Tom Barrett says education was "gutted."
After examining the issue and doing extensive interviews with 17 Milwaukee-area school districts, it's clear both sides are exaggerating.
But answering the bottom line question of whether the "tools" outweighed the cuts is elusive
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
New Jersey Administrative Law Judge Jeff Masin has ruled that even though a special education teacher mocked one of his students, called him a "'tard," and told him that he will "kick your ass from here to kingdom come," that's not enough to revoke tenure. According to the Star-Ledger, the Bankbridge Regional Board of Ed "voted to certify tenure charges against [Steven] Roth in December, and in March he appeared before Masin. The charges included unbecoming conduct, neglect of duty and verbal abuse in violation of the Harassment, Intimidation and Bullying Policy of the board." Judge Masin ruled that Roth is "not a person who cannot be expected to provide special education students with much important instruction and guidance in the future while learning from his mistakes and avoiding such improper conduct."The Board released the following statement:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
368%: The jump since 2007 in the measure of consumer credit held by the government comprised primarily of student loans.If a student loan bubble were to pop, the government, not private banks, would be the one standing around with gum in its hair.
Issuance of student loans has soared in recent years, hitting $867 billion at the end of 2011, according to an analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, more than credit cards or auto loans. The jump has led some to classify the student-lending market as a bubble, comparing it with the housing mess that nearly brought down the banking system in 2008.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
5212012 PDF via a kind Jeannie Bettner email.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
An exasperated Jamie Oliver has written to every MP demanding a U-turn over nutrition rules in schools after education secretary Michael Gove refused to act on a report that found nine out of 10 academies were selling junk food.Announcing the move on his website, the TV chef, whose campaign for better food in state schools has lifted standards for millions of pupils, told voters that if their MPs did not act "you can safely assume that they don't care about the wellbeing of our children and the future of our country".
Oliver's move came as public health officials and doctors joined a growing number of education and food organisations in criticising the education secretary. In a move that astonished experts, Gove insisted that he would not apply the nutrition standards that cover all other state schools to academies and free schools - even after a report by the School Food Trust charity found last week that many were selling sub-standard products.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Maps usually display only one layer of information. In most cases, they're limited to the topography, place names and traffic infrastructure of a certain region. True, this is very useful, and in all fairness quite often it's all we ask for. But to reduce cartography to a schematic of accessibility is to exclude the poetry of place.Or in this case, the poetry and prose of place. This literary map of Britain is composed of the names of 181 British writers, each positioned in parts of the country with which they are associated.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
One of the wealthiest, best-educated American entrepreneurs, Peter Thiel, isn't convinced college is worth the cost. With only half of recent U.S. college graduates in full-time jobs, and student loans now at $1 trillion, Thiel has come up with his own small-scale solution: pay a couple dozen of the nation's most promising students $100,000 to walk away from college and pursue their passions. Morley Safer takes a look at Thiel's critique of college.The following script is from "Dropping Out" which originally aired on May 20, 2012. Morley Safer is the correspondent. Katy Textor, producer.
These are the days in May, when young men and women are capped and gowned -- their hands clutching diplomas, their ears tuned to some wise person telling them, "You are the future." For many, deep in debt with few prospects, that future looks pretty bleak.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
When somebody asked California's governor Jerry Brown at a conference in Silicon Valley a couple of weeks ago what he would do to promote innovation, Mr Brown reminded his questioner that "innovation" in government is seldom prized. "Government is a collection of catchphrases, banalities and conventional wisdom," Mr Brown said, "and, to the extent you depart from that, you are stigmatised and reviled." Mr Brown should know. He has been innovating fast and he has been reviled. He may nonetheless be the only politician with the forthrightness to stand between California and a Greek-style debt spiral.In the four months between January and last week, the state's budget deficit rose dramatically - from $9.2bn to $15.7bn, on a $91bn budget that must be balanced by law. These things happen in California. The political system has been ingeniously rigged. It is easy for citizens to vote themselves vast benefits by referendum but nearly impossible for the legislature to pass the taxes to pay for them. Until recently it required a two-thirds majority to pass a budget. Last year, when Mr Brown reached the end of his ability to compromise, he did what California governors often do: he made an overly rosy estimate of how much the state would get in tax revenues.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
- Italians do it better. At least that's what the T-shirts say. The problem is in what language?Politecnico di Milano, one of Italy's leading universities, thinks it should be English.
The 149-year-old university, located in Italy's business capital Milan, is set to become the first Italian place of higher learning to teach all its graduate courses in English when it kicks off its academic year in 2014.
The aim is to kit out its students with the right stuff to gain access to the global jobs market. It's also meant to attract top-class international students at a time when competition among universities worldwide is hotting up.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
It's been widely reported now that the U.S. has a serious and unsustainable "higher education bubble," not unlike the unsustainable housing bubble in the U.S. that eventually crashed and resulted in a housing meltdown, mortgage tsunami, a wave of foreclosures, and a global financial crisis. The chart above illustrates that the ever-inflating higher education bubble with ever-increasing costs for college tuition and education supplies is starting to make the housing bubble look almost inconsequential by comparison.The CPI for college tuition has increased almost 12 times since 1978, compared to the 3.5 time increase in overall consumer prices, and the 4.4 time increase in home prices at their "bubble peak." What the two bubbles have in common is that they have both been fueled by political obsessions: one with homeownership and another with college education. And with those political obsessions comes the government-sponsored coerced taxpayer funded assistance that creates the "politically-motivated air" to inflate the bubbles to unsustainable levels: government taxpayer- subsidized or government taxpayer-provided credit at below market rates to borrowers who wouldn't qualify for credit from private borrowers.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Business is booming at Wisconsin Virtual Academy after two of the state's biggest virtual schools split from the country's largest online K-12 education service provider.The online charter school based in the McFarland School District, which next year will be the only virtual school in Wisconsin run by Virginia-based K12 Inc., saw a 50 percent increase in open enrollment applications this year, up from 2,402 to 3,586.
The increase comes as McFarland Superintendent Scott Brown prepares to report to his school board next month about whether WIVA is meeting performance benchmarks in the five-year charter contract that runs through mid-2014.
In an interview last week, Brown said WIVA's state test scores are not meeting the contractual benchmarks, though he said the report isn't finalized. He added the district may need more time to track how students improve over multiple years.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Much more on Paul Vallas, here.
Per Student Spending:
I don't believe spending is the issue. Madison spends $14,858.40/student (2011-2012 budget)
Middleton's 2011-2012 budget: $87,676,611 for 6,421 students = $13,654.67/student, about 8% less than Madison.
Waunakee spends $12,953.81/student about 13% less than Madison.
A few useful links over the past decade:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Those forced to graduate from college and enter the cold and competitive Real World could do worse than have comedian Bill Cosby nudge them from their ivy-covered nest."You have this education. There are parents waiting for you to move out. They've been waiting for this day, and they don't want you to back out," Cosby told a church-full of graduating students and their families on Friday at the University of San Francisco's commencement ceremony for the College of Arts and Sciences.
Laughter and applause pulsed through the Jesuit university's grand St. Ignatius Church on Fulton Street, its stained-glass saints no doubt accustomed to more contemplative conventions.
Cosby's larger message to graduates did not carry the controversial punch of his now famous speech in 2004, when he told the NAACP that "we cannot blame the white people anymore" for the troubles of the black community.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The state board of education voted Thursday to approve charter schools in Wilmington and Dover, but a proposal to start a new Montessori school under the charter system failed to gain approval.Related: Madison recently rejected a proposed IB Charter school. Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.The board unanimously approved charters for:
The First State Montessori Academy needed four votes for approval, but it received favorable votes from only three of the five board members present. Under the proposal, the school would have served kindergarten through sixth grade based on the Montessori education model. The school's planners don't yet have a location secured for the school, and they have said it may share a campus with a private Montessori school.
- Academia Antonia Alonso, for students in kindergarten through fifth grade in Wilmington. The school would focus on Hispanic English-language learners. The founding board is a partnership between Innovative Schools, a Wilmington nonprofit that aids districts and charter schools, and the Latin American Community Center, a nonprofit in Wilmington.
- Early College High School at Delaware State University, a high school embedded in the DSU campus in Dover. The curriculum would focus on science, technology, engineering and math, and is based on an early-college high school model to serve first-generation college students. State Board President Teri Quinn Gray calling the charter proposal "one of the strongest I've seen in awhile."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Which Wisconsin high school is best: Rufus King, Brookfield Central or Whitefish Bay? It depends on who you ask. According to U.S. News & World Report, King is the best; Newsweek recently ranked Brookfield Central at the top of its list, and Milwaukee Magazine has listed Whitefish Bay High School as its top choice.The latest poll, published by U.S. News, has driven Alan J. Borsuk, a fellow in public policy at Marquette University and who writes an education column published in the Journal Sentinel, to question for the first time the validity of these polls.
Why? Because the U.S. News poll has the audacity to rank three MPS high schools - King, Ronald Reagan and Milwaukee School of Languages - among the state's top 10 high schools while omitting Whitefish Bay and other suburban schools "known for high success and high average college entrance scores."
What's a parent to do? Depending on the ranking they read, parents might well choose one school over another or decide to opt out of public schools altogether. If the variation in rankings weren't enough to confuse the issue, some in the media are here to tell us that the variation signifies the worthlessness of the rankings. As Borsuk writes, "I don't think I've ever seen one (poll) that convinced me that it really pinned things down."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Over a year ago, the UFT submitted a Freedom of Information request for emails between Joel Klein and other top DoE brass, on the one hand, and the leaders of the New York City Charter School Center, the New York Charter School Association, Democrats for Education Reform and other leading supporters of corporate education reform. As it does with FOIL requests that do not suit their purposes, the DoE stonewalled the request. (Take note of the contrast with the DoE's eagerness to release the Teacher Data Reports.) Last month, the UFT went to court, arguing that the DoE's continual delays amounted to constructive denial of the FOIL law. Facing the inevitable, last Friday the DoE began to release the emails, sending several hundred to the UFT and the news media. Another 15,000 emails are still to come, so keep your eyes peeled on this one.Here are some of the highlights of the emails just released.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Michael Johnson, via a kind email:
Madison Metropolitan School District, Verona Area School District, United Way of Dane County, Urban League of Greater Madison & Boys & Girls Clubs of Dane County is collaborating to host a town hall meeting with one of the most respected urban school superintendents in the nation at Lafollette High School on May 26th at 1pm. Paul Vallas has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to support academic achievement, he has raised test scores in urban communities, built hundreds of schools while maintaining great working relationships with community leaders, teachers and unions. His efforts has been featured in Education Week, New York Times and hundreds of other articles profiling his work in urban school districts.Directions.Arne Duncan the current US Secretary of Education served as his Deputy Chief of Staff and the current Superintendent of Schools in Milwaukee was his former Chief Academic Officer. During Vallas time in other cities he has led the effort to build over 175 new school buildings and renovated more than 1,000 existing buildings. According to several news outlets Paul Vallas managed consecutive years of improved reading and math scores in every school district he led. During his time in Chicago he organized the largest after school and summer programs in the nation. His education reforms produced double digit increases in test scores which was some of the highest in the nation among the 50th largest school districts in the United States. His leadership efforts was cited in two presidential state of the union addresses and CBS News highlighted that he is one of the most sought out school superintendents in the country. Recently he was invited by the Government of Chile to assume responsibility of turning around and improving test scores in 1,100 of Chile's lowest performing schools. He was invited by the Government of Haiti to advise their Prime Minister and education team. He also served as an education adviser to London- Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Paul Vallas will share best practices, talk about school reform and take questions on how we can improve academic achievement for our kids. I hope you can join us on Saturday, May 26th at 1pm for this important discussion at LaFollette High School, 702 Pflaum Rd. Madison in the auditorium. To confirm your attendance please email Sigal Lazimy at slazimy@bgcdc.org. Thanks in advance and we look forward to seeing you! Below is a documentary of his work in New Orleans.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Relationships. That's the starting point in Kristi Cole's answer. Healthy, helpful, warm, caring relationships, but ultimately ones aimed at quality, high standards and progress.My question was: What have you learned about what works when it comes to educating kids?
I don't know of anyone else who has seen the local education scene in the past couple decades from as many vantage points as Cole. Her father taught in Milwaukee Public Schools for 38 years. He retired in 1991, the year Cole started as a teacher. She has been a school librarian, assistant principal and principal. She held major positions in the MPS central office, overseeing programs dealing with student safety and health as well as charter and alternative schools connected to MPS.
A year ago, she took a job that splits her time, three days a week as an administrator for the high-quality Milwaukee College Prep charter schools and two days a week as a coach for leaders of other schools as part of a nonprofit organization, Schools That Can Milwaukee. At 45, Cole is also working on her PhD in education.
Since her time as principal of Humboldt Park School almost a decade ago, I've looked to Cole as an example of how to do urban education well. I thought I'd learn some things myself if I asked her what she had learned. Beyond the emphasis on relationships, here are some ingredients she suggested for a high performing school:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Last week the New Jersey Arts Education Census Project issued its "NJ Arts Education Census," a report and database that measures the level of access to and participation in art and music programming offered to N.J. public school students in each of our 591 districts.Most educators - in N.J. and elsewhere -- agree that the study of art and music is a boon to children's intellectual and creative development. However, in the last few years school boards and administrators hear not the melodious tones of Mozart but the siren song of testing and accountability. There are, after all, no current accountability measures in place for a student's mastery of art history, no statewide assessments of music appreciation.
Districts are further distracted from well-rounded programming by relentless fiscal and political pressure to decrease costs, not add courses. And if you do add a course, it's more likely to be another section of algebra rather than a survey of Abstract Expressionism.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
There are several words and phrases that confuse the debate on education reform: Apples-to-apples, finding what works, bringing to scale, and the worst of them all, accountability. The concepts described by these words and phrases are all premised on the idea that there is a single model of delivering quality education to all students.No such model exists.
It follows that no matter how hard we try, we will not find what works; efforts to bring specific reforms to scale will ultimately fail, and it will always be a struggle to compare the performance of different types of schools. And when it comes to holding schools accountable, who decides for what and to whom?
Presumably in Wisconsin the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) is in charge of holding schools accountable. However, the granting of the state's No Child Left Behind waiver request is reportedly at risk because of vagueness in DPI's proposed accountability framework. The Wisconsin State Journal reports that a federal review found "Wisconsin's proposal for holding schools accountable is short on details and lacks ambitious goals to improve student achievement."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Update: the district is saying that the HR investigation of the "Lafayette issues" will be completed early next week. That's pretty fast considering how long this has dragged out. I'm hoping the district has really done a complete investigation along with an explanation of how it got to this point. I also hope that Dr. Enfield will be making some kind of statement of assurance to parents about principals and their understanding of how to handle these kinds of issues.This is a serious subject with serious allegations. That there appears to be many witnesses and e-mail evidence to nearly everything said and done is clear.
I lay this out as clearly as I know it from extensive input I have received. I have a statement (at the end of this thread) from the district that I believe would cover any statement from either the principal, Jo Lute-Ervin or Aurora Lora, Executive Director for that region.
I have known Lafayette to be a popular and high-performing school. It is one of the many over-enrolled schools in West Seattle.
But as I have told others, this issue is much bigger than just Lafayette.
Once again, if staff had followed protocol, this issue could have been quietly resolved in a fair and satisfactory manner. If the district staff had followed protocol, it could have been resolved without any outside notice. However, it appears that did not happen either at the school or district level.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Over at the Gradebook (the Tampa Bay Times education blog) this morning, another example of why public school choice alone isn't enough:Forty-two percent of the 2,200 parents in the Pasco County School District who applied to switch schools this fall were denied, the Gradebook reports, often because there wasn't enough room. (Florida's voter-approved class-size restrictions contributed to the complications.) The blog post notes the appeals process is ongoing so "a few more families might win their preferred school seats."
That still leaves a whole bunch frustrated - and unnecessarily so.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Today, instead of deferring to long practical experience, and deep knowledge of a particular place, managers prefer to implement 'best practice' from somewhere else; they impose theoretical models with less and less understanding of what does not work on the ground; and they justify decisions with abstract metrics, and obscure concepts. And as more and more positions are filled with people with this mentality, there are fewer people, with the confidence, or seniority, to expose the shallowness of this approach. Our culture is beginning to forget what deep knowledge and contact with the ground looked like, or why it mattered.Something to consider in light of Oconomowoc's planned changes.
The solution must be to give power back to people with deep knowledge. But it won't happen through running training courses. You need to force institutions to change their promotion criteria, and put those with knowledge, judgement and experience back at the very top. Some of them might not be ideal managers: they might be less popular with staff, unappealing to stake-holders, more difficult to work with. But they can offer things we have forgotten how to measure: not just long experience, but rigour, a sense of vocation, and unexpected frames of reference. They might have prevented some of our recent mistakes. They could certainly bring more flexible and inventive ways of engaging with the world. And we cannot afford to continue to ignore them.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Professor Claude Steele, of Stanford, studies the effects of performance anxiety on academic tests. He set a group of students consisting of African-Americans and Caucasians a test, telling them it would measure intellectual ability. The African-Americans performed worse than the Caucasians. Steele then gave a separate group the same test, telling them it was just a preparatory drill. The gulf narrowed sharply. The "achievement gap" in us education has complex causes, but one may be that bright African-American students are more likely to feel they are representing their ethnic group, which leads them to overthink.How do you learn to unthink? Dylan believes the creative impulse needs protecting from self-analysis: "As you get older, you get smarter, and that can hinder you...You've got to programme your brain not to think too much." Flann O'Brien said we should be "calculatedly stupid" in order to write. The only reliable cure for overthinking seems to be enjoyment, something that both success and analysis can dull. Experienced athletes and artists often complain that they have lost touch with what made them love what they do in the first place. Thinking about it is a poor substitute.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Oconomowoc's plans for next school year are undeniably bold:Wisconsin will be watching closely for results.
- Reduce the number of teachers but pay the many who stay a lot more money for teaching an extra period.
- Use technology -- including students' own hand-held devices -- to encourage and personalize learning.
- Save more than $500,000 to help balance the district's budget without reducing class sizes or cutting programs for students.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The DPI released graduation rates last year using both the new and old calculation method for the state and individual school districts, and did the same again this year.Matthew DeFour:An example of the difference between the two calculations: The legacy rate for the most recent data shows Wisconsin's students had a 90.5% graduation rate for 2011, instead of the 87% rate for that class under the new method the federal government considers more accurate.
Using the new, stricter method, the data shows Milwaukee Public Schools' graduation rate increased for 2011 to 62.8%., up from 61.1% in 2010.
"We have much more work to do, but these numbers - along with ACT score growth and growth in 10th grade state test scores - show that we continue to move in the right direction," MPS Superintendent Gregory Thornton said in a statement Thursday.
MPS officials on Thursday pointed out that the 1.7 percentage-point increase between the two years for the district was greater than the state four-year graduation rate increase in that time. The state's four-year rate increased 1.3 percentage points, from 85.7% in 2009-'10.
The annual report from the Department of Public Instruction released Thursday also showed Madison's four-year graduation rate dipped slightly last year to 73.7 percent.According to the data, 50.1 percent of Madison's black students graduated in four years, up from 48.3 percent in 2010. The white student graduation rate declined about 3.1 percentage points, to 84.1 percent.
District officials and education experts said it was unclear what accounted for the changes, and it's difficult to draw any conclusions about Madison's achievement gap from one or two years of data.
"You need to be looking over a period of several years that what you're looking at is real change rather than a little blip from one to the other," said Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.
The graduation rates of black and white students in Madison have been a major topic of discussion in the city over the past year.Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.
Standing Firm on Grad Rates
by Chuck Edwards:
Even as the Obama administration is busy dismantling much of NCLB through waivers, it is standing firm on some Bush-era decisions.One of them is to consider high school graduation to be exactly that -- graduating with a regular diploma, even if it takes five or six years for kids with special barriers. For accountability decisions affecting high schools, the Bush administration would not allow states to give schools "graduation" credit for students who obtain a GED or certificate of completion -- only a regular diploma would do.
In response to the Obama administration's new "ESEA Flexibility" initiative, states have taken another run at that decision, which was enshrined in last-gasp Bush regulations issued in October 2008.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Teaching isn't known to be a lucrative profession, but online marketplace Teachers Pay Teachers is changing that for some educators.Deanna Jump, a kindergarten teacher from Georgia, has made $700,000 selling her lesson plans on Teachers Pay Teachers, an ecommerce startup where teachers offer their lesson plans to fellow educators.
Paul Edelman, the founder of Teachers Pay Teachers, created the platform following a four-year stint as a New York City public school teacher.
"I had an insight that the materials teachers created night after night had monetary value, so I set out to create a marketplace called Teachers Pay Teachers," Edelman told Mashable. "Teachers are now making a pretty significant supplemental income and creating higher quality materials."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The last thing you want to give people waging a scorched-earth campaign against you is a gas can and a match.Though well intended, the hard-charging Florida Board of Education moved too far, too fast last year when it raised the bar on academic standards. The short-term result for the state's standardized writing test isn't pretty. According to scores released this week, the percentage of passing fourth graders alone dropped from 81 to 27.
In an emergency session, the board tried to mitigate. It revised the passing scores downward so the percent passing will be roughly the same this year as it was last year. Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson also admitted the state should have better communicated the new scoring criteria to teachers.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A new higher education ranking focuses on evaluating quality by countries as a whole, as opposed to specific academic institutions. Universitas 21, an organization of 23 research universities across 15 countries, published its first ranking of countries "which are 'best' at providing higher education." Universitas 21's report, published by the University of Melbourne in Australia, ranked 48 countries in all. Here are some of their findings:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Proficiency under pressure -- that's what we test for. Right? That's what public education is all about in the new Florida. Standardized tests decide whether students graduate, how much teachers earn, what performance grades schools get, how much bonus money to give to schools that excel.Statement from Commissioner Robinson on FCAT WritingSo much rides on test outcomes that classroom curriculums have been narrowed to a kind of perpetual test preparation. And test taking. The Fort Myers News-Press, looking at the state's mandatory testing regime, counted 27 standardized tests that eighth-grade students were required to jam into this school year. Students, teachers, principals, administrators, superintendents, even school board members, all know they're judged by the outcomes of tests.
Yet the state superintendent, the state board of education and NCS Pearson, the giant testing corporation with a four-year, $254 million contract to administer the state's standardized test regime, seem to suffer no such accountability. Their competence, their proficiency under pressure has been tested this school year. They flunked and flunked spectacularly.
Yesterday's vote by the State Board of Education to recalibrate the school grading scale of the FCAT Writing test was done in response to a tougher grading system that appropriately expects our students to understand proper punctuation, spelling and grammar. The Board acted after it became clear that students were posting significantly lower scores under newer, tougher writing standards.We are asking more from our students and teachers than we ever have. I believe it is appropriate to expect that our students know how to spell and how to properly punctuate a sentence. Before this year, those basics were not given enough attention, nor did we give enough attention to communicating these basic expectations to our teachers. I support the Board's decision to recalibrate the school grading scale while keeping the writing standards high.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Amid a crushing budget bind, Milwaukee Public Schools has had to cut dozens of specialized teachers from its classrooms in recent years - teachers who bring arts, music and physical education to Milwaukee's kids. That's why we like a new idea proposed by Superintendent Gregory Thornton.Thornton is proposing the creation of a $13.4 million fund in the district's budget to ensure that schools have at least one arts, music or physical education instructor. The money would be allocated to all MPS schools based on size. At minimum, schools would receive enough money to pay for one of the three programs for students at least one day a week.
Studies confirm the value of such education for kids, but, unfortunately, low-income students in urban schools often get shortchanged. Thornton says that's not fair.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
May 11, 2012 marks the 15-year anniversary since IBM's chess-playing supercomputer Deep Blue defeated the reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov. In the video below IBM Research scientist Dr. Murray Campbell, one of the original developers, talks about the challenges and breakthroughs of building Deep Blue.Designed as a "brute force" high-power parallel processing super-computer, Deep Blue could analyze 200 million chess positions per second. It defeated Kasparov 3.5-2.5 after losing 4-2 the previous year. After the game Deep Blue was used to develop drug treatments, analyze risk and conduct data mining. It also paved the way for the next generation of its replacements - Blue Gene and Watson.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Graduate school, a path to higher learning and potentially higher income, increasingly lands students in higher debt brackets.But while Congress searches for ways to alleviate the loan burden for undergrads, experts say little attention is being paid to master's students. In fact, lost in the debate over the nation's student loan debt topping the $1 trillion mark is that graduate students account for a third of that sum -- and that their indebtedness is likely about to grow much worse.
Beginning in July, subsidized Stafford loans will no longer be available to graduate students, a shift that experts say will force student borrowers into more expensive loans to cover tuition. These loans are the most popular type for graduate school, with more than one-third of all students signing up for them annually, because the government covers the interest payments during the years of enrollment. In contrast, other loans require students to pay the full cost.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Staring down steep tuition hikes, students at the University of California have taken to carrying picket signs. As far as I can tell, though, none has demanded that President Barack Obama accept a Grand Swap that could protect their education while saving them money. Allow me to explain.When I was governor of Tennessee in the early 1980s, I traveled to meet with President Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office and offer that Grand Swap: Medicaid for K-12 education. The federal government would take over 100% of Medicaid, the federal health-care program mainly for low-income Americans, and states would assume all responsibility for the nation's 100,000 public schools. Reagan liked the idea, but it went nowhere.
If we had made that swap in 1981, states would have come out ahead, keeping $13.2 billion in Medicaid spending and giving $8.7 billion in education spending back to Washington. Today, states would have about $92 billion a year in extra funds, as they'd keep the $149 billion they're now spending on Medicaid and give back to Washington the $57 billion that the federal government spends per year on schools.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Knudsen, in a news conference, avoided references to the "Philadelphia School District."Decentralization is inevitable, regardless of idealogy. We're no longer sending most kids to work the fields and cattle before/after school or in the summer."We are now looking at a much broader definition of education in the city that includes not only district schools but other schools as well," he said.
Mayor Nutter hailed the plan, which he said would push control over education down to the school level.
"If we don't take significant action, the system will collapse," the mayor said at a separate news conference. "If you care about kids and if you care about education, if you care about the future of this city, that's what we need to all grow up and deal with."
Teachers union president Jerry Jordan decried the radical restructuring as the SRC divesting itself of many of the core responsibilities of public education. He called it a "cynical, right-wing, market-driven" blueprint.
"This is totally dismantling the system," Jordan said. "It's a business plan crafted to privatize the services within the School District."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Doug Erickson, via a kind reader's email:
At St. Ambrose Academy in Madison, neither the curriculum nor the faith is watered down.Freshmen at the Catholic high school read Homer's "The Odyssey" and discuss it using the Socratic method. Students attend Mass three times weekly, and religion infuses most classes.
It's an approach that has found great favor among a slice of the Catholic populace. Enrollment is projected to balloon from 68 this school year to 210 in five years.
The growth starkly contrasts the fate of St. Mary's Catholic School in Platteville, also in the Madison Catholic Diocese. The 84-student school is scheduled to close June 1.
Diocesan officials and others say St. Mary's is an atypical case not reflective of the health of the other 45 Catholic schools in the diocese. St. Mary's parishioners became divided over the arrival two years ago of conservative priests. School enrollment and donations dropped.
"Platteville was very unique," said Matthew Kussow, executive director of the Wisconsin Council of Religious & Independent Schools. "They had a specific situation that was a change from the past, and when that happens, issues can come up."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Channel3000.com, via a kind reader:
A teenager said she was attacked and beaten by three classmates near East High School.Related: Madison police calls near local high schools: 1996-2006.Two 16-year-old girls and a 15-year-old girl were arrested last week in connection with the assault.
The victim, Alana Krupp, 15, said she knows the girls involved but maintains she wasn't talking trash about them.
The incident happened last Wednesday at the intersection of Fourth Street and Winnebago Street a block south of East High School.
Krupp arrived at the bus stop like any other day, but in a few seconds an otherwise OK freshman year at East High School was turned upside down when she was confronted by the girls.
"She said, 'I wanted to fight you.' And I said, 'I'm not going to fight you, because there's no point in it. I never did anything to you,'" Krupp said. "She hit me in the face, and I got pulled down to the ground by my hair."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Here's a striking synchronicity: on May 10th (last Thursday) in a Wall St. Journal article about the recent release of U.S. students’ "deeply disappointing"; science scores on the NAEP national assessment, NJ Ed. Comm. Chris Cerf is quoted in the context of differentiating salaries for hard-to-fill positions like science and math:The Obama administration and some state leaders, including the Republican governors of New Jersey and Iowa, in recent years have pushed districts to alter union contracts to allow higher salaries for teachers in sciences and other hard-to-staff subjects. Christopher Cerf, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's education commissioner, said the "market" for science teachers is highly competitive so schools should "use compensation creatively to maximize outcomes for kids." Teachers have insisted that pay changes be made only as part of broader contract negotiations, giving them more input into the process
On the same day the Journal article ran, NJ Assembly Democrats Mila Jasey, Albert Coutinho, Dan Benson, and Ralph Caputo issued a press release on the passage of a new bill intended "to address teacher shortages in math and science."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Rhode Island Department of Education launched a new online tool Tuesday that allows families to track the progress and proficiency of their children's schools.The program is called the Rhode Island Growth Model Visualization Tool. It is essentially a high-tech report card grading local schools and districts based on results of New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) testing.
"What this tool does, is it takes each school and school district that's in it and looks at different grade levels and groups," explained Rhode Island Education Commissioner Deborah Gist. "You can slice and dice [the data] in all kinds of different ways."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The increasing role of standardized testing in U.S. classrooms is triggering pockets of rebellion across the country from school officials, teachers and parents who say the system is stifling teaching and learning.In Texas, some 400 local school boards--more than a third of the state's total--have adopted a resolution this year asking lawmakers to scale back testing. In Everett, Wash., more than 500 children skipped state exams earlier this month in protest. A national coalition of parents and civil rights groups, including the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, signed a petition in April asking Congress to reduce federal testing mandates.
In recent weeks, the protest spread to Florida, where two school boards, including Palm Beach, signed on to a petition similar to the one in Texas. A parent in a third, Broward County, on Tuesday formally requested that school officials support the movement.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Sharon Rosenblatt was talking to her therapist fast and furiously about her dating life, when the woman suddenly interrupted her. "Haven't we heard this before?" the therapist asked.Was Ms. Rosenblatt offended? Not at all. The 23-year-old, who works in business development for an information technology company, says she specifically sought out a tough-love therapist after graduating from college and moving to Silver Spring, Md., two years ago.
"When there's unconditional love from my therapist, I'm not inclined to change," Ms. Rosenblatt says. Previous therapists, she says, would listen passively while she complained unchallenged.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Being maltreated as a child can perhaps affect you for life. It now seems the harm might reach into your very DNA. Two recently published studies found evidence of changes to the genetic material in people with experience of maltreatment. These are the tip of an iceberg of discoveries in the still largely mysterious field of "epigenetic" epidemiology--the alteration of gene expression in ways that affect later health.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In our national conversation about race and other forms of inequality, presidential candidates and the media have fostered a consensus that the civil rights movement is finished. The February groundbreaking for the National Museum of African American History and Culture, for example, celebrated the "history" of racial injustice. Republican candidate Mitt Romney noted that month that we shouldn't be "concerned" about economic injustice -- by now, he averred, that problem has been solved. Even Martin Luther King Jr. has been widely reimagined as a genial, nonpartisan man who would be satisfied with the legalistic gains black Americans have achieved yet unconcerned about their substandard socioeconomic status. Civil rights activists who disagree are said to be stuck in the 1960s or harbor, as Romney put it, a "resentment of success." They are accused of playing the "race card," engaging in "class warfare" or generally disrespecting the sound-bite-consensus that this country has moved beyond the racial and economic complications of its past.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
UW-Madison School of Education, via a kind email:
Visiting lecturer Daniel Trohler is a professor from the University of Luxembourg. He will be speaking about international education perspectives.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Center for European Studies, via a kind email:
Please join us for a lecture on "What Is Bildung? The Everlasting Attractiveness of a Fuzzy Concept in German Education Theory" Rebekka Horlacher, Senior Scientist, University of Zurich, Switzerland. Sponsored by the Center for European Studies, Center for German and European Studies and Curriculum & Instruction.Thursday, May 17, 2012
3:00 - 4:00 pm, 220 Teacher Education Bldg., 225 N. Mills St. Madison, WI
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
60K PDF Newsletter via a kind Jeannie Bettner email:
Members of all MTI bargaining units (MTI, EA-MTI, SEE-MTI, SSA-MTI and USO-MTI) are invited to attend an MTI meeting to discuss the impact of Governor Walker's Act 10 on MTI members, on MTI's various Collective Bargaining Agreements, on the Union itself, and where we can go from here. A question and answer session will follow. Do you have questions?MTI staff and elected leaders are also available to attend meetings at your school or work site. Speak to your MTI Faculty Representative today about scheduling a meeting.
- Wednesday, May 16, 4:30-6:00 p.m., LaFollette High School, Room C-17
- Tuesday, May 22, 4:30-6:00 p.m., Madison Labor Temple, 1602 S. Park Street
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The youngest of twelve kids, Trina was known as a slow child. She had a very low IQ and couldn't read or write. Kids made fun of her for sucking her fingers. Her mother died when Trina was 9, and her father was a violent alcoholic capable of unthinkable cruelty. (Sworn affidavits describe, in addition to horrific abuse against his wife and kids, how he once beat the family dog to death with a hammer as Trina watched, then made his children clean up its remains.) From the time Trina was young, she was mostly cared for by her siblings: among them, Edith (or Edy), the eldest, who took over her mother's responsibilities, and twin sisters Lynn and Linda, just a year older than Trina. In and out of homelessness, Trina and the twins slept in cars and abandoned buildings, washing their clothes in police stations and foraging for food wherever they could, including from trash cans.When she was 11, Trina was sent by her grandmother to Allentown State Hospital for mental treatment; she was discharged at 13 against the advice of her doctor and stopped taking her medication.
Following the fire, prison officials requested she be given a psychiatric evaluation, after which she was deemed unfit for trial and hospitalized. A second evaluation yielded a diagnosis of schizophrenia. But a third assessment, just a few weeks later, deemed her competent to stand trial. Her lawyer did not challenge the decision. Nor did he challenge the prosecutor's successful push to try Trina as an adult. (He would later be jailed and disbarred.) Trina was tried in March 1977. Trial transcripts have been lost, but it's clear that she took the stand as the sole witness for the defense. Frances Newsome was the key witness for the prosecution, telling the jury Trina had set the fire as revenge on Sylvia Harvey for forbidding her sons to play with her.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Editor's note: Progress in the parental school choice movement is measured not only by big gains in states like Indiana and Louisiana, but by the flurry of incremental developments in more states every year. Peter Hanley, executive director of the California-based American Center for School Choice, offers a look at encouraging developments in his home state.California has the nation's largest charter school program, with 982 charter schools serving 412,000 students. But with nearly a two-thirds Democratic legislature heavily influenced by the California Teachers Association, tax credit scholarships or vouchers have been entirely off the table. In fact, charter schools' flexibility is under near constant attack. Now, though, two legislators have introduced innovative approaches that address a unique feature in California's constitution and attempt to bring educational tax credits to the state.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Wisconsin is reworking its application for relief from certain elements of a 10-year-old federal education law, based on feedback received from the U.S. Department of Education last month that outlined where the state's application was light on details.A letter from April 17 indicates the state needs a better plan for transitioning to college- and career-ready standards in its schools, and for implementing teacher and principal evaluation and support systems. Wisconsin's plan also needs ambitious yearly objectives for schools and better criteria for recognizing progress over time in persistently low-performing schools.
State officials on Monday said that the cycle of feedback and revision is normal as states around the country propose new accountability measures for schools that would replace the punitive system under the federal law known as No Child Left Behind.
"This is very, very common," Lynette Russell, assistant state superintendent for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, said in an interview Monday.
Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, who did not see the letter before the weekend, said it affirmed concerns were raised before the application was submitted that DPI's proposal for a new accountability system "left not much meat on the bones."State responds to concerns over No Child Left Behind application"Folks thought they would do a cursory, general waiver and get it, and at the end of the day it would be pretty hard to be held accountable for it," Olsen said. "The (U.S. Education) department is not letting Wisconsin get away with that at all."
The letter commended Wisconsin for planning for a new common set of standards aligned to college and career readiness, and also for developing a teacher evaluation system based on educator practice and student test scores.
But it criticized the application for not detailing how the state would implement those new systems
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
One in 3 young adults with autism have no paid job experience, college or technical schooling nearly seven years after high school graduation, a study finds. That's a poorer showing than those with other disabilities including those who are mentally disabled, the researchers said.With roughly half a million autistic kids reaching adulthood in the next decade, experts say it's an issue policymakers urgently need to address.
The study was done well before unemployment peaked from the recession. The situation today is tough even for young adults who don't have such limitations.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Consensus has it that we are living in the Age of Big Data. When our college president was hired, he declared himself "data driven"; during interviews for vice president of academic affairs, all three finalists announced that they, too, were "data driven" (though none could articulate a clear image of what higher education might look like ten years from now). So what does "data driven" mean? Every day, our digital helpmeets dump petabytes of data into our cringing neural pathways. We are besotted with data; we've never had so much of the stuff. But to be data driven sounds uncomfortably like Captain Ahab (who was whale driven).The words "data driven" are gang members; when I hear them, I can be sure the words "outcomes" and "a culture of evidence" are slouching around nearby and will shortly make an appearance. Often, data is announced (as if newly arrived from Mount Sinai) in totals, aggregates, medians, percentages, rates, multipliers--but then the data just piles up in corners and collects under the bed.
Frankly, I don't have much confidence in data's probative value. Even though digits and stats supply a comforting sense of measurement, certitude, and solidity, data alone is still the smallest particle of information, no matter how much of it accumulates. Data by itself is inert, like Frankenstein's monster, patched together and waiting for a lightning bolt. Sometimes it waits a long time. It may seem irrefutable, but until data is analyzed, it just lays there. Remembering Christmas presents from his childhood in Wales, Dylan Thomas recalled receiving "books that told me everything about the wasp, except why."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Madison School District 3.5MB PDF, via a kind reader's email:
Dear Community Members,Pages 117 to 123 describe the baseline metrics.
The preliminary plan to eliminate achievement gaps provided a framework around which to engage members of the community in a discussion about what we need to do to address the achievement gaps. To gather input, we held community input sessions, met with community organizations, and talked with our staff. Summaries and an analysis of session feedback are listed in the plan and at mmsd.org/thefuture.That input served as our guide in developing these recommendations. Then, we also considered educational research, the new federal mandates of the Response to Intervention (RtI) program, cost, and logistics, as well as community input. We reviewed what has worked in our school district, in our community, and in other districts across the country.
I believe that if we are going to do better by our children, we must invest. But I also believe we have a responsibility to balance the needs of our community and leverage resources for the greatest impact on student achievement. The final recommended plan is reduced from a financial perspective. This was done to ensure greater sustainability from a fiscal perspective.
The revised plan maintains the six original areas of focus. These six chapters illustrate the landscape of education today - areas that are critical to closing achievement gaps. They also represent areas where leverage exists to eliminate our achievement gaps. Any successful plan to close student achievement gaps must employ a combination of strategies. If there were one simple answer, it would have been employed a long time ago and replicated in districts across the country. Our reality calls for many solutions at many levels of the organization. Our problem is a complex one. Our solutions must be equally complex in their approach.
The good news is that research on what works has been going on for years. Although there is no one right way to teach all students, the research is solid on increasing student performance through an aligned curriculum, effective instruction, frequent monitoring of progress, research-based decision making before a child experiences failure, having interventions in place to help learners, and involving the entire community in support of children.
To address this last point, this plan also asks for a commitment from the community to join MMSD using elements of the Strive Model (Kania, John and Kramer, Mark. (2011). "Collective impact." Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2011) to develop a network which links services to schools through a collaborative district approach as well a school-based grass roots "community school model" approach based on each school's need. This concept is elaborated where appropriate in each chapter and in the conclusion of this document.
The recommendations within this plan focus on academic rigor, expectations, accountability, response to behaviors, professional development, cultural competence,3 parents as partners, hiring for diversity, and establishing a new relationship with our community. It also is a plan that supports the federal mandates of Response to Intervention (RtI), which is the practice of providing high-quality instruction, interventions, and progress monitoring which is matched to student needs to make decisions about changes in instruction, and analyzing student response data decisions through collaboration.
These final recommendations reflect some effective work already under way that needs additional focus in order to meet student needs and RtI requirements, some promising practices, and some new ideas. These recommendations are all based on research and are a call to action to our staff, our families, and our community.
Some recommendations from the preliminary plan have been made more cost effective, and others have been elaborated upon. The following items are either new, have been eliminated, or have been revised to allow further planning during the 2012-13 school year:New Initiative: Ensure all K-12 Students Demonstrate Proficiency in the Standards for Mathematics Practice
New Initiative: Drop-Out Recovery
New Initiative: Increase Options for Restorative Practices in the MMSD Student Conduct and Discipline Plan
Eliminated: PEOPLE Program for Elementary Students Eliminated: Youth Court Expansion to Middle School
Eliminated: Implement 21st Century Community Learning Centers in the Highest Need Elementary Schools
Eliminated: Professional Development - Technology Coach
Eliminated: Collaborate with the Community to Implement the Parent-Child Home Program
Further Planning: Extend the School DayThis final recommended plan, Building our Future, was developed to eliminate our achievement gaps. As a school district, we know we need to take new action. We also know we must work with you, members of this great community, to better address the needs of our children. We now look forward to discussing this final proposed plan with the Board of Education. Let's work together to make a difference for our children.
Sincerely,
Daniel A. Nerad, Superintendent
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Mathalicious is currently raising $164,000 to create a series of math videos - 52 in all as the project name suggests. That's one math video a week, along with a teacher's guide on how the videos can be incorporated into lessons. The videos will follow the approach of the rest of Mathalicious mission: show students how math helps you understand the world around you. I don't mean "two trains leave the station" kind of story problems either. I mean problems that are interesting and relevant to students and that teach basic math concepts (Common Core State Standards-aligned) as well as broader problem solving and critical thinking skills. A sample lesson on probability: Does "Bankrupt" come up more often than it should on Wheel of Fortune? Is the show rigged?$164,000 is sizable goal for a Kickstarter project; the average project seeks under $10,000. But there have been some fairly incredible success stories with Kickstarter as of late. Musician Amanda Palmer raised her goal of $100,000 for her latest record and tour in just 6 hours (she's now raised over $600,000 with 21 days still to go). 5 projects so far this year have raised over $1 million, and when its campaign ends on May 18, the Pebble E-Paper Watch will have set the new Kickstarter record, with over $10 million raised. The original ask: $100,000.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I don't spend much time debunking our most powerful educational fad: value-added assessments to rate teachers. My colleague Valerie Strauss eviscerates value-added several times a week on her Answer Sheet blog with the verve of a samurai, so who needs me?Much more on "value added assessment", here.Unfortunately, value-added is still growing in every corner of our nation, including D.C. schools, despite all that torn flesh and missing pieces. It's like those monsters lumbering through this year's action films. We've got to stop them! Let me fling my small, aged body in their way with the best argument against value-added I have seen in some time.
It comes from education analyst and teacher trainer Grant Wiggins and his "Granted, but . . ." blog. He starts with the reasons many people, including him and me, like the idea of value-added. Why not rate teachers by how much their students improve over time? In theory, this allows us to judge teachers in low- and high-income schools fairly, instead of declaring, as we tend to do, that the teachers in rich neighborhoods are better than those in poor neighborhoods because their students' test scores are higher.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In an op-ed featured in Flashreport, Lance Izumi discussed what will happen to California's educational system now that it has agreed to replace its own rigorous state student-learning standards with the comparatively less difficult national standards supported by the Obama administration. Will courses and curriculum change? How will testing of students be affected? Will the effort to reform teacher evaluation be derailed? So far, the answers to these questions are not promising.The Obama administration required states to adopt the national "Common Core" standards as a condition for competing for federal "Race to the Top" grants and for receiving waivers from penalties for failing to comply with the student-achievement requirements of the No Child Left Behind law.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Welcome to the 86th Carnival of Mathematics! is semiprime, nontotient, and noncototient. It is also happy since and . In fact, it is the smallest happy, nontotient semiprime (the only smaller happy nontotient is 68--which is, of course, 86 in reverse--but 68 is not semiprime).However, the most interesting mathematical fact about 86 (in my opinion) is that it is the largest known integer for which the decimal expansion of contains no zeros! In particular, . Although no one has proved it is the largest such , every up to (which is quite a lot, although still slightly less than the total number of integers) has been checked to contain at least one zero. The probability that any larger power of 2 contains no zeros is vanishingly small, given some reasonable assumptions about the distribution of digits in base-ten expansions of powers of two.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
As we piece together the history of the recent proposal to revise the Transportation Standards, it reveals a story of deception, misinformation, abdication of responsibility, and, more than anything else, hypocrisy.The Board will vote on Wednesday evening on a revised set of Transportation Standards for 2012-2013. We can't say what those revised standards will be exactly - they have yet to release the final version. They will undoubtedly vote to approve - they always do. But what will they approve? Even they don't know. This comes after the Board already adopted transportation standards for the coming school year. How did we get here? It's an ugly, ugly story.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Should teachers be setting educational policy? Based on the comments to my recent article for Education Next, the answer is a resounding "yes!" My response is a bit more nuanced: It might be worth a try, although scaling any successes would be challenging.In the article, I acknowledged the tension between my role as education consultant and "policy wonk," on the one hand, and my role as a father of two girls in (a very good) public elementary school, on the other. For example, as a consultant, I help schools implement positive behavioral interventions and supports for disruptive students, but, as a parent, I find myself wishing disruptive students would simply be removed from my daughters' classroom. This tension is hardly unique to education: Consider the well-meaning environmentalist who lives in a large home and drives an SUV.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Gov. Jerry Brown announced on Saturday that the state's deficit has ballooned to $16 billion, a huge increase over his $9.2-billion estimate in January.The bigger deficit is a significant setback for California, which has struggled to turn the page on a devastating budget crisis. Brown, who announced the deficit on YouTube, is expected to outline his full budget proposal on Monday in Sacramento.
"This means we will have to go much further, and make cuts far greater, than I asked for at the beginning of the year," Brown said in the video.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Last fall, Arlene Ackerman, the former schools superintendent in Philadelphia, made a stunning announcement for someone of her status. In a newspaper op-ed, she forcefully came out in favor of expanded school choice options, including more charter schools and yes, even vouchers. "I've come to a sad realization," she wrote. "Real reform will never come from within the system."In this redefinED podcast, Ackerman talks more about her evolution.
For years, she pushed change from the highest perches in K-12 education. Before Philly, she headed the school districts in Washington D.C. and San Francisco. She led the latter when it became a finalist for the prestigious Broad Prize, annually awarded to the best urban school district in the country, in 2005. But the kinds of sweeping reform needed to help poor and minority kids, she said, too often met with resistance from unions, politicians, vendors and others who benefited from not budging.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
This just in from the University of Dayton...The Dayton Early College Academy -- on the University of Dayton campus -- received a bronze medal from U.S. News & World Report in its annual ranking of America's Best High Schools, released May 11.
The report analyzed academic and enrollment data from nearly 22,000 public high schools to find the best in the nation. A total of 4,850 schools received recognition in gold, silver and bronze categories.
DECA is one of four early college high schools in Ohio to receive recognition.
The University of Dayton founded DECA in 2003 in partnership with Dayton Public Schools with the singular focus of preparing urban students to succeed in college.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
My name is Derek, and I was an unpaid intern.I begin with a confession, because the unpaid internship has become something of a dishonor, if not a scandal. And, as New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse wrote in his blockbuster take-down of the institution in 2010, I might have helped various companies conspire to break the law -- even if it's the murkiest, most broken law in the country.
Of the 10 million students at four-year colleges in the U.S., more than 75% have at least one internship before graduating. We don't know how many of those internships are unpaid, but Ross Perlin, the author of Intern Nation, estimates that it's up to one-third. "It's the only major category of work that I know of that is not tracked at all by the Bureau of Labor Statistics," Perlin said.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
November is nearing, and around the country candidates are courting voters. But, if they really want to connect with the men and women they hope to represent, they should start speaking up about a topic Americans care deeply about but which is being ignored.A recent poll by the College Board showed more than two-thirds of voters call education an issue that is "extremely important" to them in the 2012 election. Only jobs and the economy are viewed with more urgency, and large majorities of voters see education and job creation as inextricably linked.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Internet takes college courses out of the classroom. But prior learning assessment takes college outside of college.The practice of granting college credit for learning and knowledge gained outside the traditional academic setting goes back decades, with roots in the G.I. Bill and World War II veterans who earned credits for military training.
But prior learning assessment mostly occurs behind the scenes, partially because colleges avoid loudly advertising that they believe college-level learning can occur before a student ever interacts with faculty members.That low profile is ending, however, as prior learning is poised to break into the mainstream in a big way. The national college completion push and the expanding adult student market are driving the growth. And ramping up to meet this demand are two of the field's early adopters -- the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning and the American Council of Education -- which may soon be even bigger players in determining what counts for college credit.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
John Kemble was the great actor of his generation, the next one on from Garrick. Some critics found they could not think of Hamlet without hearing Kemble in their mind's ear.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Madison School District Administration (PDF).
Two year administrator contracts have been the norm for some time - matching the term and perhaps benefits of the teacher union contracts. The composition of future teacher arrangements (more) may change in Madison, or not. Should the new Superintendent have flexibility in staffing?
What are the student achievement implications of continuing this "status quo" or "same service" practice? Perhaps the District's long standing reading problems are a place to think differently.
UPDATE, via several kind readers:
I compared Madison's proposed Administrator contract hours (PDF) with Sun Prairie's HR document and Waunakee's HR guidelines. The result is the chart below:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A team from Madison West High School blew away its rivals Saturday, winning first place -- and a free trip to London -- in the Team America Rocketry Challenge.The four-member team beat 99 others in the finals at the national competition held in The Plains, Va. The winning team gets an expenses-paid trip to London courtesy of Raytheon Company to compete in the July 15 Farnborough International Air Show.
Contestants must design, build and launch a rocket that reaches exactly 800 feet during a 43- to 47-second flight. The payload, two raw eggs, must parachute to the ground undamaged.
The West team earned a score of 12; a perfect score is zero. The next lowest score was 22. Two other West teams competed Saturday, with one placing 16th and the other 75th.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Many years ago I asked Otto Neugebauer, a pioneering historian of mathematics and astronomy in the ancient world, about his education in pre-World War I Austria. Neugebauer was known both for his comprehensive histories and for his editions and interpretations of very difficult texts--mathematical and astronomical tables and horoscopes, preserved on cuneiform tablets, in Greek papyri and Latin manuscripts, and in many other sources and traditions. (Late in life, Neugebauer mastered Ethiopic and wrote penetrating work on Ethiopian astronomy and calendrics.)I expected him to say something warm about his teachers at gymnasium, along the lines of the memoir in which another great émigré scholar, Erwin Panofsky, described the "lovable pedant" who taught him Greek in Berlin (this gentleman reproached himself in class for failing to notice a misplaced comma in a Greek text, since he himself had written an article on that very comma long before). Instead, Neugebauer told me that he had hated his secondary school. He received his diploma, he explained, only because he volunteered for the army, which led to several years of service in the artillery on the Italian front. And he did not begin to work at a high level until he went to university after the war.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Parents might know what an A means when they see it on a report card, but what if their school was graded "blue?"Madison adopted a "standards-based" report card for middle schools several years ago. Unfortunately, it was not, at the time, compatible with the then new "infinite campus" system. Has this changed?The state Education Department is backing away from its plan to grade schools using three colors -- red, yellow and green -- to one that would use five colors, saying it would be more helpful to parents.
But several education advocacy groups say the new plan is better than the "traffic light," but still falls short of a report card system they said works well in other states and gives parents a clear indication of a school's progress.
"We're glad to hear about the five categories -- a big improvement for the new public reporting system," said Amber Arellano, executive director of the Education Trust -Midwest. "We still think parents intuitively understand an A to F system better than a color system. For example, what does "yellow" mean to a parent in terms of school quality?"
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
It is the latest development in a long-running dispute over the bundling of teaching aids - such as manuals and CD-ROMs - with textbooks, which parents and the government say is pushing up prices.Last year, the Education Bureau imposed a ban on publishers giving schools "free" teaching materials while adding their cost to the prices students paid for the corresponding textbooks.
But on Monday, Suen said schools should get free basic manuals for teachers in an effort to "streamline" the policy, though they not accept free CDs, statistical databases or practice exam questions, which were more expensive.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Next week is National Teacher Appreciation Week, and, as far as I'm concerned, they don't get nearly enough.On Tuesday, the United States Department of Education is hoping that people will take to Facebook and Twitter to thank a teacher who has made a difference in their lives. I want to contribute to that effort. And I plan to thank a teacher who never taught me in a classroom but taught me what it meant to be an educator: my mother.
She worked in her local school system for 34 years before retiring. Then she volunteered at a school in her district until, at age 67, she won a seat on her local school board. Education is in her blood.
Through her I saw up close that teaching is one of those jobs you do with the whole of you -- trying to break through to a young mind can break your heart. My mother cared about her students like they were her own children. I guess that's why so many of them dispensed with "Mrs. Blow" and just called her Mama.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A new report from Stanford University researcher Linda Darling-Hammond details what the components of a comprehensive teacher evaluation system should look like at a time when such assessments have become one of the most contentious debates in education today.Much of the controversy swirls around the growing trend of using students' standardized test scores over time to help assess teacher effectiveness.
This "value-added" method of assessment -- which involves the use of complicated formulas that supposedly evaluate how much "value" a teacher adds to a student's achievement -- is considered unreliable and not valid by many experts, though school reformers have glommed onto it with great zeal.
Any reader of this blog will have seen numerous pieces from educators, mathematicians and others explaining why this method is unfair, as well as pieces on what does work in teacher evaluation.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Researchers at Duke University have given a powerful new demonstration of the gene sequencing technique used successfully in Wisconsin to diagnose and treat Nic Volker, the young boy from Monona who suffered from a never-before-seen intestinal disease.The team at Duke worked for more than two years, sequencing a dozen children with different unknown diseases. By sequencing all of their genes, researchers were able to reach a likely genetic diagnosis for half of the children, according to work detailed in the Journal of Medical Genetics.
The Duke study bolsters what Nic's doctors at the Medical College of Wisconsin and Children's Hospital of Wisconsin have been saying since his landmark case in 2009: The sequencing of our genetic script can solve the riddle of some unknown illnesses, giving hope to families who have spent thousands of dollars and sought numerous medical opinions without success.
"I am absolutely convinced that in the setting of undiagnosed illnesses in children it is incumbent on the health care system to provide this kind of sequencing," said David B. Goldstein, a professor of genetics at the Duke University School of Medicine, who worked on the new study.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Economists normally measure the private return to education by estimating a "Micro-Mincer" regression:(1) log(personal income in $s)= a + b1*(individual education in years)
Given crucial assumptions, b1 is the private return to education. I've discussed some of these crucial assumptions elsewhere. One that I've neglected, though, is the possibility of reverse causation. Maybe higher income (or the expectation of higher income) leads to more education in the same way that higher income leads to more plasma TVs: you buy not as a prudent investment, but because the money's burning a hole in your pocket. If so, b1 overestimates education's private rate of return.
Now you could object that personal income has little effect on educational attainment because individuals pay only a tiny fraction of the bill. If your income suddenly doubled, how many extra years of education would you get in response? An average answer of "one year" seems pretty high, suggesting an extremely small income-->education effect.*
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In the midst of the most desperate threat to our nation, President Abraham Lincoln looked beyond the dire present of the Civil War and signed a groundbreaking national commitment to higher education. On July 2, 1862, the Morrill Act created the land-grant system for state educational institutions to foster engineering and agricultural science.From coast to coast -- from the University of Florida to the University of Alaska -- every state has benefited from Lincoln's foresight and a supportive, bipartisan group of legislators. For generations, that was how Washington looked on higher education.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A survey of employers by the National Association of Colleges and Employers showed those that recruit on campuses plan to boost hiring of new grads by 10.2% from last year. However, on-campus recruiting is only a small slice of the pie--the bulk of graduates find jobs on their own.In a study to be released Thursday, the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University found that recent graduates are taking awhile to find work. Only 49% of graduates from the classes of 2009 to 2011 had found a full-time job within a year of finishing school, compared with 73% for students who graduated in the three years prior.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Do you remember our past reports of Chinese students buried under their books or throwing out their books and notes to relieve stress as China's annual Gaokao national college entrance examinations approach?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Washington Post.Photos.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
From time to time, friends have pondered the path of Madison area students after graduation. I've begun to compile Freshman enrollment data from the UW-Madison and UW-System. These charts illustrate Madison Memorial High School graduates first year UW enrollment from 1983 to 2011. This is of course, just part of the picture. I hope to address other paths over the next few months.
Madison Memorial's senior class enrollment in the year prior to UW System enrollment was 543(2005-2006) 496(2006-2007) 503(2007-2008) 452(2008-2009) 444(2009-2010) 435(2010-2011)
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
From time to time, friends have pondered the path of Madison area students after graduation. I've begun to compile Freshman enrollment data from the UW-Madison and UW-System. These charts illustrate Madison LaFollette High School graduates first year UW enrollment from 1983 to 2011. This is of course, just part of the picture. I hope to address other paths over the next few months.
Madison LaFollette's senior class enrollment in the year prior to UW System enrollment was 425(2005-2006) 366(2006-2007) 421(2007-2008) 404(2008-2009) 374(2009-2010) 389(2010-2011)
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
From time to time, friends have pondered the path of Madison area students after graduation. I've begun to compile Freshman enrollment data from the UW-Madison and UW-System. These charts illustrate Madison Edgewood High School graduates first year UW enrollment from 1983 to 2011. This is of course, just part of the picture. I hope to address other paths over the next few months.
Madison Edgewood's total enrollment, according to its website is currently 650 students.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Today we started the spring term, 6-week Calculus 2 class that I've been writing about for the last few days. We had a good time today, getting comfortable with each other and doing some review of the basics of the definite integral. Before we get too far into the term, I wanted to outline the technology infrastructure of the course.For a long time, I'd used the learning management system (LMS) of my institution as the basic technology for the course, and everything else kind of fit around the LMS. At GVSU the default LMS is Blackboard. But I decided after used Blackboard this past year that we have irreconcilable differences. I don't ask much from my LMS; I mainly use it to archive files, provide a link to a central calendar, post grades, and to make announcements. I don't need all the dozens of other features Blackboard offers, and the profusion of features in Blackboard tends to make it a mile wide and an inch deep, with the basic functions needed for a class (email, file hosting, gradebook) kludgy and difficult. So I decided to make a break with Blackboard and strike out on my own.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Of the state's 50 largest school districts, the Watertown Unified School District ranked 48th, ahead only of Racine and Milwaukee, according to a recent report by the MacIver Institute. However, some education researchers said the report doesn't tell the whole story.The report took the 50 largest school districts in Wisconsin and compared them based on factors such as performance on the Wisconsin Concepts Knowledge Examination (WKCE), ACT test scores and participation, Advanced Placement scores and participation, graduation rate, students eligible for free or reduced price lunch and students enrolled in English Language Learners programs.
The top five districts were Elmbrook, Marshfield Unified, New Berlin, Verona Area and Middleton-Cross Plains Area. The bottom five were Kaukauna Area, Superior, Watertown Unified, Racine Unified and Milwaukee.
The report ranked Watertown 41st in student achievement, 46th in student attainment and 24th in student population affect on performance, for an overall grade of D- and rank of 48.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Fact 1: Close to a third of U.S. adults are obese. Fact 2: Almost 90% of people with newly-diagnosed type 2 diabetes are overweight. County maps reflect the close links between these key public health challenges.Click on a county and move the slider bar to compare obesity and diabetes statistics.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Tatiana Pina via a kind reader's email:
The House Chamber and State House corridors filled up Monday with 150 students from Providence schools who came to pitch ideas for making their city a better place to live.Angel Taveras
The ideas included tackling environmental safety, gang violence, prostitution, NECAP testing and teenage obesity.The presentations were part of school partnerships with Generation Citizen, a program founded in 2008 by Scott Warren, then a Brown University senior. Education Commissioner Deborah Gist, Mayor Angel Taveras, Rep. David N. Cicilline and Warren attended the event.
While I have been mayor of Providence over the last 15 months, our city has made tough choices to position Providence for progress and improve our city's economic, educational and political outlook.We have taken the difficult steps to make structural reforms to our pension system that protect the system for current workers and our retirees. We have taken significant strides to improve our public schools, and have convened a Children and Youth Cabinet that has made concrete and strategic suggestions for reform.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The idea that a handful of college instructors and student teachers in the school of education at the University of Massachusetts could slow the corporatization of public education in America is both quaint and ridiculous.Sixty-seven of the 68 students studying to be teachers at the middle and high school levels at the Amherst campus are protesting a new national licensure procedure being developed by Stanford University with the education company Pearson.
The UMass students say that their professors and the classroom teachers who observe them for six months in real school settings can do a better job judging their skills than a corporation that has never seen them.
They have refused to send Pearson two 10-minute videos of themselves teaching, as well as a 40-page take-home test, requirements of an assessment that will soon be necessary for licensure in several states.
"This is something complex and we don't like seeing it taken out of human hands," said Barbara Madeloni, who runs the university's high school teacher training program. "We are putting a stick in the gears."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
. The financial health of the California State Teachers' Retirement System (CalSTRS) is much in the news these days, and that health is intertwined with the upcoming ballot initiative campaign to raise income and sales taxes in the state. So it's worth noting that the number of California public school teachers who retired in 2011 declined for the first time in five years, and by a hefty 10 percent.The median retirement age is also climbing, from 61.2 in 2001 to 61.9 in 2011. California teachers are vested after five years, and can retire as early as age 55. Those retiring in 2011 had fewer median years of service (25.5) than any previous group of retirees in the last 10 years.
The good news for CalSTRS and the state budget is that with fewer years of service, the average 2011 retiree received less of a payout than the 2010 retiree ($168 per month less). The bad news is that the good news only postpones the inevitable. CalSTRS currently pays benefits to some 253,000 retired teachers and surviving family members. There are more than 603,000 teachers who still work or have worked in the public schools and will be eligible for pensions when they retire.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Beginning in the 2016-17 school year, the parents of students who cannot demonstrate adequate literacy skills at the end of third grade will be given a choice: enroll their children in an intensive reading program over the summer or have them repeat the grade.The element of parental involvement and choice was a key concession, said Sen. Herman Quirmbach, D-Ames and the Senate's lead negotiator on the bill.
But even as lawmakers found compromise on the policy for early-grade literacy, they were unable to agree on funding for it.
Chambers and Quirmbach confirmed on Tuesday that the Legislature would not appropriate any funds for enhanced early-grade literacy efforts in next year's budget. Under the language of the bill, then, school districts will not be required to implement the additional efforts until the state provides additional dollars to fund them.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Eighteen-year-old Nick Wilckens and his five friends want to arrive in style at their senior prom next week. Instead of a predictable black limousine, they plan to clang to the curb in a vintage firetruck. "We're going to be the people who are remembered," Mr. Wilckens says.His friend, Jared Kosmala, 18, adds, "We want to spray people with hoses. But I don't know if that's going to happen."
In Racine, Wis., where Mr. Wilckens and his friends live, students have a 60-year tradition of taking oddball transportation to the city's big prom party, from homemade parade floats to vintage hearses.
Dina Davis made history in 1987 by arriving with her date on a baby elephant named Louella. "I'm just a normal girl, but I had a crazy prom night," says Ms. Davis of Shorewood, Wis., who works in sales for a food company. Her date borrowed the elephant from a petting zoo where he worked, Ms. Davis says. "Nobody will ever beat it."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
It's that terrifying time for seniors -- high school seniors, that is: the nail-biting moment when millions of them find out whether they've been accepted or rejected by their college of choice. But if that in-or-out verdict appears final, there's another one that's anything but definitive -- namely, a college's offer of financial help to parent and child.At a time when demand for college aid is soaring -- applications for federal assistance have increased by 59 percent since 2006 -- 07, according to the U.S. Department of Education and FinAid.org -- appeals of award packages are also on the rise. Some colleges say requests for reconsideration are up as much as 30 percent over the past three years; this is forcing administrators to enter into sensitive financial negotiations and even renegotiations (yes, you can appeal an appeal). And the back-and-forth involves not just newly accepted students but also those at the tail end of their campus experience.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The brightly colored walls of La Escuela Fratney Elementary School in Milwaukee used to reverberate the sounds of laughter and chatter as students painted their masterpieces and crafted pottery.Related: 2012 WSMA State Festival Madison Area High School Student Event CountsToday the art room echoes nothing but silence as it has stood nearly vacant all school year. In a year of budget cuts, La Escuela Fratney had to let go of its art teacher for the 2012-'13 school year, and with her, what MPS parent Jasmine Alindar describes as the "soul of the school."
"She was and still is a very beloved member of the school community," Alindar said. "So it was a really hard blow."
Alindar, whose fifth-grade daughter, Alice, has attended La Escuela Fratney since first grade, said the elementary school also lacks specialized music and physical education teachers and has never offered courses in these subjects while her daughter has been enrolled.
La Escuela Fratney isn't alone in Milwaukee Public Schools. Eighty-seven of 175 schools - many of them elementary schools - no longer have specialized teachers for art, music or physical education.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
bout 22 percent of California's eighth-graders tested on a national science test passed, ranking the Golden State among the worst in the nation, according to figures released Thursday.2011 NAEP Science results (3.3MB PDF).Scores from the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation's Report Card, show that too few students have the skills that could lead to careers in the field, educators said.
Nationally, 31 percent of eighth-graders who were tested scored proficient or advanced. Both the national and state scores improved slightly over scores from two years ago, the last time the test was administered.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
via a kind Sarah Fudin email. More about Sarah @ 2tor.com:
Sarah joined 2tor in January 2010 as a 2tern (a term she coined to replace intern), and shortly thereafter became a Student Support Advisor for the MAT@USC program. Sarah most recently joined the marketing team in New York City where she works on a variety of projects across all of the company's programs. Sarah is a 2009 graduate of Lehigh University where she earned her Bachelors in Business and Economics with a focus in Marketing. While at Lehigh, Sarah was a proud Mountain Hawk and captained the varsity lacrosse team. Sarah enjoys running and arts and crafts.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
via a kind email.
Perhaps, one day, Madison will take bold steps to address its reading (more) and math challenges. The recent rejection of the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school proposal illustrates how far our community must travel.
About College Track:
College Track is the catalyst for change for under-resourced high school students who are motivated to earn a college degree. Since its inception, College Track has grown each year, strengthening its services and expanding its program to support more and more students.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I support the teaching profession, administration, school boards and public education. Above balancing the needs of adults, however, my main responsibility is for students and the environments necessary for their learning.An alternate view from Rose Locander: Gut education now, pay laterHundreds of decisions must be made daily to support that learning environment. Some decisions are easy, obvious and routine; some are difficult, painful and even courageous. All decisions are subject to both support and criticism. In a democratic environment with local control for schools, I wouldn't want it any other way.
A transformational plan for high school staffing was presented recently to the Oconomowoc School Board. The plan reallocates resources, human and financial, and deploys them where they are needed the most. Across seven departments at Oconomowoc High School, an original staff of 60 will be reduced to a staff of 45. The 45 teachers each will be assigned an additional class section and will be compensated $14,000 each for that addition and the loss of some preparation time within the school day.
Unfortunately, 15 positions will be eliminated and teachers will be personally affected. Some teachers are eligible for retirement, some will be reassigned based on licensure and, unfortunately, nine will be laid off. The plan also generates a recurring savings of over $500,000 annually, maintains all programs and services for high school students and does not increase class sizes.
When I first read of the draconian hits to public education that the Oconomowoc Area School District is proposing, I thought this might be a belated April Fools' joke. Who in their right mind guts their high school staff in an attempt to balance their budget?Related, in Madison: Budget Cuts: We Won't Be as Bold and Innovative as Oconomowoc, and That's Okay. Remarkable.The school district wants to reduce its high school teaching staff by about 20%. It has become obvious that the "tools" given to school districts by Gov. Scott Walker have turned into sharpened arrows directed at the heart of public education.
I have questions for the residents of Oconomowoc: Are you going to accept what is going on in your district? Is this what you want for your children? Are you willing to have overworked staff members try to help your children with key curricular subjects? Are you willing to watch as your district goes knee-deep into the abyss?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"CREATE the family you want: boy or girl," ran an advertisement for the Washington Centre for Reproductive Medicine, an American clinic located two hours' drive south of the Canadian border. Using in vitro fertilisation to select the sex of a child is illegal in Canada, and the ad was soon withdrawn. But for a while it ran in the Indo-Canadian Voice, a newspaper for South Asian migrants.Sex selection is overwhelmingly associated with China and India. But it may be spreading to rich countries, too. A study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) on April 16th looked at 767,000 births in Ontario province from 2002-07 and checked them against the mother's country of origin.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
The doom-and-gloomers were wrong about our public schools.Most Dane County districts have figured out ways to avoid teacher layoffs next year despite cuts in state aid and a tight revenue cap.
The State Journal last week surveyed Dane County's 16 main school districts on preliminary non-renewal notices, which had to be issued by April 30. Monona Grove issued notices to one full-time and seven part-time employees, and Mount Horeb delivered one layoff notice.
That was about it.
Madison, Sun Prairie, Stoughton, McFarland, Verona, Oregon, DeForest, Waunakee and Deerfield reported no layoff notices to teachers this year. Belleville reduced hours for one position, and Cambridge cut a principal position in February.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Several students at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County noticed their linear algebra teacher was struggling this semester. They said he made mistakes, erased his work without explanation and seemed confused.Then it got worse. He quit in mid-March. The administration had to scramble. Retired math chair Jerry Berry, with no experience teaching linear algebra, kept an eye on student progress while a George Mason University graduate student provided the instruction. The graduate student look a leave when his wife had a baby. Another graduate student replaced him. A substitute teacher without much linear algebra experience replaced Berry as supervising teacher, telling students he would do his best.
This happens in regular schools, but Jefferson is the least regular school imaginable. It is our nation's most selective high school, with an average SAT score of 2,218, serving a broad swath of Northern Virginia. It is known for its great faculty and splendid equipment. "Multiple teachers is not ideal, and almost unheard of at TJ," said Myra Spoden, who teaches other linear algebra classes at the school.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Michelle Rhee's faith in regulation is odd. The public school system is super-heavily regulated with laws and policies streaming down from the federal, state and local levels. Despite all of that, much of the system performs at a tragically poor level. That of course is not to say that vouchers should have no regulation, but the right level of regulation is not "heavy."Rhee also places far too much weight on the results of standardized test and gives far too little deference to the judgment of parents. Parents make decisions about schools for a large variety of reasons- including things like school safety, peer groups and the availability of specialized programs. In addition to missing the whole point about school choices being multifaceted with parents best able to judge all the factors, individual test scores bounce around from year to year, they often take a temporary hit when a child transfers and adjusts to a new school.
The notion of having program administrators looking at the math and reading tests and deciding to cast children back to their 'failing neighborhood school' is very problematic. Pity the poor voucher program apparatchiks who have to drag children back to a public school where they had been continually bullied because they had the flu on testing day. Pity the children more. The subject of what to do about poorly performing private schools in a choice system is a complex topic and opinions vary widely. Rhee's proposed solution however does not begin to capture this complexity. Full post here.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Common Core national math and reading standards, adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia two years ago, are coming under attack from some quarters as a federal intrusion into state education matters.The voluntary academic standards, which specify what students should know in each grade, were heavily promoted by the Obama administration through its $4.35 billion Race to the Top education-grant competition. States that instituted changes such as common learning goals received bonus points in their applications.
Supporters say the Common Core standards better prepare students for college or the workforce, and are important as the U.S. falls behind other nations in areas such as math proficiency.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
U.S. News and World Report this week released its list of the top high schools in the country and in each state, but Madison's four high schools didn't make the cut.The WKCE has long been criticized for its lack of rigor. Background: Ouch! Madison schools are 'weak'? and College Station's School DistrictThat's because under the three-step formula the magazine used to rate high schools, the combined test scores of black, Hispanic and low-income students at East, La Follette, Memorial and West were too low to qualify the schools for recognition.
It's the fourth time the magazine, known for its annual rankings of college and graduate schools, has ranked high schools and the first time since December 2009. The magazine worked with the American Institutes for Research to develop the ranking system.
The magazine reviewed reading and math test scores for nearly 22,000 high schools in the country. Of that number, only 5,267 high schools, including the four in Madison, advanced to step two of the analysis. That means math and reading test scores exceeded expectations among other high schools in the state given the level of poverty in each school.
But Madison's schools appear to have faltered in the second step of the analysis, which compares a weighted average of math and reading scores for each school's "disadvantaged students" -- i.e. black, Hispanic and low-income students -- with the same group statewide.
In 2011-12, 53.5 percent of Wisconsin's disadvantaged students scored proficient or advanced on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination, compared with about 47 percent at each of the four Madison high schools.
Related: www.wisconsin2.org
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Now that the College Board and the Deeper Learning Project have shown us the way to save time and money in the schools by assessing student writing by computer at the rate, as the College Board has reported, of 16,000 samples in 20 seconds, it is surely time to look for new ways to save money and time with exciting new digital technology.
School sports presently take hundreds of hours out of the academic year, not just in matches and games, but in the countless hours of practice demanded, not only out of student time, but of faculty time as well.
Finland has solved this particular problem by having no sports offered in its educational institutions. If students want to play some sport, they can join a club in the community. This saves an enormous amount of time for both students and faculty in the academic calendar year.
Of course, the Finnish approach is out of the question for high schools in the United States for many reasons, but that does not mean that exciting new 21st Century technology cannot make an exciting new contribution.
Here the United States military has shown us the way. Instead of using up oceans of jet fuel, of the sort now needed not only for aircraft but for Abrams tanks as well, much of the student/soldier/airman training time is now spent in computer simulators.
Just think what simulators could do for high school sports! It would still be necessary to put time aside for actual football, basketball, soccer, baseball and other games and matches, but the time now absorbed on the practice fields could perhaps, with the right new software and computers, be transferred to computer simulators for each activity.
The initial cost would be enormous, of course, and great news for the technology companies who now seem so interested in education, and demands on student time might not be diminished that much, but just think of the former coaching time saved for our teachers!
At last they might be able to assign those serious academic research papers they have had to avoid for so long because they simply did not have the time to devote to guide students in writing them.
The great majority of our public high school students now graduate without ever having read a complete nonfiction book or written one serious research paper, and so they continue to go off to further education greatly unprepared for the reading and writing requirements they encounter.
But with these new computer sports simulators, that can be remedied. Teachers will once again have the time, saved for them by the computer simulations, to assign and discuss actual history books and to work with students on their academic expository writing, which has been so sadly neglected because of other demands, such as coaching, that have traditionally been placed on teacher time.
It is very exciting to realize that modern 21st Century technology might be able to do as much good for academic reading and writing as it is apparently doing with the blindingly swift, superficial, and moronic "assessment" it is now employed to offer with those tens of thousands of formulaic meaningless samples of student writing!
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
You are cordially invited to attend the graduation ceremony for students of the UW-Madison Odyssey Project Class of 2011-2012. Project Director Emily Auerbach and Writing Coach Marshall Cook will present certificates attesting to students' successful completion of six introductory UW credits in English. UW-Madison Interim Chancellor David Ward will make congratulatory remarks.
From September to May, students in this rigorous humanities course have discussed great works of literature, American history, philosophy, and art history while developing skills in critical thinking and persuasive writing. The evening will include brief remarks or performances by each graduating student; recognition of supplemental teachers Jean Feraca, Gene Phillips, and Craig Werner; acknowledgment of Odyssey Project donors and supporters; and music and refreshments.
Web site: www.odyssey.wisc.edu
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
From time to time, friends have pondered the path of Madison area students after graduation. I've begun to compile Freshman enrollment data from the UW-Madison and UW-System. These charts illustrate Madison East High School graduates first year UW enrollment from 1983 to 2011. This is of course, just part of the picture. I hope to address other paths over the next few months.
I have been unable to obtain senior class high school enrollments. The Wisconsin DPI website only mentions the total high school population.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
From time to time, friends have pondered the path of Madison area students after graduation. I've begun to compile Freshman enrollment data from the UW-Madison and UW-System. These charts illustrate Madison West High School graduates first year UW enrollment from 1983 to 2011. This is of course, just part of the picture. I hope to address other paths over the next few months.
I have been unable to obtain senior class high school enrollments. The Wisconsin DPI website only mentions the total high school population.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
One finding (from Seymour, Aro & Erskine, 2003) illustrated in one figure (Figure 5.3 from Stan Dehaene's marvelous book, Reading in the Brain.). The figure shows errors in word reading at the end of first grade, by country.Are we to conclude that the differences are due to educational practice? The vaunted Finnish system shows smashing results even at this early age, whereas the degenerate British system can't get it right?
Countrywide differences in instruction could play a role, but Dehaene emphasize that the countries in which children make a lot of errors--Portugal, France, Denmark, and especially Britain--just happen to have deeper orthographies.
A shallow orthography means that there is a straightforward correspondence between letters and phonemes. English, in contrast, has one of the deepest (most complex) orthographies among the alphabetic languages: for example, the letter combination "gh" if pronounced differently in in "ghost," "eight," and "enough."
In short, children learning to read English have a difficult task in front of them--and so too, therefore, do teachers.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
IN THE past year students protesting over the cost of university education in business-friendly Chile have captured the world's attention. In recent months their counterparts in statist Quebec have taken up the cause. Since February about a third of the province's 450,000 university students have boycotted classes to oppose the tuition-fee increases planned by Jean Charest, the province's Liberal premier. Some have blocked roads and vandalised government buildings. On April 25th and 26th around 115 people were arrested, following evening protests that turned into window-smashing in central Montreal.Quebeckers have long seen cheap university education as a birthright. The decision by the centrist Liberals to double fees in 1990 was one reason why they lost control of the province. Their successor was the separatist Parti Québécois (PQ), which responded to a student strike in 1996 by freezing tuition fees for 11 years.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
When Susan Romano first read her son Zach's financial aid letter from Drexel University, a private college in Philadelphia, her eyes immediately jumped to the line highlighted in yellow: "$13,442 expected payment" for the first year at the $63,000-a-year school."At first, I thought it was great," says Romano, an insurance claims representative from Huntingdon, Pa. "The more I read it over and over, the worse it got."
It turned out the college's "offered financial aid" included $42,000 in loans to be taken out by the family.
"A loan to me is not financial aid," says Romano. "It is money I have to pay."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Prepaid debit cards are becoming the de facto debit cards for a growing number of people these days. This is partially because issuers are promoting the heck out of them and partially because people, especially younger people, view them as preferable to a traditional bank account. As a result, a small number of colleges are experimenting with -- and profiting from -- hybrid student ID cards that are also prepaid debit cards. Is this a clever way for cash-strapped schools to avoid socking students with yet another tuition hike, or are colleges doing their students a disservice?There are a couple of reasons why these cards got popular in the first place: Issuers like them because there's no lending risk (you're spending your own money) and because they can earn higher interchange fees from merchants. People told interviewers in a recent focus group they like prepaid cards because they like the built-in discipline, and because they really, really hate bank fees. They also griped about prepaid debit card fees, but said card companies present them in an understandable, up-front way, which banks don't do.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
It's graduation season, which means that students, teachers, and administrators alike are all thinking about one thing: Facebook.Schools around the globe have a fascination with--indeed, sometimes a fixation on--the social networking site and what their students are getting up to online. Questions about the appropriate response to student material on social networking sites have existed for years, but they're exploding into serious policy questions (and even laws) as such sites become almost ubiquitous teen hangouts.
For instance: can school administration use social networking to keeps tabs on what students do during the school day? What about things they do after leaving school property?
In the St. Louis suburb of Clayton, the big news this week was the resignation of Clayton High School's principal, Louise Losos. According to local paper the Post-Dispatch, someone named Suzy Harriston had made Facebook "friends" with more than 300 people, including many high school students, despite the fact that no one knew who she was. On April 5, the school's former quarterback claimed publicly that "Harriston" was really Losos. According to the paper:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Establishing school choice for parents and ending social promotion for students are two top priorities in Gov. Brian Sandoval's education reform agenda for the 2013 legislative session, an administration official said.Linking pay to performance and providing professional development to ensure students have the best possible classroom teachers is a third major priority, said Dale Erquiaga, senior adviser to Sandoval.
Erquiaga briefed the Nevada State Public School Charter Authority on the governor's education reform agenda being readied for the next session.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Beyond the naval shipyard in south-east Washington lies Fort McNair, America's third-oldest continuous fort, which looks across the Potomac at the Ronald Reagan national airport. Sacked by the British in the war of 1812, the fort is today better known as the home of the National Defense University (NDU) - the descendant of the Army Industrial College that was set up in 1924 to prevent a recurrence of the procurement difficulties that had blighted the US military during the First World War. It was also supposed to act as a kind of internal think tank for the military.NDU was the place where promising officers were sent to prepare their minds for leadership. Dwight Eisenhower, after whom its main redbrick building is named, graduated from here. By focusing on the resources needed to sustain the US military, these mid-career officers think differently to others: they grasp the importance of a robust economy. "Without it, we are nothing," says Alpha, a thoughtful air force colonel, who, as is the custom, is known by his military nickname (a name I have changed to protect his identity). "People forget that America's military strength is because of our power. It didn't cause it."
I got to know Alpha in peculiar circumstances. Unusually for a foreigner, particularly one whose forebears once trashed the place, I was invited by the NDU to judge the school's annual exercise in national strategising. Along with two other "distinguished visitors" - a label that has never before, and is unlikely again, to be bestowed on me - I was invited to assess a ten-year national security plan for the US that the students had spent the previous two weeks thrashing out. The campus also conducts hi-tech war simulations in which outsiders with military or diplomatic expertise are invited to participate.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Access our powerful, easy-to-use gradebook from anywhere. Our application comes with a free gradebook that aligns to assignments you create in and outside of Kite.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Proposed new diagnostic criteria for autism don't appear to reduce the number of children diagnosed with that condition, according to preliminary data presented at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting on Sunday.Those findings could damp the controversy that has surrounded suggested changes to the main psychiatric diagnostic manual in the U.S., the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, about how autism and related disorders that are characterized by social impairments and repetitive behavior are categorized.
One of the main changes, which has yet to be finished, recommends combining several disorders, including Asperger's syndrome and "pervasive developmental delay not otherwise specified," with autism into one broad category known as autism-spectrum disorder.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Tony Evers via "DPI ConnectED":
1. Common Core Standards - Wisconsin GuidanceMuch more on the "Common Core" academic standards, here.New DPI publications help Wisconsin educators understand and implement the Common Core State Standards for English language arts and mathematics, as well as the new concept of Literacy in All Content Areas.
Wisconsin adopted the standards in 2010, but that was the easy task. Implementing them through engaging instruction coupled with rigorous learning activities and assessment is the hard work.
The first step requires that teachers know and understand the standards. The new publications provide guidance on the standards' relationship to Wisconsin's vision of Every Child a Graduate, supporting all students through Response to Intervention systems, and the responsibility that all teachers have for developing reading, writing, thinking, speaking, and listening skills.
A distinguishing feature of the Common Core State Standards is their emphasis on disciplinary literacy. To be career and college ready, students must know how to read and write complex informational and technical text. So, instruction in every classroom, no matter the discipline, must focus on both the content and the reading and writing skills students need to demonstrate learning.
Wisconsin educators are committed to grasping content and providing high-quality instruction. Combining helpful resources with effective practices used by quality educators leads to success for Wisconsin students.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The 2012 Wisconsin recall election primary is today. Teacher appreciation week is underway as well.
Teachers - the people who educate us and give us the vital knowledge which we need to live our lives. They encourage, support, discipline and prepare us for the road ahead and now it's time for us to show them our appreciation. Teacher Appreciation Week begins on the 7th until the 11th of May 2012, which will be the perfect opportunity for us to show teachers how thankful we are for their support. So boys and girls, it's time for us to demonstrate how much our teachers mean to us, let's all say a big thank you to the people who work really hard so that we can have a better future.Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (PDF):The 8th of May 2012 will mark Teacher Appreciation Day and students all across America will show their appreciation by rewarding their teachers with lovely gifts. These gifts can come in a variety of shapes and sizes - remember, it's the thought that counts! Your school will also have a special schedule lined up which will provide many outlets for you to show how much you're teacher means to you. Maybe you could write your teacher a poem or even a story about your favorite memory. You may also choose to make you're teacher a "best teacher in the world" award, and present it to him or her during the week.
If you are not among those who voted early, be sure you vote tomorrow. The terrible legislation, Act 10, which has put your economic security and your employment security at risk would not be on
the books if voter turnout in 2010 had been as great as in 2008. 812,086 fewer people voted in Wisconsin in 2010 than in 2008. Governor Walker won by only 124,638. Every MTI member doing their part will help reverse Act 10 and restore your rights and security. No matter who wins the primary, we need ALL HANDS ON DECK to rid our state of Governor Walker's divisive approach to balancing the budget on the backs of working families, cuts to public education, women's health and the dismantling of the safety net, in favor of continued tax breaks to out-of-state corporate interests funding his campaign and his legal defense fund. The far-right is trying to make Wisconsin the model for how to break unions. Join those standing up against Act 10 by ensuring that everyone votes on June 5!MTI Faculty Representatives will schedule a meeting at each work site to discuss the effective ways to increase voter turnout. Make contact with friends and family, encourage them to vote, make a phone call or send a note or email the importance of this election. Personal contact makes a big difference.
MTI members will be making calls to union households from the Labor Temple and participating in door-to-door contacts. These efforts are aimed at reaching the infrequent voters, particularly those who voted in 2008 and did not vote in 2010. We need them to assure success. This election will directly impact the future of your profession, your pay and your benefits, your security and the future of public education.
Action is needed to assure success. See www.madisonteachers.org for ways to get involved.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Last week Bill Schmidt, of Michigan State University, rolled out in a highly publicized national press event the "key conclusions" from his recent research. We can't see any of the underlying research, as Schmidt did not publish it. Its supposed findings, however, already got so much uncritical exposure and praise from the usual suspects that it is important to put Schmidt's words in their proper context. And that context seems more problematic than organizations like Achieve, or Chiefs for Change, who sponsored this research, would like us to believe.I have reviewed Schmidt's presentation, and these are some of my observations.
1) First, we should note how carefully Schmidt hedges his bets. His first (and last) slide says that the Common Core Standards for Mathematics "[c]an potentially elevate the academic performance of America's students" (with the emphasis on the "potentially" in the original).
It is hard to imagine a more sweeping disclaimer--almost anything can "potentially" elevate academic performance. More money; more professional development; more unionization; more school choice; more selectivity in choosing teachers; better textbooks; better parent education via public campaigns; better movies from Hollywood that will improve character education and discipline of youth; and so on.
2) Schmidt repeats in multiple slides that parents and teachers support the Common Core Standards and claim to be familiar with them. A large fraction of teachers even supposedly believes it is prepared to teach them.
I can believe that teachers heard about them, but I doubt many have any real basis for liking them, or for claiming to be prepared to teach them. Other surveys found that most teachers and parents don't really know or understand the actual content of the standards and the implications of teaching them. After teachers actually try teaching them in the classroom and we see the assessments, maybe we could put more trust in these surveys.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Online education is not new. The University of Phoenix started its online degree program in 1989. Four million college students took at least one online class during the fall of 2007.But, over the past few months, something has changed. The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures.
This week, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, have formed a company, Coursera, which offers interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford, Michigan, Penn and Princeton. Many other elite universities, including Yale and Carnegie Mellon, are moving aggressively online. President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, "There's a tsunami coming."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Internet takes college courses out of the classroom. But prior learning assessment takes college outside of college.The practice of granting college credit for learning and knowledge gained outside the traditional academic setting goes back decades, with roots in the G.I. Bill and World War II veterans who earned credits for military training.
But prior learning assessment mostly occurs behind the scenes, partially because colleges avoid loudly advertising that they believe college-level learning can occur before a student ever interacts with faculty members.
That low profile is ending, however, as prior learning is poised to break into the mainstream in a big way. The national college completion push and the expanding adult student market are driving the growth. And ramping up to meet this demand are two of the field's early adopters -- the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning and the American Council of Education -- which may soon be even bigger players in determining what counts for college credit.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
We have posted numerous times about grade inflation in the school district, which is great on the ego, but has a nasty after-bite if one opts to go on to college.Looking back over the years we documented the following for middle school kids and grade inflation, using the honor roll as our data:
2008 3rd Quarter: 55% of all middle schools made the honor roll; 18% scored perfect 4.0's
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Bureaucracy is crushing America's schools. That's the inescapable conclusion of virtually every essay from America the Fixable's April education series -- by experts from the right and left, by union leader Randi Weingarten and charter school innovator David Feinberg. Mere reform won't work. The existing legal structure needs to be dismantled. Polling shows that's what the American people want as well.Solving the nation's most entrenched problems See full coverage
Inspired by the bold views of the essays from the series, and also by readers' comments, I've come up with a proposed presidential platform for overhauling America's public schools. It calls for a radical change in approach, replacing bureaucracy with individual responsibility and accountability.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
iPhones, Nintendos and Kindles -- devices synonymous with "fun" -- are taking a new role in the classroom, thanks to a new trend in education called Bring Your Own Technology - or BYOT.BYOT programs -- like the one at Georgia's Coal Mountain Elementary School -- encourage students to bring in their own personal mobile technology -- including iPads, Kindle Fires, netbooks -- even gaming devices -- to use during class.
"It's really a simple thing," says Tim Clark, District Technology Specialist for Forsyth County School District. "Kids have technology in their pockets and [are] taking them to school, but trying to hide them from teachers and from their parents. What we're trying to do is have the kids take them out of their pockets and use [them] for instruction."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The leaders of the legislature's Black and Puerto Rican Caucus spoke out Thursday about education reform, calling for legislation that gives the education commissioner a strong hand and ample flexibility to turn around low-performing schools.Mark Pazniokas and Jacqueline Rabe Thomas: Minority legislators back Malloy -- to a point.Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven, chairman of the caucus, said the group supports giving the commissioner broad authority to reconstitute a low-achieving school. The group also wants the commissioner to be able to convert a troubled school into a state or local charter school and to be able to put the school under the control of a non-profit entity. Gov.Dannel P. Malloy originally proposed similar measures, but subsequent working versions of the legislation have reined in the commissioner's power.
The 22-member caucus detailed its position as members of Malloy's administration and Democratic legislative leaders continue to negotiate to reach an agreement on a reform bill before the session ends May 9.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The International Baccalaureate (IB) encompasses programmes in primary, middle and diploma years for students aged from three to 19. While many schools in Hong Kong now offer different curriculums leading to the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme, they may not adopt all of the IB programmes from the primary level.Those that do offer them award diplomas after students finish their middle years programmes.
Some schools offer diploma programmes in conjunction with the International General Certificate of Secondary Education or the General Certificate of Secondary Education. As a parent, it is important to consider which high school credential your child will present for admission to university. Is it more suitable for your child to have an A-level, the American High School Diploma, or an IB?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
via a kind reader:
The Sun-Times says "CTU's reckless strike talk is bad for Chicago's kids":But MTI has a different view:
"If one teacher union goes on strike we ALL should in #solidarity!!! Change will come from the teachers."
https://twitter.com/#!/MtiMadison/status/198900868572127233
"#edchat- Would YOU go on strike in #solidarity with Chicago teachers? Would you go on strike to make a statement and fight for #publiced?"
https://twitter.com/#!/MtiMadison/status/198901424854269953"Re-asking question from yesterday: Educators, would you strike in #solidarity with Chicago teachers? In support of REAL #publiced change?" https://twitter.com/#!/MtiMadison/status/199191706296516609
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
It was immediately christened a win-win deal. Win-win is one of corporate America's less irritating phrases and, in this case, an accurate description of Microsoft's $300m (£186m) tie-up with US bookseller Barnes & Noble.If you missed it, the deal will see the two companies create a new venture that will own the Nook, the digital reading device that Barnes & Noble introduced in 2009 to compete with Amazon's Kindle. Coming a year after Microsoft paid an eye-watering $8.5bn for the online video chat service Skype, this week's piece of business is the latest attempt by the world's largest software maker to secure a foothold in the rapidly-changing market for e-readers and tablet computers.
The agreement gives Microsoft an 18pc stake in the Nook. Unknown in Britain, the ereader has amassed a 30pc stake in the US market with far less financial muscle than Amazon. It is no surprise the tie-up has produced fevered speculation that the best engineering and design brains at Microsoft and Barnes & Noble will now combine to produce a brand new tablet to take on Amazon and Apple.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Remember that teacher you grumbled about back in your school days, the really tough one who made you work so hard, insisted you could do better, and made you sweat for your A's? The one you didn't appreciate until after you graduated and realized how much you had learned?Minority students in the U.S. might have fewer of those teachers, at least compared to white students, and as a result they might be at a significant learning disadvantage.
A major study, led by Rutgers-Newark psychology professor Kent D. Harber, indicates that public school teachers under-challenge minority students by providing them more positive feedback than they give to white students, for work of equal merit. The study, which is currently available online in the Journal of Educational Psychology (JEP), involved 113 white middle school and high school teachers in two public school districts located in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut tri-state area, one middle class and white, and the other more working class and racially mixed.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
CT: What about the training and capabilities of Madison school teachers and how they deliver in the classroom day to day -- is there room for improvement there?JM: Well, there's always room for improvement -- there's room for improvement in what I do. I can only say that the Madison School District has invested all kinds of things in professional development. One thing teachers tell us if they have time to work together, they can make strides. I found early in my career if I'm having a teacher identified as having a performance problem, ask the principal who is the best at doing what they want this teacher to do. Then you go to that teacher and say: "You have a colleague who needs help, will you take them under your wing?" I don't have access to any of what they talk about, management doesn't have access to that -- it's been a remarkably successful venture.
CT: In discussion of the achievement gap in Madison I've heard from African-American parents up and down the economic spectrum who say that their children are met at school with low expectations that really hamper their performance.
JM: I've heard that too. The Madison School District has an agreed-upon mandatory cultural course that people have to take. But there are people in society who don't like to be around other races. I don't see that when teachers are together. And we have a variety of people who are leaders in MTI -- either Asian or Indian or black -- but there are people who have different expectations from people who are different from them.
CT: Does the union have a role in dealing with teachers whose lowered expectations of students of color might contribute to the achievement gap?
JM: The only time MTI would get involved is if somebody was being criticized for that, we'd likely be involved with that; if someone were being disciplined for that, we would be involved. We've not seen that.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
America's four-year liberal arts colleges are--in a good sense--a peculiar institution. Since their inauspicious origins in the seventeenth century as, in essence, gentlemen's clubs with a profoundly Protestant mission, they have undergone a number of significant and far-reaching metamorphoses. For a long time it was a cultural commonplace that the doctrines of Protestant humanism provided the essential elements for higher learning and that moral education, grounded in the study of Scripture, was one of higher education's central goals, uniquely useful for shaping character, training ministers and producing upstanding civic leaders. But when the modern research university emerged in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the college system struggled to preserve its mission. Of what merit was general education amid a pulsating scientific-industrial civilization that increasingly prized the values of professionalism and narrow expertise?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Editor's note: Wayne Sutton is an Entrepreneur, Advisor and Partner of NewMe Accelerator, a residential technology start-up accelerator/incubator for businesses that are led by under-represented minorities in the technology industry.One of today's most challenging yet promising markets is the educational system. If you want to see startups hungry to disrupt an industry, look no further. Founders are trying to solve the problems plaguing our education system: including reconciling student debt, providing students with the skills required to land a job both before and after graduation, and offering the best course material online regardless of age, location and educational level.
Millions of people are headed to the Internet to learn. And now everyone, from professors to entrepreneurs, are looking to launch a platform to solve the problem of a broken traditional educational system - And many believe that Silicon Valley will have the answers.
If you look at the demographics (high school dropout rates, high unemployment and the number of people taking online courses) you'll find a common denominator; minorities are leading in three categories. In 2011, only 57 percent of blacks and Latinos graduated from high school, compared to 80 percent of Asians and 78 percent of whites. While data reports that only 1% of tech startups are founded by African Americans, you'll find a significant number of educational startups founded by minorities (women, Hispanics and African Americans) in the now-increasing 1% of minority tech startups.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
An internal investigation into UNC-Chapel Hill's Department of African and Afro-American Studies has found evidence of academic fraud involving more than 50 classes that range from no-show professors to unauthorized grade changes for students.One of the no-show classes is the Swahili course taken by former football player Michael McAdoo that prompted NCAA findings of impermissible tutoring, and drew more controversy when the final paper he submitted was found to have been heavily plagiarized.
The investigation found many of the suspect classes were taught in the summer by former department chairman Julius Nyang'oro, who resigned from that post in September. The university now says Nyang'oro, 57, who was the department's first-ever chairman, is retiring July 1.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
College is the best investment you can make, President Obama told students last month at the University of Colorado.As a metaphor for the benefits of education, that statement is fine. But taken as a claim about the financial returns of a college degree, it poses two problems.
The first is that students and their families still lack sufficient data to estimate long-term returns for specific college degrees the way investors do with stocks and bonds.
The second problem is one of investment risk. Stock investors can manage risk by buying a diverse basket of shares, but a college student bets on a single asset: himself.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Dejuan McGowan was trying to figure out how he was going to budget the money he was making. He thought about getting a one-bedroom house, but decided that, in case he and his wife have a child, they should go for two bedrooms. It would cost $855 a month, plus $200 for utilities."That puts me at $1,055 and I only have a house and some light," he said. "That's going to cut down on cable, health care and furnishing." And there won't be much money for entertainment, once you add in food, a car, telephone, and a few other things.
This wasn't real life for McGowan, an 11th-grader at Holy Redeemer Christian Academy. It was a morning in the JA Finance Park, a spacious, Main Street-like setting where about 9,000 students from throughout the region have come in the course of this school year to get a dose of the realities they will face when they reach (dare they think about it) adulthood. They are assigned an income and personal circumstances, given information on needs and costs, given coaching from both Junior Achievement staff and volunteers from businesses. The goal: a plan for how to spend their money.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Most Dane County school districts expect to balance their 2012-13 budgets without teacher layoffs, superintendents said Tuesday.Related: Real Data: How Act 10 Affected the Sun Prairie Area School District by sp-eye:Instead, to offset stricter-than-usual funding limits set by the state, districts are cutting positions through attrition, reducing benefits and tapping reserves.
Some are also working with employees to identify savings through new work rules being developed to replace collective bargaining agreements, most of which expire June 30.
The layoff issue is being closely watched statewide as state budget cuts to education play a role in Gov. Scott Walker's upcoming recall election.
In a State Journal survey of Dane County's 16 main school districts, Monona Grove reported issuing notices to one full-time and seven part-time employees, and Mount Horeb said it issued one layoff notice.
Act 10 was designed to provide school district and municipalities with "tools"....tools which could be used to lower property taxes and get a handle on exploding costs.How did it work?
Well...we look at DPT salary and fringe benefit data available from DPI and compared apples to apples. We looked at actual employees in both administration and teaching (support staff salary data is not available). We looked at employees that were on staff both in 2010-11 and this year (2011-12).We broke teachers down in to 3 classes: the top shelf (most highly paid), those with salaries right in the middle, and those on the bottom rung. Further, we initially obtained data on 32 individuals in each class, to make for a representative statistical sampling.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"We've got another lawsuit," my friend and client Lana* told me over the phone.Related: Why you should stop attending diversity training by Suzanne Lucas and Diversity Training Ineffective by Phil Bowermaster."Really?" I was honestly surprised. "What about all that diversity training everyone went through?"
"Well, apparently we need to do it again."
Lana was the head of Human Resources for Bedia, a company in the media industry that felt, at times, like an old boy's network. Diversity wasn't just a professional issue for her; she cared about it personally.
Over the years, there had been a number of incidents at Bedia in which individuals had felt misunderstood, mistreated, or disrespected. Eventually, someone sued.
In the most recent situation, someone used a word in a letter that felt derogatory to a number of African Americans. Before that, someone sent a sexist joke around the office and a female co-worker was offended. There were other incidents too.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In 2012, Americans will pay approximately $4.041 trillion in taxes, which is $152 billion, or 3.9 percent, more than they will spend on housing, food, and clothing.[1] Through looking at contemporary data and examining the trend of tax collections and expenditures on housing, food, and clothing, we can compare the costs of government with the necessary costs individuals incur every year. Relative to the basic cost of living, taxes have increased considerably in recent decades. In turn, a greater share of essential private expenditures are now funded through government outlays.Historical Perspective: Tax Growth Exceeds Spending Growth
Between 1929 and the early 1980s, aggregate tax collections were less than total expenditures on housing, food, and clothing (see chart). From 1929 to 1980, tax liabilities grew from $10 billion to $751 billion, while expenditures on housing, food, and clothing grew from $41.6 billion to $775.7 billion. In 1982, total tax collections exceeded expenditures on those items. The gap between tax collections and expenditures on essential goods reached a maximum in 2000, when Americans gave 19 percent more to the government than they spent on these items. The growth in tax collections has halted due to economic contractions, such as the collapse of the "dot-com bubble" in 2001 and the 2007-2009 financial crisis.[2]
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Griffith Middle School in Indiana aims to transform "learners today" into "leaders tomorrow." Leaders of which country, I wonder, after reading the Griffith Middle School Handbook. North Korea? The U.S. Constitution appears to have no standing in Griffith.Students who have the misfortune to attend school here have virtually no speech rights, pursuant to vague, arbitrary anti-bullying and intimidation rules that include such cryptic provisions as a ban on "innuendos," for which they may be suspended or expelled. They are subject to rules against using or possessing profanity, pornography or obscenity that include a breathtakingly vague prohibition of "other inappropriate materials" and a ban on "using or writing derogatory written materials." I suppose they could be disciplined for reading this post, which intentionally derogates Griffith School administrators.
Griffith students should perhaps learn to behave like obedient little automatons: They may be expelled for displaying "disrespect" toward staff or other students or for "disruptive behavior," including "chronic lack of supplies" and "arguing;" (so much for the spirit of free inquiry). They may be suspended for "hall misconduct," which includes "boisterous behavior" as well as failure to walk on the right.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
An assistant professor recently wrote to me with an interesting request: "I would like you to suggest a software package or other applications that could more critically assess formal writing than the grammar kernel in Microsoft Office. I am disappointed in my students' writing yet don't really have the time to fully evaluate writing assignments."Well, then.
I found the question to be strange, and his tone more than a little demanding, but I did a bit of checking. Microsoft's spell checker is a great tool against typos, but, as we all know, it often makes nonsense out of students' prose by suggesting correct spellings of completely different and inappropriate words, which they accept without thinking. Its grammar function drives me nuts, but I suppose for some it can provide a prompt to look more closely at sentences.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
As is routine with school choice proposals, the parent trigger bill in Florida - defeated in March after a dramatic 20-20 vote in the state Senate - was portrayed by critics as another front in a systematic campaign to privatize public schools. So it was fascinating today to hear more detail about the history and motivations behind the bill from Gloria Romero, the former California state senator - and Democrat - who sponsored the original trigger bill in that state."This is a law that's so simple, it's revolutionary," Romero told participants at the American Federation for Children summit in Newark. "This law has the power to really shift paradigms, to give true power - not just lip service, no longer window dressing - to parents who are sick and tired of failing schools."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Clark County School Board unanimously voted Wednesday to pursue a ballot question seeking voter approval for a six-year property tax increase to renovate and replace aging schools.Although the exact wording of the question has yet to be determined, voters will be asked in November to allow the School District to launch a capital levy program that funds school maintenance on what the district is calling a pay-as-you-go basis.
Under the proposal, property taxes would increase about $74 annually on a house valued at $100,000 to begin funding high-priority school construction and rehabilitation projects.
The tax increase would generate $669 million over the six-year period, district officials said, assuming there are no further declines in property values past 2013. The property tax rate would return to its current rate after the six years.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
National Association of College Admission Counseling:
Openings for Qualified Students
Search by state/country for NACAC-member colleges and universities that are still accepting applications for Fall 2012 freshman and/or transfer admission. Then click on the "Contact Info" link if you would like more information from the college/university about how to apply. Many colleges are added to the list after the initial May 2 deadline, so be sure the check back.
Colleges and Universities: Participation in the survey is limited to NACAC-member Principal Representatives. If you would like to add your college to the listing or update your current listing, please click on the link below. You will be prompted to log-in to the site.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The NFL is done for the year, but it is not pure fantasy to suggest that it may be done for good in the not-too-distant future. How might such a doomsday scenario play out and what would be the economic and social consequences?By now we're all familiar with the growing phenomenon of head injuries and cognitive problems among football players, even at the high school level. In 2009, Malcolm Gladwell asked whether football might someday come to an end, a concern seconded recently by Jonah Lehrer.
Before you say that football is far too big to ever disappear, consider the history: If you look at the stocks in the Fortune 500 from 1983, for example, 40 percent of those companies no longer exist. The original version of Napster no longer exists, largely because of lawsuits. No matter how well a business matches economic conditions at one point in time, it's not a lock to be a leader in the future, and that is true for the NFL too. Sports are not immune to these pressures. In the first half of the 20th century, the three big sports were baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and today only one of those is still a marquee attraction.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I'd suggest that letter grading is inappropriate for institutions like the war colleges, but that more systematic evaluation is not.Letter grades were not given at the interwar Command and General Staff School, but class rankings based on percentages were, and I think something like that might be more appropriate. I do know that there was a distinct but very visible minority of students, military and civilian, at the National War College when I was a student who just skated by, including contributing nothing to group projects and letting others take up the slack. Some sort of more rigorous evaluation seems to me to be indicated.
One thing I think that any war college evaluation system needs to be very careful about is the application of civilian academic standards and concepts to military students. There is a fundamental and decisive difference between mid-career military officers in a military institution and civilian graduate students. While I am a big proponent of more civilian graduate education for military officers, there are also a fair number of officers who might not excel in a formal educational milieu who are nonetheless consummate military professionals.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In more than 20 years I've spent studying the issue, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics.Mr. Bissinger is the author of "Friday Night Lights." He will participate in a debate Tuesday evening at New York University, sponsored by Intelligence Squared, in which he and Malcolm Gladwell will argue that college football should be bannedThat's because college football has no academic purpose. Which is why it needs to be banned. A radical solution, yes. But necessary in today's times.
Football only provides the thickest layer of distraction in an atmosphere in which colleges and universities these days are all about distraction, nursing an obsession with the social well-being of students as opposed to the obsession that they are there for the vital and single purpose of learning as much as they can to compete in the brutal realities of the global economy.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The numbers (carefully compiled by Jon East, vice president for policy & public affairs at Step Up) are from 2010-11 and we know in many cases the current figures are even higher. Charter school enrollment, for example, topped 175,000 this year, and the tax credit scholarship program serves more than 39,000 students. Altogether, the numbers underscore two things we emphasize at redefinED: School choice - the kind that allows parents to go beyond their neighborhood school - is becoming mainstream in Florida. And the lines between "public" and "private" are more blurred here than in any other state.The AFC conference agenda includes Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Newark Mayor Cory Booker and an all-star line up of choice experts and advocates. We're hoping to have a little time to update you on what's going on with blog posts and tweets. For the latter, follow us at @redefinEDonline.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Funny thing happened on the way to educating our country. We lost track of how important history is and we lost sight of what it really means to be educated. Somewhere along the line we decided, as a culture, that the only really important thing was to have a career and get a job and make money and be comfortable. In order to do this most efficiently we took our universities, which previously had subscribed to a mandate that good education meant well rounded education, and turned them into big trade schools. Mostly for the benefit of big business.Each "discipline" narrowed down its focus to transmit only the rawest and coarsest base competencies. Engineering students learned their math and physical sciences but lost the institutional mandate that required what used to be considered basics. Things like literature and a foreign language became roadkill for the sciences. Business majors never see the inside of a philosophy or art history classroom on their rush to riches. Our forefathers knew that it was in our society's best interest that people understand the value of good novels and poems, become civilized by appreciating important and time tested music and also to understand the arc of art history and art in general.
It has been said that "Art tells us what it is to be human." And I would say that any society that doesn't value it's art will soon cease to be creative, cease to produce truly creative products and will live a meaner existence. To not know history is to be doomed to endlessly repeat it.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
There is a rapidly growing international community of scholars who have been pursuing the Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics approach to linguistic analysis, which has its historical roots in Berkeley and particularly in the work of Charles Fillmore. The purpose of this website is to provide an information resource that will keep track of new developments in constructional research and also promote discussion and collaboration among linguists interested in applying and further extending the constructional approach.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Do charter schools do more - get better results - with less? If you ask this question, you'll probably get very strong answers, ranging from the affirmative to the negative, often depending on the person's overall view of charter schools. The reality, however, is that we really don't know.Actually, despite uninformed coverage of insufficient evidence, researchers don't even have a good handle on how much charter schools spend, to say nothing of whether how and how much they spend leads to better outcomes. Reporting of charter financial data is incomplete, imprecise and inconsistent. It is difficult to disentangle the financial relationships between charter management organizations (CMOs) and the schools they run, as well as that between charter schools and their "host" districts.
A new report published by the National Education Policy Center, with support from the Shanker Institute and the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice, examines spending between 2008 and 2010 among charter schools run by major CMOs in three states - New York, Texas and Ohio. The results suggest that relative charter spending in these states, like test-based charter performance overall, varies widely. In addition, perhaps more importantly, the findings make it clear that there remain significant barriers to accurate spending comparisons between charter and regular public schools, which severely hinder rigorous efforts to examine the cost-effectiveness of these schools.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The past 30 years of library history is littered with projects and plans and sometimes just dreams of ways the library might play a more pivotal role in the digital revolution that continues to transform the information landscape around us. Some of those projects never really got off the ground.Web Directories
Remember those heady early days when we thought we were going to catalog the web? OCLC even set up a whole project for this task back around the turn of the century (sounds like a long time ago, doesn't it?). It was called CORC, or Collaborative Online Resource Catalog. Librarians around the world were supposed to select and catalog "good, librarian-certified" web resources. There was even talk of assigning Dewey numbers to websites -- an idea which I'm sure would have brought tears to the eyes of many, especially our patrons. Today, the only evidence you can find of CORC is a few sentences in a list of abandoned research projects on the OCLC website and some links to PowerPoints and articles saluting it -- most now more than 10 years old.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I had another long plane flight recently, so I decided to try making another game, to explore exactly what types of mathematical reasoning might be amenable to gamification. I decided to start with one of the simplest types of logical argument (and one of the few that avoids the disjunction problem mentioned in the previous post), namely the Aristotelian logic of syllogistic reasoning, most famously exemplified by the classic syllogism:Major premise: All men are mortal.
Minor premise: Socrates is a man.
Conclusion: Socrates is a mortal.
There is a classic collection of logic puzzles of Lewis Carroll (from his book on symbolic logic), in which he presents a set of premises and asks to derive a conclusion using all of the premises. Here are four examples of such sets:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
When Amy Chua published an article in the Wall Street Journal last January entitled "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior," people were offended. The article--an excerpt from her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother--makes the case for a "Chinese" style of parenting in brutally honest terms. Chua, a professor of law at Yale and mother of two daughters, observes that "Chinese" parents produce many more "math whizzes and music prodigies" than "Western" parents. This, she claims, is the fruit of a style of parenting that values academic excellence, musical genius and, above all, success, and which does not shy away from imposing strict rules and restrictions, hard work that verges on torture, and despotic punishments. The Western style--with its emphasis on playing sports, having fun and building self-esteem--is by contrast woefully flaccid.To illustrate her point, Chua describes her own parenting techniques: she never allowed her daughters to earn less than perfect grades (an A- or second place was unacceptable); even on vacation she forced them to endure three-hour piano and violin practice sessions without food or bathroom breaks (once, when her then three-year old daughter disobeyed, she made her stand outside in freezing weather); she used threats and extortion to force them to excel (when her younger daughter resisted learning a piano piece, Chua "threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years"). The only extracurricular activities she allowed her daughters were those in which they could win a medal (and that medal had to be gold)--"loser" activities like crafts, theater, television, sleepovers and dating were forbidden. Chua never mentions corporal punishment, but she does think it perfectly acceptable to call one's children fat, lazy, stupid or worthless--so long as it is done out of love and for the children's own good. She once told her older daughter she was "garbage."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
It strikes me that most people in favour of tuition hikes view higher education as a net loss paid by their taxes, rather than as an investment that will bring high dividends in the future. It is my wish that more people approached higher education funding like venture capitalists approach startups -- as an investment rather than as a cost. Let me explain what I mean.Statistically, 9 8 out of 10 startups will fail, costing venture capitalists millions. However, the 2 that succeed will more than cover the losses on the other 8, with lots of extra profit on top, which is why the VCs continue to do it.
Opponents to free higher education tend to point out how many students have trouble finding jobs after they graduate, especially those who chose to major in humanities. However, if we look at it from the same perspective as venture capitalists, it doesn't matter that many students who receive higher education end up working minimal-wage jobs. We as a society reap our monetary and cultural benefits from those few who do succeed.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Charles Barone & Elizabeth DeBray:
A practical look at the education laws established by Congress over the past half-century shows three things that Congress is uniquely positioned to do well: promote equal educational opportunity, set goals and keep score, and invest in research and development. Further historical reflection also shows that Congress has two significant limitations: an inability to respond quickly and a limited capacity to monitor and enforce.Over the past 50 years, Congress has enacted sweeping changes to federal law when a segment of U.S. society was judged as having been denied equal educational opportunity, and when states and municipalities were unable or unwilling to remedy those inequities.
Title I of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act was intended to equalize the educational opportunities available to poor and minority children. Title IX of the 1965 Civil Rights Act, as amended in 1972, banned sexual discrimination in federally funded education programs. The 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act, known today as the Individuals with Disabilities Act, or IDEA, granted the right to a free and appropriate public education for students with disabilities. Pell Grants, established in 1965, expanded access to postsecondary education for millions of low-income students.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
It's all in the family for a Madison Memorial High School senior.On Wednesday, Sundaram Gunasekaran and his wife, Sujatha, were notified their second child, Suman, 17, was selected as a Presidential Scholar by the U.S. Department of Education
In 2009, the couple's daughter Suvai received the honor and now is at Harvard University where Suman will join her in the fall.
Staff with the Presidential Scholars Program said having two students from the same family receive the honor is a rare occurrence but were unable to confirm whether it's happened before.
Suman, one of 141 selected for the honor out of more than 3,300 candidates, said he was proud to be the second in his family to receive the honor and credited his parents' encouragement
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
THE range of names parents choose to give their offspring has increased dramatically in recent decades. While many countries seek to ban some of the most exotic appellations (see article), the quest for originality continues. To help parents, and inspired by America's Baby Name Voyager, Anna Powell-Smith has created a neat visualisation of baby-naming patterns in England and Wales using 15 years of data from the Office of National Statistics. It reveals some interesting social trends. There has been a move towards more flowery, old-fashioned names for girls, and away from Biblical names for boys. Chloe, Lauren, Daniel and James are out. Lily, Grace, Oliver and Ethan are in. Films such as "The Matrix" and "Amélie" have had significant influences; and the proportion of eastern European names jumped in 2005 following the expansion of the European Union. The biggest proportional fallers were Brittany for girls, Macaulay for boys, and Jordan for both.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Neal Karlinsky & Meredith Frost:
Working behind the counter at a futon store in Tacoma, Wash., is not the place you would expect to find a man some call a mathematical genius of unprecedented proportions.Jason Padgett, 41, sees complex mathematical formulas everywhere he looks and turns them into stunning, intricate diagrams he can draw by hand. He's the only person in the world known to have this incredible skill, which he obtained by sheer accident just a decade ago.
"I'm obsessed with numbers, geometry specifically," Padgett said. "I literally dream about it. There's not a moment that I can't see it, and it just doesn't turn off."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
While reviewing the results of a new student survey this year, the Sennett Middle School student council was surprised to learn about safety concerns.After further investigation, council members discovered some students didn't feel comfortable in a certain hallway, so Principal Colleen Lodholz ensured a security guard monitored the hallway between class periods.
Lodholz said the Gallup Student Poll, administered in grades 5-12 for the first time in the fall, was more effective than past school climate surveys because the results were available sooner.
"Typically when we did the climate surveys, you wouldn't get the results until summer," Lodholz said. "You could choose to use it the following year, but the kids had moved on."
The Gallup poll asks students to rate 20 statements such as "I know I will graduate from high school" and "I feel safe in this school." The statements correspond to the categories "hope," "engagement" and "well-being."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Kathleen Falk today used a closed school as a backdrop for a campaign speech touting her plans to restore school aid cuts if elected governor. The school, Phillis Wheatley Elementary, was recently shut down by the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). Last month a candidate running against Milwaukee representative Jason Fields in the 11th Assembly District Democratic primary, Mandela Barnes, kicked off his campaign in front of MPS' closed Daniel Webster Middle School. Barnes too spoke of restoring funding to public education, arguing that a closed school reflects poorly on a neighborhood:"We chose this location because this closed school building represents the loss of hope and opportunity. Who would bring jobs to an area that closes schools?Falk's appearance and Barnes' statement highlight a serious byproduct of Milwaukee's culture of school choice. Schools close frequently in Milwaukee. They do by design.The final set of reports from the School Choice Demonstration Project found that during the course of their five-year evaluation 36 private Milwaukee Parental Choice Program schools and 40 MPS schools closed their doors. There is evidence those schools were performing lower than schools that remain open, which on its face is a good thing for students.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:
Another approach might be eliminating programs or initiatives that are more closely aligned to student learning. Possibilities here could include reducing our school staff who are not classroom teachers, like Reading Interventionists, Instructional Resource Teachers, and Positive Behavior Coaches. We could also eliminate special interventions for struggling readers. The reading recovery program is the best-known example. While reading recovery is backed by research that supports its effectiveness, it's an expensive program and, at least as of a couple of years ago, we hadn't seen in Madison the level of successful outcomes in terms of students' reading progress that had typically been achieved elsewhere with the program.Related: 60% to 42%: Madison School District's Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags "National Average": Administration seeks to continue its use.My view is that we should have in place an established schedule for evaluating the effectiveness of our intervention programs, like Reading Recovery, and we should be willing to make difficult decisions based on what the evaluations tell us. But that evaluation and review process should be separate from our budgeting process. We shouldn't look at cutting programs like Reading Recovery strictly as a cost-saving measure. I doubt that we're willing to eliminate all intensive interventions for struggling readers - I don't even know if we could do so legally - and it's far from obvious that substituting one intensive reading intervention program for another would end up saving us all that much money.
Much more on the Oconomowoc School District's high school staffing an compensation plan, here.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Tamar Lewin, via a kind Rick Kiley email:
In what is shaping up as an academic Battle of the Titans -- one that offers vast new learning opportunities for students around the world -- Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities.Harvard's involvement follows M.I.T.'s announcement in December that it was starting an open online learning project, MITx. Its first course, Circuits and Electronics, began in March, enrolling about 120,000 students, some 10,000 of whom made it through the recent midterm exam. Those who complete the course will get a certificate of mastery and a grade, but no official credit. Similarly, edX courses will offer a certificate but not credit.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The lawsuit was filed under state public records law, in the wake of the controversy over whether the sick notes were based on honest claims of sickness; the newspaper agreed to have the employee names blacked out to preserve employee privacy.More, here.Speaking of Madison, this James Madison quote -- made about support for education funding, but often also used by supporters of public access to government records -- might be relevant:
A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will ever govern ignorance; and a people, who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Modern man (and woman?) is very interested in speed, on land and sea and in the air, but also in "scoring" student writing, it appears. Educational Testing Service recently praised its computer program's ability to score 16,000 samples of writing in 20 seconds.
I should probably explain my bias against too much speed, and not just where it helps to kill thousands of people on the highway. Several decades ago, I took a speed reading course from Xerox Learning Systems. They gave a pre-test on reading and comprehension, and the tests after the course showed that I had doubled my reading speed and cut my comprehension in half.
The arguments in favor of grading student writing by computer program are that it saves money and time and allows huge volumes of student responses-to-a-prompt to be "addressed," as they would say.
I am not sure whether Abraham Lincoln wrote The Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope on the train to Pennsylvania or not, but if he had taken one of the new bullet trains, no doubt the speech would have been shorter and quite possibly less immortal.
Other writers have found inspiration watching the land pass by their train windows, but that again has become less common, no doubt, as the speed of travel has increased. The Dreamliner may make it easier to sleep during the flight, but there is not much to see out the window.
E.T.S. may be able to make some serious money in "assessing" student writing at 21st century speeds, but the comprehension of that work will have been cut to zero, I am quite sure, because, as you understand, the computer program, and perhaps some of those who are promoting this scoring by machine, have no idea what the student is saying in any case.
Assessing short writing samples at blinded speeds may lead to encouraging more teachers to assign such brief pieces to their students, thus saving them from having to take the time in coaching and evaluating writing that could be spent on watching videos and talking about the Twilight series or The Hunger Games in class. Thus, students' greatest writing efforts in high school could be devoted to their 500-word "college essay," instead of, for example, a 4,000-word Extended Essay such as they would need to do for the International Baccalaureate Diploma.
It should be noted that the College Board has recently announced a new Capstone Writing Initiative, by which they plan to introduce academic expository writing, over a three-year Pilot program into a select few of our high schools. At first, papers will be produced by groups on limited topics, but perhaps in a few more years, students of this new AP program will be allowed to attempt the sort of serious history research paper that The Concord Review has published by more than 1,000 secondary students from 39 countries over the last 25 years.
I would caution the AP, however, that if they are going to ask teachers and students to work on serious academic papers, they may very well have to slow down the assessments, unless, of course, computers have advanced enough in the next three or four years so that they can not only "evaluate" such papers at a rapid pace, but also begin the understand the very first thing of what the students are writing about (i.e. the subject matter). After all, Deep Blue did well at Jeopardy, didn't it? So a future program, with hundreds of thousands of history books in its memory banks, may be able to make connections to allow it to at least seem to understand some of the history that the student has derived from their own reading and thinking.
These advances could make it easier at last to assign and assess serious student academic expository writing at the secondary level, at least enough to satisfy the College Board and those who buy the Capstone Project, but I am sorry to say that, for the student, the process of reading history and writing about it will be just as slow, and just as valuable, as it was for Thucydides and Tacitus and Edward Gibbon back in the day, and for David McCullough in our own day.
At a recent conference, David McCullough, who spent 10 years writing Truman, said that he is often asked how he divides his time between research and writing. He said no one every asks him how much time he spends thinking. The new computer scoring programs don't waste any time thinking about the content of the work they are evaluating, and, in their rush to do a lot of writing "assessments" real fast and very cheaply, perhaps those promoting those programs don't spend a lot of time on that part either.
-------------------------
"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
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
One of the segments from "Waiting for Superman" that stuck in my head is the following statement by Newsweek reporter Jonathan Alter:It's very, very important to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. Teachers are great, a national treasure. Teachers' unions are, generally speaking, a menace and an impediment to reform.
The distinction between teachers and their unions (as well as those of other workers) has been a matter of political and conceptual contention for long time. On one "side," the common viewpoint, as characterized by Alter's slightly hyperbolic line, is "love teachers, don't like their unions." On the other "side," criticism of teachers' unions is often called "teacher bashing."
So, is there any distinction between teachers and teachers' unions? Of course there is.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
More colleges are experimenting with online-learning platforms to meet the growing demand for higher education and to increase revenue in the face of budget cuts. But the next generation of online-learning systems faces several barriers to adoption, according to a new report.Chief among them are professors' desires to customize what they teach and their reluctance to use prepackaged course material. The most sophisticated of today's online-learning systems rely on machine-guided instruction to adapt lessons to the needs of individual students. But most of those systems do not yet allow instructors to deeply tailor the material to meet their course needs. And highly-interactive systems are often too complex for pioneering professors to adopt and sustain on their own.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Obviously, this is just one student and doesn't necessarily generalize, but I love that the electrodermal activity is nearly flatlined during classes. ;-) (Note that the activity is higher during sleep than during class...)"Changes in skin conductance at the surface, referred to as electrodermal activity (EDA), reflect activity within the sympathetic axis of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) and provide a sensitive and convenient measure of assessing alterations in sympathetic arousal associated with emotion, cognition, and attention."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Seated in plastic chairs in a grade-school cafeteria in Minnesota, Sandra and Alan Roth admired their 7-year-old daughter, Melesech, making her stage debut last month in "Peter Pan" as one of the "lost kids"--the children who find themselves spirited away to a magical place called Neverland. Four years earlier, to the day, the Roths had brought Mel home from Ethiopia, where they had adopted her."Oh, Wendy, we thought you were going to be our mother!" said Mel on stage, speaking her only line and wearing a rust-colored tunic and fuzzy Ugg-style boots.
"She is very special," said Mrs. Roth, 49 years old. For children like her in Ethiopia, she added, "There is no future."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Altar (map), a rough and airless town lost in Mexico's wild northern desert, used to provide a thriving trade for its 8,000 permanent residents. Seared by merciless summer heat, and just 60 miles from the Arizona border, it has served as the last and most important watering hole for thousands of undocumented Mexicans headed for the US.Juan Ramírez, who sells last-minute supplies for migrants - miniature bars of soap, woollen blankets to protect against the freezing nights and carpet-bottomed moccasins to avoid leaving footprints on the perilous journey north - remembers the good times well. "There were people from all over," he says. "There were times when the main square looked like a stadium just before a big game."
Today, it looks like one long after the final whistle has blown. Since the US recession bit in 2008, Washington beefed up security along the border and Arizona passed a zero-tolerance anti-immigration law, the human river that once flowed north, much of it through Altar, has become almost as dry as the desert itself.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Florida: State Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson responds to newspaper questions about charter schools and vouchers. (Tampa Bay Times Gradebook blog) He suggest school choice critics have a double standard. (redefinED)Wisconsin: Vouchers have become an issue in the Democratic primary for governor between candidates Tom Barrett and Kathleen Falk. (wispolitics.com)
South Carolina: Jeb Bush talks education reform and school choice at a summit for educators, lawmakers and business leaders. (Associated Press) Parents rally for choice as Legislature considers several proposals. (The State)
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Douglas County Board of Education:
In a bold move toward increased transparency, the Douglas County Board of Education adopted a resolution on March 20 to open labor negotiations with the Douglas County Federation of Teachers (DCFT) to the public.Fabulous.On April 11, those negotiations commenced with presentations by representatives of Douglas County School District (DCSD) and the DCFT about their collective bargaining agreement proposals. The next session is scheduled for May 9 at the Cantril Building.
The sessions are open to the public and the media.
The Douglas County schools spend $8,112.40/student. The 2011 budget spends $481,066,888 for 59,300 students, according to this document. Madison spends 14,858.40 per student (2011-2012 budget).
Census data comparison: Dane (WI-USA 45.4% Bachelors Degree or higher; per capita money income: $32,392) vs. Douglas County (CO-USA 54.4% Bachelors Degree or higher; per capita money income: $42,418). It appears we spend far more on K-12 education from a much lower economic base.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
John Stanford advanced the idea of a foreign language immersion school before his death in 1998. He thought that a district with many students speaking many languages could be an asset and had put forth the idea of a foreign language immersion school. Backed by the School Board and under the leadership of principal Karen Kodama, the John Stanford International School opened in the Latona building in the fall of 2000.When it started it was dual language immersion for either Spanish or Japanese (these languages were chosen in a survey of parents and business leaders). Additionally, it was one of the elementary Bilingual Orientation Centers for elementary students. That was primarily where the native speakers came from who became part of the two-way learning for other students.
In 1999, JSIS was one of five of the University of Washington's K-12 initiatives. The goals* were:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
IN OUR common narrative, the modern era of global finance--what we call the Old Order--begins with the Great Depression and New Deal of the 1930s. The economic model put in place by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and others at the end of World War II is seen as a political as well as economic break point. But arbitrarily selected demarcation points in any human timeline can be misleading. The purpose of narrative, after all, is to simplify the complex and, over time, to remake the past in today's terms. As we approach any discussion of the Old Order, we must acknowledge that the image of intelligent design in public policy is largely an illusion.There is no question that the world after 1950 was a reflection of the wants and needs of the United States, the victor in war and thus the designer of the peacetime system of commerce and finance that followed. Just as the Roman, Mongol and British empires did centuries earlier, America made the post-World War II peace in its own image. The U.S.-centric model enjoyed enormous success due to factors such as relatively low inflation, financial transactions that respect anonymity, an open court system and a relatively enlightened foreign policy--all unique attributes of the American system.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
COMPARED with its world-famous universities, America's community colleges are virtually anonymous. But over half of the nation's 20m undergraduates attend them, and the number is growing fast. Poor, minority and first-generation-immigrant students are far more likely to get their tertiary education from community colleges--where two-year courses offer a cheap route to a degree--than from universities. And, increasingly, many policymakers are wondering whether more attention to the colleges might be a low-cost way of resolving the nation's shortage of skilled workers.America's problem with training was laid bare in a report published last year by Deloitte, a consultancy firm, and the Manufacturing Institute. It identified 600,000 positions that were going unfilled because there were too few qualified skilled workers. Too many colleges, it seems, still fail to align themselves with the needs of local employers, a mismatch that is bad both for the employers and for potential employees, though arguably universities are even worse at doing this.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
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.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The only pill approved in the U.S. for treatment of children with type 2 diabetes is proving surprisingly ineffective, according to a new study, heightening worries about the fast-growing and largely preventable disease.The research, reported Sunday, is one of the first long-term studies to test the effectiveness of drugs for diabetic children--estimated in the U.S. to number in the tens of thousands. It tested three different drug-based regimens aimed at controlling the disease and found that only about half the participants successfully controlled their blood sugar--despite relatively good compliance.
Researchers said the findings suggested a majority of youth with the disease may require more than one oral medication--or resort to insulin injections--within a few years of diagnosis.
The disappointing results, some of which caught researchers by surprise, underscore the daunting challenges in treating the condition, which had been viewed as an adult disease until it emerged among adolescents in the past 15 to 20 years alongside rising rates of obesity.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Last year, Kim Crosby spent about 80% of her class time teaching math concepts at Waukesha STEM Academy. For the other 20%, she helped students individually.This year that time is reversed: 80% of her class time is spent moving from student to student; about one-fifth continues to be a standard lecture format. The rest of the direct-instruction materials she wants students to see, she assigns to watch or read at home.
"To me, this makes more sense," Crosby said.
When it comes to challenging traditional ideas about how schools should operate, this 2-year-old charter school in Waukesha is building a reputation with a curriculum that focuses on science, technology, engineering and math, and where student schedules can change every day.
Students choose when they want to eat and when they want to work during a 60-minute lunch, and can randomly be found working in groups behind the reception desk. Or in the teachers lounge.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Do you remember the first time you sampled Nutella as a breakfast food? Maybe smeared on a French baguette? You probably felt like you were getting away with something with every chocolate-hazelnut bite.Well, it turns out not everyone knows that the chocolately treat is basically a candy bar in a creamy form.
Do you remember the first time you sampled Nutella as a breakfast food? Maybe smeared on a French baguette? You probably felt like you were getting away with something with every chocolate-hazelnut bite.
Well, it turns out not everyone knows that the chocolately treat is basically a candy bar in a creamy form.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
After a high school student was found unresponsive in a West Side elementary school bathroom with a marijuana pipe in his backpack, parents are questioning why an alternative school program for academically at-risk high school students is in the same building as the elementary school."It does raise concerns," said Becky Ketarkus, who has six children enrolled at Stephens Elementary, 120 S. Rosa Road. "I'd love to know what the plan is for the future to make sure the school is safe."
Superintendent Dan Nerad answered that the program is not unique -- two other elementary schools house alternative programs for high schoolers -- and the district has had relatively few problems similar to the incident on Monday. He stressed that, unlike some other alternative programs, those in elementary schools are targeted to academically at-risk students, not those with behavior issues.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Gov. Chris Christie announced Monday that he wants to retire New Jersey's maligned high school graduation exam and instead give students a series of tougher tests at the end of required courses.Christie said Monday that moving away from the High School Proficiency Assessment, or HSPA, would produce graduates more prepared for college or careers.
The current exit exam is considered weak. It requires juniors to be tested on knowledge that they should learn by early in their high school careers. Critics also say that, despite tightening standards, it's too easy for students to take and pass a less rigorous alternative exam.
The change is the latest initiative from Christie aimed at trying to raise the standards in the state's public schools. While on average, New Jersey students are among the nation's highest performing, those in the state's cities tend to fare much worse.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
George P. Schultz & Eric A. Hanushek, via several kind readers:
In addressing our current fiscal and economic woes, too often we neglect a key ingredient of our nation's economic future--the human capital produced by our K-12 school system. An improved education system would lead to a dramatically different future for the U.S., because educational outcomes strongly affect economic growth and the distribution of income.Over the past half century, countries with higher math and science skills have grown faster than those with lower-skilled populations. In the chart nearby, we compare GDP-per-capita growth rates between 1960 and 2000 with achievement results on international math assessment tests. The countries include almost all of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries plus a number of developing countries. What stands out is that all the countries follow a nearly straight line that slopes upward--as scores rise, so does economic growth. Peru, South Africa and the Philippines are at the bottom; Singapore and Taiwan, the top.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Neerav Kingsland lives and breathes numbers. But when you ask the chief strategy officer of New Schools for New Orleans about this city's remarkable efforts to rebuild its schools in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he starts not with statistics but with the story of Bridget Green.Matthew DiCarlo:A young woman whose grades earned her the distinction of valedictorian of her 2003 high school class, Green never gave the commencement speech or walked across the stage with her classmates. Despite five tries, she was unable to pass the math-competency exit exam required for graduation.
Green's story is emblematic of the hopelessness that used to mark New Orleans's schools. No matter how smart or hardworking or well-meaning the system's leaders, there was no chance for sustainable improvement, given the enormity of its dysfunction. Then the levees broke and the city was devastated, and out of that destruction came the need to build a new system, one that today is accompanied by buoyant optimism. Since 2006, New Orleans students have halved the achievement gap with their state counterparts. They are on track to, in the next five years, make this the first urban city in the country to exceed its state's average test scores. The share of students proficient on state tests rose from 35 percent in 2005 to 56 percent in 2011; 40 percent of students attended schools identified by the state as "academically unacceptable" in 2011, down from 78 percent in 2005.
Charter schools in New Orleans (NOLA) now serve over four out of five students in the city - the largest market share of any big city in the nation. As of the 2011-12 school year, most of the city's schools (around 80 percent), charter and regular public, are overseen by the Recovery School District (RSD), a statewide agency created in 2003 to take over low-performing schools, which assumed control of most NOLA schools in Katrina's aftermath.Around three-quarters of these RSD schools (50 out of 66) are charters. The remainder of NOLA's schools are overseen either by the Orleans Parish School Board (which is responsible for 11 charters and six regular public schools, and taxing authority for all parish schools) or by the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (which is directly responsible for three charters, and also supervises the RSD).
New Orleans is often held up as a model for the rapid expansion of charter schools in other urban districts, based on the argument that charter proliferation since 2005-06 has generated rapid improvements in student outcomes. There are two separate claims potentially embedded in this argument. The first is that the city's schools perform better that they did pre-Katrina. The second is that NOLA's charters have outperformed the city's dwindling supply of traditional public schools since the hurricane.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Jackie Barrow explains how she teaches children thousands of miles awayNo-one does love and encouragement better than a granny. Now that love is being spread across continents, as UK-based grandmothers extend their embrace to school children thousands of miles away in India.
Jackie Barrow isn't a granny yet but as a retired teacher she felt she might qualify for an advert in The Guardian newspaper calling for volunteers to help teach children in India.
She did and today, three years on, she is reading "Not Now Bernard" via Skype to a small group of children in the Indian city of Pune.
They love it and are engaged in the experience as she holds up an Easter egg to show them how children in the UK celebrated the recent holiday.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The MacIver Institute District Report Card takes an innovative look at the Wisconsin's fifty largest public school districts and offers a vigorous analysis and traditional letter grading system in this unique analysis. It rates districts across several different measures to create a comprehensive look at how teachers and administrators are performing in their schools. The Report Card goes beyond the typical parochial comparison of neighboring communities to also focus on how children compete on a global level. With a dynamic global economy perpetually in front of us, a broader focus was needed to better understand how our districts stack up across many metrics.Madison ranked 42nd out of 50 in academic achievement, 40th in student attainment, B- overall.The Report Card takes into account not only how a student is testing, but also how likely a district is to push their students to achieve more. The state has recently increased graduation requirements to include more coursework and more challenging classes. This metric works to gauge the progress that has been made in those departments. Finally, the MI District Report Card factors in a student's basic background to better understand the challenges that a school district may face and their effectiveness as a result. Educating students from low-income families, as well as other students that have traditionally been difficult to teach, is critically important to the future of Wisconsin.
These rankings go beyond what standardized testing tells us. They take a closer look inside the classroom and assign grades based on achievement, attainment, and student population. Districts that have higher percentages of low-income and limited English proficiency (LEP) students, two factors that are traditionally linked to lower scores on state testing measures, earn extra points to address this greater degree of difficulty for their teachers.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Data available from the UC Office of the President shows that there were 2.5 faculty members for each senior manager in the UC system in 1993. Now there are as many senior managers as faculty. Just think: Each professor could have his or her personal senior manager.A report on administrative growth by the UCLA Faculty Associationestimated that UC would have $800 million more each year if senior management had grown at the same rate as the rest of the university since 1997, instead of four times faster.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
It's time somebody looked (at least in the public eye) at some of the demographics and policy/practices and how they may or may not relate to achievement (in terms of WKCE scores).Much more on the oft-criticized WKCE, here.First a very brief less in the art of correlation. We can take any two pieces of information and mathematically determine whether or not there is a pattern...a correlation. The mathematical tool is the correlation coefficient. It provides a number ranging from -1 (perfect inverse correlation, as X increases, Y decreases) to +1 (perfect correlation, as X increases/decreases, so does Y). Then, all we need to do is apply some statistics based on the size of our data set to determine whether or not the correlation is significant (statistically speaking). For this exercise we looked at the 95% level of confidence, which means that there would be 5% or less chance that the correlation observed resulted from chance alone.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently offered a stark assessment of the threat to his state's future that is posed by mounting pension and retiree health-care bills for government workers. Unless Illinois enacts reform quickly, he said, the costs of these programs will force taxes so high that, "You won't recruit a business, you won't recruit a family to live here."We're likely to hear more such worries in coming years. That's because state and local governments across the country have accumulated several trillion dollars in unfunded retirement promises to public-sector workers, the costs of which will increasingly force taxes higher and crowd out other spending. Already businesses and residents are slowly starting to sit up and notice.
"Companies don't want to buy shares in a phenomenal tax burden that will unfold over the decades," the Chicago Tribune observed after Mr. Emanuel issued his warning on April 4. And neither will citizens.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Watch as four student reporters hand Sir Ken Robinson a "blank check" and say: Design a learning place of your dreams. It's a three-part video series -- and definitely do watch through to Part 3, where things get a little bit silly.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Do critics have a double standard when it comes to scrutinizing school choice options like charter schools and vouchers? Florida Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson suggested as much in an interview published today by the Tampa Bay Times' Gradebook education blog.In response to a question from the Times editorial board, Robinson noted that charter schools that struggle academically and/or financially can be shut down (in Florida, that has happened many times) but that same ultimate penalty is rarely leveled at traditional public schools (off hand, we can't think of any examples in Florida). "For the bad charter schools that aren't working, they should close," Robinson said. "But for the traditional schools that have also failed a number of our kids, we don't see the same level of righteous indignation."
Robinson has deep roots in the school choice movement, having once served as president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options. And interestingly enough, the editorial board's questions focused mostly on choice options. Here are some other excerpts:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A fresh take on the uncanny, unnerving power of the unconscious mind.We think we're thinking our way through life. Well, yes and no. We're thinking, but our unconscious minds are enormously powerful drivers. We think, but they can decide - often before we've even asked the question. For decades, we've understood we're open to "subliminal seduction." Our unconscious mind can be wooed.
Freud called it a beast. New science is showing just how powerful the mind beneath can be, and - often - how helpful. It's us. And it's way ahead of us.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Anyone who has been to an expensive private school with an energetic "alumni outreach officer" will know the deal. The letters and the glossy brochures come regularly - one of them dropped on my door mat only the other day. Nick Clegg will have got the same letter and so will Chris Huhne, or Christopher Paul-Huhne, as he was known as a boy at Westminster School. So, too, will the singer Dido, the actress Imogen Stubbs and Martha Lane Fox.All of these distinguished people will have benefited enormously from their great good fortune to have been educated at one of the finest schools in the country. The attraction of our private schools has traditionally been in the excellence of the teaching, but no more, it seems. For the past 20 years or so, the great private schools of Britain, and some of the not so great ones, have been engaged in a demented arms race to outdo each other in facilities.
In 1984, average yearly boarding fees in private schools were about £4,000. Today, many of them charge more than £30,000, roughly a threefold increase in real terms according to the Bank of England's inflation calculator. Private schools once offered a slightly superior version of a grammar school education. Many of them occupied lovely sites, but there was no special emphasis on lavish facilities.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In late March, a panel of 10 education experts gathered in Washington to nominate four most-improved urban school districts for a national education prize. What should have been a routine review of student data, however, suddenly took a new direction.First one member on the review panel for the annual Broad Prize for Urban Education then another noticed the same thing: Plenty of large urban school districts nationwide were making solid progress with Hispanic students closing achievement gaps with white students. But African-American students continued to lag.
In theory, the experts should not have been seeing what they were seeing. The federal data tracking Hispanic and black students show that they are making roughly the same progress (not much) in closing learning gaps. That left the review panel members puzzled. Was this an illusion?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
More Intelligent Life, via Brian S. Hall:
A fundamental paradox of human psychology is that thinking can be bad for us. When we follow our own thoughts too closely, we can lose our bearings, as our inner chatter drowns out common sense. A study of shopping behaviour found that the less information people were given about a brand of jam, the better the choice they made. When offered details of ingredients, they got befuddled by their options and ended up choosing a jam they didn't like.If a rat is faced with a puzzle in which food is placed on its left 60% of the time and on the right 40% of the time, it will quickly deduce that the left side is more rewarding, and head there every time, thus achieving a 60% success rate. Young children adopt the same strategy. When Yale undergraduates play the game, they try to figure out some underlying pattern, and end up doing worse than the rat or the child. We really can be too clever for our own good.
By allowing ourselves to listen to our (better) instincts, we can tap into a kind of compressed wisdom. The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer argues that much of our behaviour is based on deceptively sophisticated rules-of-thumb, or "heuristics". A robot programmed to chase and catch a ball would need to compute a series of complex differential equations to track the ball's trajectory. But baseball players do so by instinctively following simple rules: run in the right general direction, and adjust your speed to keep a constant angle between eye and ball.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Some people with autism have dynamic jobs that take advantage of their innate skills, and are acquainted with life's pleasures, including love, hacking and golf. Many, however, live terrifically difficult lives, and are brutally stigmatized.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
