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"I have no doubt that the way we're going to improve student achievement is by focusing on what happens in the classroom," Cheatham said.Related: A history of Madison Superintendent experiences.Clash with unions
Madison Teachers Inc. executive director John Matthews and others say poverty drives the achievement gap more so than classroom factors."We do have a high-quality teaching force in Madison -- it's been that way for years," Matthews said. He added that one challenge he'd like to see Cheatham address is the administration's tendency to adopt new programs every few years.
Cheatham's salary will be $235,000, 17 percent more than predecessor Dan Nerad. Unlike Nerad, a former Green Bay social worker and superintendent, Cheatham has never led an organization. She also hasn't stayed in the same job for more than two years since she was a teacher in Newark, Calif., from 1997 to 2003.
Mitchell, who beat out Cheatham for the top job at Partners in School Innovation where she worked for a year before moving to Chicago, said Cheatham has the talent to become schools chief in a major city like Chicago or New York in seven to 10 years. That's a benefit for Madison because Cheatham is on the upswing of her career and must succeed in order to advance, Mitchell said.
"The thing about Madison that's kind of exciting is there's plenty of work to do and plenty of resources with which to do it," Mitchell said. "It's kind of a sweet spot for Jen. Whether she stays will depend on how committed the district is to continuing the work she does."
I asked the three (! - just one in 2013) 2008 Madison school board candidates (Gallon, Nerad or McIntyre), if they supported "hiring the best teachers and getting out of the way", or a "top down" approach where the District administration's department of "curriculum done our way" working in unison with Schools of Education, grant makers and other third parties attempt to impose teaching models on staff.
Union intransigence is one of the reasons (in my view) we experience administrative attempts to impose curricula via math or reading "police". I would prefer to see a "hire the best and let them teach - to high global standards" approach. Simplify and focus on the basics: reading, writing, math and science.
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Madison School Board Seat 5 Candidate TJ Mertz Sued Twice for Unpaid Utility Bills by WKOW TV.
Sarah Manski keeps Nan Brien out of court; reports lots of Green by David Blaska:
She blew through Monday's campaign finance reporting deadline as blithely as she ran - and then quit - her race for Madison School Board. ("Paging Sarah Manski: You can't leave for California just yet.") But Sarah Manski has finally made an honest woman of her treasurer and protector of the union-dominated old guard, Nan Brien.T.J. Mertz: How did Act 10 prevent you from paying your electric bill, and what about your conflict of interest? by David Blaska(The former school board member, nemesis of public schools chartered to address the racial achievement gap, told WKOW TV-27 that her role as treasurer was only as a figurehead. Like Sgt. Schultz, so many in Madison are saying about the Manski campaign: "I knew nothing!")
The Manski fundraising report filed Friday - four days late - reveals quite the haul in just a few weeks for a local race: $7,733 since Feb. 5 for a race that she ended two days after the Feb. 19 primary election. That makes a total of $11,136 since entering the race in December. That's a lot of Green! As in very Green green.
Now, if Sarah had been a conservative instead of a professional Walker stalker (see: Wisconsin Wave), The Capital Times would have staged one of its pretend ethics meltdowns about the evils of out-of-state money. An example of their situational ethics is "Pat Roggensack's out-of-state cash":
Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Pat Roggensack makes little secret of her ideological and partisan alliances. And most of [her] money is coming from outside Wisconsin.You want "outside Wisconsin"? How about St. Louis, Mo.; Lansdale, Pa.; N. Hollywood, Calif.; Edina, Minn.; Mishakawa, Ind.; Vancouver, Wash.; Kensington, Md.; Palo Alto, Calif.; New York, N.Y.; Port Orford, Ore.; Flossmoor, Ill.; Sheffield, Mass.; Orange, Calif.; Syracuse, N.Y.; Chevy Chase, Md.; Charleston, S.C.; Chicago, Ill.; Corvallis, Ore.; Saratoga Springs, N.Y.; Redlands, Calif.; Charlotte, N.C.; Austin, Texas; Los Angeles, Calif.; Tampa, Fla.; Boulder, Colo.; San Bernardino, Calif.; Detroit, Mich.; Santa Fe, N.M.; Seattle, Wash.; Carmel, Calif.; Houston, Texas; Philadelphia, Pa.That is only a partial list of postmarks for "Manski for Wisconsin," as her Madison School Board campaign was grandiosely named. Yes, when it comes to "outside cash," John Nichols' protégés get a pass. Manski collected 107 contributions in the latest reporting period, of which only 32 bore a Madison address, including: MTI boss John Matthews, $50; Mayor Soglin aide Sarah Miley's husband, $100; and of course, Marj "Somebody Good" Passman, $50.
Blaska's Bring It! finds that Mertz's spouse, Karin Schmidt, is employed by the Madison Metropolitan School District as a special education assistant at Madison West High School. That necessitates that Mertz recuse himself on such important votes as teacher and staff salary, benefits, working conditions, length of school day and year.The odd thing is that nowhere on his campaign website does Mertz refer to his wife. He mentions two sons but no spouse. Why is she The Woman Who Must Not Be Named?
"No particular reason why she is not listed there," Mertz told me today. Seriously? And what about the obvious conflict of interest?
"If elected, I will recuse myself as advised by district legal staff," Mertz told this blog. I asked what would trigger a recusal. He responded, "As to recusals, I don't know. I will take the legal advice of the district counsel. You could ask her; I have not yet, as it is not appropriate for her to be giving advice to a candidate."
Really? You're running for school board but you don't know when and on what you can vote?
I have posed the conflict-of-interest issue to MMSD legal staff as well as to the Wisconsin School Board Assn. This being the Easter weekend holiday, answers may not be forthcoming before the election. However, Mertz supporter Bill Keys, the former school board president who banned the Pledge of Allegiance at Madison schools, a year ago declared that school board candidate Nichelle Nichols "will be unable to work fully with her colleagues," because she was a Madison Urban League employee:
When I served on the board, our attorney instructed me to avoid Madison Teachers Inc. negotiations and not even be in the room during discussions. As a retired teacher, I benefited only from the life insurance policy provided by the district. Even so, discussions or votes on MTI benefits would violate state law.
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Is it my imagination, or have you noticed that some public high school courses that are now called "honors" are equivalent to the regular "college prep" curriculum of earlier eras? And have you also noticed that what is now called "college prep" is aimed largely at students who are deemed low achievers or of low cognitive ability?Related: English 10.In fact, this trend is nobody's imagination. Over the past generation, public schools have done away with "tracking" -- a practice that began in the early 1900′s. By the 20′s and 30′s, curricula in high schools had evolved into four different types: college-preparatory, vocational (e.g., plumbing, metal work, electrical, auto), trade-oriented (e.g., accounting, secretarial), and general. Students were tracked into the various curricula based largely on IQ but sometimes other factors such as race and skin color. Children of immigrants, and children who came from farms rather than cities, were often assumed to be inferior in cognitive ability and treated accordingly.
During the 60's and 70's, radical education critics such as Jonathan Kozol brought accusations against a system they found racist and sadistic. They argued that public schools were hostile to children and lacked innovation in pedagogy. Their goal -- which became the goal of the larger education establishment -- was to restore equity to students, erasing the lines that divided them by social class and race. The desire to eliminate inequity translated to the goal of preparing every student for college. The goal was laudable, but as college prep merged with the general education track, it became student-centered and needs-based, with lower standards and less homework assigned.
Some of the previous standards returned during the early 80's, when the "Back to Basics" movement reacted against the fads of the late 60's and the 70's by reinstituting traditional curricula. But the underlying ideas of Kozol and others did not go away, and the progressive watchword in education has continued to be "equality."
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Tap or click for a larger version of the above chart.
Madison Superintendent Jane Belmore:
In investigating the options for data to report for these programs for 2011-12 and for prior years, Research & Program Evaluation staff have not been able to find a consistent way that students were identified as participants in these literacy interventions in prior years.Much more on Madison's disastrous reading results, here. Reading continues to be job one for our $392,000,000 public schools.As such, there are serious data concerns that make the exact measures too difficult to secure at this time. Staff are working now with Curriculum & Assessment leads to find solutions. However, it is possible that this plan will need to be modified based on uncertain data availability prior to 2011-12.
Given the results, perhaps the continued $pending and related property tax increases for Reading Recovery are driven by adult employment, rather than kids learning to read.
UPDATE: April 1, 2013 Madison School Board discussion of the District's reading results. I found the curriculum creation conversation toward the end of the meeting fascinating, particularly in light of these long term terrible results. I am not optimistic that student reading skills will improve given the present structure and practices. 30 MB MP3.
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CATHOLIC SCHOOL was not the ordeal for me that it apparently was for many other children of my generation. I attended Catholic grade schools, served as an altar boy, and, astonishingly, was never struck by a nun or molested by a priest. All in all I was treated kindly, which often was more than I deserved. My education has withstood the test of time, including both the lessons my teachers instilled and the ones they never intended.Related: English 10In the mid-20th century, when I was in grade school, a child's self-esteem was not a matter for concern. Shame was considered a spur to better behavior and accomplishment. If you flunked a test, you were singled out, and the offending sheet of paper, bloodied with red marks, was waved before the entire class as a warning, much the way our catechisms depicted a boy with black splotches on his soul.
Fear was also considered useful. In the fourth grade, right around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, one of the nuns at St. Petronille's, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, told us that the Vatican had received a secret warning that the world would soon be consumed by a fatal nuclear exchange. The fact that the warning had purportedly been delivered by Our Lady of Fátima lent the prediction divine authority. (Any last sliver of doubt was removed by our viewing of the 1952 movie The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, wherein the Virgin Mary herself appeared on a luminous cloud.) We were surely cooked. I remember pondering the futility of existence, to say nothing of the futility of safety drills that involved huddling under desks. When the fateful sirens sounded, I resolved, I would be out of there. Down the front steps, across Hillside Avenue, over fences, and through backyards, I would take the shortest possible route home, where I planned to crawl under my father's workbench in the basement. It was the sturdiest thing I had ever seen. I didn't believe it would save me, but after weighing the alternatives carefully, I decided it was my preferred spot to face oblivion.
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School vouchers are usually opposed by teachers unions and their Democratic allies, but a dirty little secret is that some suburban Republicans oppose them too. The latter is the case in Wisconsin, where GOP Governor Scott Walker's plan to get more kids out of failing schools is facing opposition from short-sighted members of his own party.The Badger State's 22-year-old voucher program currently covers Milwaukee and Racine. But in his budget for fiscal 2014-15, Mr. Walker wants to expand it to nine of the state's worst school districts and increase funding by 9%. Under the proposed formula, students in districts that have at least two schools that get a D or F on their 2011-2012 performance report cards could use a voucher at a private school.
The plan would cover 500 new students in the first year, 1,000 in the second, and thereafter as many as qualified under the formula, which extends the voucher to students in failing schools whose families make 300% of the poverty level. The new areas include Beloit, Green Bay, Kenosha, Waukesha and Fond du Lac, and more than 40,000 children who currently attend lousy public schools would be eligible.
......
While Wisconsin schools score better than most, in 2010 the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that Wisconsin's black fourth grade students had the worst reading scores in the country. By eighth grade, black students did worse on English tests than students for whom English was a second language.
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Like me, millions of high-school seniors with sour grapes are asking themselves this week how they failed to get into the colleges of their dreams. It's simple: For years, they--we--were lied to.Colleges tell you, "Just be yourself." That is great advice, as long as yourself has nine extracurriculars, six leadership positions, three varsity sports, killer SAT scores and two moms. Then by all means, be yourself! If you work at a local pizza shop and are the slowest person on the cross-country team, consider taking your business elsewhere.
What could I have done differently over the past years?
For starters, had I known two years ago what I know now, I would have gladly worn a headdress to school. Show me to any closet, and I would've happily come out of it. "Diversity!" I offer about as much diversity as a saltine cracker. If it were up to me, I would've been any of the diversities: Navajo, Pacific Islander, anything. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, I salute you and your 1/32 Cherokee heritage.
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If high school students took charge of their education with limited supervision, would they learn? A Massachusetts school is finding out."Some kids say, I hate science or I hate math, but what they are really saying is: I hate science class or I hate math class," says high school senior Matt Whalan.
Whalan is writing a novel. That's a notable feat for a 17-year-old, and he has a semester to finish it. Whalan is enrolled in the Monument Mountain Regional High School's Independent Project, an alternative program described as a "school within a school," founded and run by students. The semester-long program is in its third year, and Whalan has completed the program three times during his high school career and says it has saved his grades.
"I've been a writer all through high school, and my grades were suffering because I was devoted to writing instead of school," says Whalan. Thankfully, that changed for him when a fellow schoolmate launched the Independent Project at the Great Barrington, Mass., school.
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Phil Hands:
It is difficult to comprehend the words Madison schools and "reform" in practice. Such is the pressure to maintain the "status quo". More, here.
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Reaction was swift and angry.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board elections, here."Enough is enough of this. Hypocrisy is alive and thriving in Madison!" read a Facebook post from United Migrant Opportunity Services board chair Juan Jose Lopez.
"It was all part of a plan to silence Ananda Mirilli," wrote radio host and former Urban League board member Derrell Connor in a blog post entitled "Madison liberals hurting communities of color."
"To the communities of color in Madison, I say this: Don't forget what has happened here. If there was ever a time to become organized and engaged, it is now."
And perhaps most scathing of all, an editorial from The Madison Times:
"The MMSD School Board race that came crashing down pretty much typifies the status of race relations we see every day and the tremendous racial divide we have in Madison right now. White elite liberals dictating to, condescending to and manipulating Madison's communities of color. This is when they are kind enough to not completely ignore them, which, unfortunately, is most of the time."
This outcry was the result of a Madison school board primary in February. It didn't seem like a big deal at first: Only 18,452 voters bothered to cast ballots.
"The interest was certainly greater after the election than it was before," says TJ Mertz with a laugh. "There's no question about that!"
Mertz, who finished second in the primary, is now the only candidate actively campaigning to win Seat 5 on April 2. First-place finisher Sarah Manski stunned voters when she dropped out of the race the day after the primary, citing her husband's acceptance to a graduate school in California. Election rules say her name must remain on the ballot, though, and that leaves off the third-place finisher, Ananda Mirilli, who is Latina. Mirilli has decided not to pursue a write-in campaign.
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The bill's author and primary sponsor, Republican Rep. Joel Kleefisch of Oconomowoc, says that broadcasters have poured lots of money into their operations to make them compatible with an increasingly digital world, and he lauds the "distinctive link" between the stations and the communities they serve.Much more on fiscal indulgences and our political class, here.Co-sponsor Rep. Brett Hulsey, a liberal Madison Democrat not usually given to signing on to Republican bills, is more blunt.
"I co-sponsored this bill because employers from the TV and radio stations in my district asked me to," he said. "There are four TV stations and 13 radio stations, and they employ over 200 people in the district."
This is typical of the approach legislators take to taxes, according to Berry. "Somebody will come to them and ask them to carve out some teeny exemption."
And over time, they add up.
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Superintendent Jane Belmore 2.5MB PDF
When the Building Our Future plan was approved in June 2012, BOE members approved two motions to assure that specific accountability plans and progress indicators would be provided for each program receiving funding. Research & Program Evaluation staff have worked since then to create a comprehensive report to monitor progress on district priorities and strategies related to the plan. It is noted that while this plan officially indicated 17 specific strategies to address closing achievement gaps, every instructional decision in the district and at the school level is made with the intention of all students learning to potential and all learning gaps closed.Summary of "Building Our Future" activites (2.3MB PDF)The overarching priorities section of the report has been developed this year to provide the direction for and measure of all of the energies that are going into all students reaching high levels of academic performance. This section of the report can stand alone as direction for and measures of overall district improvement efforts.
A. Synthesis of Topic: The Building Our Future Plan is a comprehensive set of strategies designed to eliminate achievement gaps while at the same time increase the achievement of all students. Attached to this report are Summary of Activities for the strategies approved by the Board of Education in each of the identified foundational areas: Instructional support, College and Career Readiness, Culturally Relevant Practices, Safe and Positive School Environments, Family Engagement, and Diverse and Qualified Workforce. Each of the summaries provides activities implemented, challenges, and future recommendations. All strategies now have outcome measures identified.Related: Madison's disastrous reading results.B. Recommendations: We are recommending, for budget purposes, all year two activities be moved to year three and that next year will be a combination of completion of year one activities and some recommended year two activities. These specific recommendations will come through the 2013/14 budget process. As with any implementation phase, some of the strategies needed to be modified and adapted. We continue to see this plan as the frame work by which the district will close the achievement gap.
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Tap on the image to view a larger version. Source: The Global Report Card.
Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:
Recently I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the Madison school district's achievement gap problems and other challenges we face. I've also been responding to the outlandish notion that Madison is a failing school district whose students deserve private school vouchers as their only lifeline to academic success.Related:At times like this, I find it helpful to remember that Madison's schools are educating many, many students who are succeeding. Some of them are succeeding spectacularly. With apologies to those I'm overlooking, here's a brief run-down on some of our stars -
Madison Memorial's recently-formed science bowl team won the Wisconsin state championship in January. The team of seniors Srikar Adibhatla, Sohil Shah, Thejas Wesley and William Xiang and sophomore Brian Luo will represent Wisconsin in the National Science Bowl Championship in Washington, D.C. in April.
Credit for non-Madison School District courses and the Talented and Gifted complaint.
Census.gov on Madison's demographics, compared to College Station, TX. 52.9% of Madison residents have a bachelor's degree, compared to the State's 26%. 57.5% of College Station, Texas's residents have a college degree.
Madison High School UW-Madison and University of Wisconsin System enrollment trends 1983-2011:
East LaFollette, Memorial, West, Edgewood.
Where have all the students, gone? A look at suburban Madison enrollment changes.
National Merit Semifinalists & Wisconsin's cut scores.
Madison's nearly $15k per student annual spending, community support and higher education infrastructure provide the raw materials for world class public schools. Benchmarking ourselves against world leaders would seem to be a great place to begin.
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In 12th grade, my friend Ryan and I were finalists for the Silver State Scholars, a competition to identify the "Top 100" seniors in Nevada. The finalists were flown to Lake Tahoe for two days of interviews. On the plane, Ryan and I met a boy from Las Vegas. Looking to size up the competition, we asked what high school he went to. He said a name we didn't recognize and added, "It's a magnet school." Ryan asked what a magnet school was, and spent the remaining hour incredulously demanding a detailed account of the young man's educational history: his time abroad, his after-school robotics club, his tutors, his college prep courses.All educations, we realized then, are not created equal. For Ryan and me, of Pahrump, Nev., just an hour from the city, the Vegas boy was a citizen of a planet we would never visit. What we didn't know was that there were other, more distant planets that we could not even see. And those planets couldn't see us, either.
A study released last week by researchers at Harvard and Stanford quantified what everyone in my hometown already knew: even the most talented rural poor kids don't go to the nation's best colleges. The vast majority, the study found, do not even try.
For deans of admissions brainstorming what they can do to remedy this, might I suggest: anything.
...Of course, finding these students and facilitating their admission into elite universities is only half of the story. The other half is providing the resources and supports they need while they're on campus, so that they don't continue to feel like aliens.
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A growing number of lawmakers across the country are taking steps to redefine public education, shifting the debate from the classroom to the pocketbook. Instead of simply financing a traditional system of neighborhood schools, legislators and some governors are headed toward funneling public money directly to families, who would be free to choose the kind of schooling they believe is best for their children, be it public, charter, private, religious, online or at home.Lessons on school choice from Sweden.On Tuesday, after a legal fight, the Indiana Supreme Court upheld the state's voucher program as constitutional. This month, Gov. Robert Bentley of Alabama signed tax-credit legislation so that families can take their children out of failing public schools and enroll them in private schools, or at least in better-performing public schools.
In Arizona, which already has a tax-credit scholarship program, the Legislature has broadened eligibility for education savings accounts. And in New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie, in an effort to circumvent a Legislature that has repeatedly defeated voucher bills, has inserted $2 million into his budget so low-income children can obtain private school vouchers.
Proponents say tax-credit and voucher programs offer families a way to escape failing public schools. But critics warn that by drawing money away from public schools, such programs weaken a system left vulnerable after years of crippling state budget cuts -- while showing little evidence that students actually benefit.
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The Des Moines Register published then removed an interactive map Wednesday that looked at how school resource officers are deployed in Iowa after it drew criticism from people who thought the map showed unprotected districts. Or as Fox News host Megyn Kelly put it, "If I'm some psycho, I might wanna play my odds."The map "identifies more than 100 public schools, from kindergarten through high school and community college campuses that have no security," Mike Opelka wrote on The Blaze.
The Register changed the map to show only districts with full-time security, Fox News reports, then ditched that map, too. The article, which has drawn some angry comments, now has no map -- and no note explaining what happened.
Register Editor Rick Green told Kelly that the map was an attempt, in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre, to answer questions from parents about what sort of police presence their school districts had. It "showed no schools, showed no addresses [and] it did not go into detail," Green said. He said it was "incredibly unfortunate" that The Blaze was displaying a non-interactive version of the map on its site.
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America's K-12 public education system has experienced tremendous historical growth in employment, according to the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. Between fiscal year (FY) 1950 and FY 2009, the number of K-12 public school students in the United States increased by 96 percent, while the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) school employees grew 386 percent. Public schools grew staffing at a rate four times faster than the increase in students over that time period. Of those personnel, teachers' numbers increased 252 percent, while administrators and other non-teaching staff experienced growth of 702 percent, more than seven times the increase in students.Related: Richard Zimman's 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary ClubThat hiring pattern has persisted in more recent years as well. Between FY 1992 and FY 2009, the number of K-12 public school students nationwide grew 17 percent, while the number of FTE school employees increased 39 percent. Among school personnel, teachers' staffing numbers rose 32 percent, while administrators and other non-teaching staff experienced growth of 46 percent, 2.3 times greater than the increase in students over that 18-year period; the growth in the number of teachers was almost twice that of students.
The two aforementioned figures come from "The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America's Public Schools." This companion report contains more state-specific information about public school staffing. Specifically, this report contains:
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How can we measure what makes a school system work? Andreas Schleicher walks us through the PISA test, a global measurement that ranks countries against one another -- then uses that same data to help schools improve. Watch to find out where your country stacks up, and learn the single factor that makes some systems outperform others.What makes a great school system? To find out, Andreas Schleicher administers a test to compare student performance around the world. Full bio »
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A grand jury on Friday indicted Beverly L. Hall, the former superintendent powerhouse of the Atlanta School District, on racketeering and other charges, bringing a dramatic new chapter to one of the largest cheating scandals in the country.The grand jury also indicted 34 teachers and administrators in addition to Dr. Hall, who resigned in 2011 just before results of an investigation into the scandal was released. The panel recommended $7.5 million bond for Dr. Hall, who could face up to 45 years in prison.
In a list of 65 charges against the educators that includes influencing witnesses, theft by taking, conspiracy and making false statements, Fulton County prosecutors painted a picture of a decade-long conspiracy that involved awarding bonuses connected to improving scores on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests, the state's main test of core academic subjects for elementary and middle schools, and a culture where, in some schools, cheating was an acceptable way to get them.
"Prosecutors allege the 35 named defendants conspired to either cheat, conceal cheating or retaliate against whistle-blowers in an effort to bolster C.R.C.T. scores for the benefit of financial rewards associated with high test scores," according to the indictment.
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Set goals....and do them! Set them out of reach, but able to be accomplished. Make them possible to do, but impossible to do right now. After all, the whole purpose of a goal is personal growth right? Set your goals so you need external information or help from somebody else. You are guaranteed to pick up new information, grow as a person, and gain new skills. The feeling from achieving something you didn't think you could do is worth the whole (usually painful) process.
Find a passion....
and chase it. Find something you love to do and become good at it. Whenever you feel like something is wearing you down, go do what you love, then come back to the issue at hand. It allows you to disconnect for a while, but when you come back to the issue you will have renewed vigor. I've found that the more unrelated to school it is, the better. I'm going to school for business, but outdoor activities and building UAV's are my passion. Whenever I feel like I'm overloaded in school, I go ski for a while or work on a new personal project. The schoolwork doesn't get any less painful, but my mindset changes.
Be creative.
Some people are born creative, but most people work at it. Creativity isn't a talent that just appears after a crazy weekend in Tijuana; it's a skill that takes work. The more effort you put into being creative, the more you will get out of it. Dream up something crazy, and build it. Brainstorm about a crazy system or program, and see through to its end. See what other people are doing, analyze it, and figure out how it can be done better. See how you can make something stronger, less expensive, look better, function better, sound better, or simply hype something up more than someone else. In most cases, little changes can have huge effects. Do you spend $600 every semester on books for school? Stop. Rent, trade, or barter to get the material. Need beer money? Find something people want, make it, and sell it to them. DIY is the new cool.
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The packages arrived by mail in October of the students' senior year of high school. They consisted of brightly colored accordion folders containing about 75 sheets of paper. The sheets were filed with information about colleges: their admissions standards, graduation rates and financial aid policies.
The students receiving the packages were mostly high-achieving, low-income students, and they were part of a randomized experiment. The researchers sending the packets were trying to determine whether most poor students did not attend selective colleges because they did not want to, or because they did not understand that they could.
The results are now in, and they suggest that basic information can substantially increase the number of low-income students who apply to, attend and graduate from top colleges.
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Americans have learned to trust free markets. Republican or Democrat, we believe the unimpeded exchange of goods and services will yield better solutions than five-year plans set by even the most well-meaning public servants. Free markets have sometimes led to excess -- reality TV and supersized soft drinks come to mind -- but have also given us incredible innovation, a remarkable degree of choice and the world's strongest economy.And yet free markets are absent from K-12 education. We grant each school district a geographic monopoly, which creates a monopoly on how students within the (sometimes arbitrary) district lines are taught. Worse, we are setting state and national standards that move steadily toward greater central control of education.
The people who favor that control have the right intentions. Just as doctors don't extemporize while performing open-heart surgery, why, they ask, should 3 million K-12 teachers be inventing their own ways to teach? We need to figure out what works and then make every teacher do it.
It sounds so simple, but consider these facts:
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Five candidates are competing for three seats on the Madison school board, with the general election on April 2, 2013.Wayne Strong and Dean Loumos (Isthmus) TJ Mertz (Isthmus).The political context for the races is explosive, given Gov. Scott Walker's revolutionary proposals for education in Wisconsin: cuts to public school funding, an expansion of the voucher program, and a revamping of teachers' evaluations and bargaining rights.
In Madison, the issues are particularly complex, with the intense disagreements over the district's achievement gap between white and minority students.
In the race for Seat 4, incumbent James Howard is running against Greg Packnett, a Democratic legislative aide.
In this competitive series of elections, there are numerous candidate forums and listening sessions under way, and we thought we'd pose our own questions to candidates.
For this fourth and final week of questions, we ask candidates to evaluate Gov. Scott Walker's proposals for the Wisconsin's 2013-15 budget, and consider how it would impact schools in the state. Along similar lines, we ask candidates to share their thoughts on the proposal to expand voucher schools in Wisconsin.
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So the Indiana Supreme Court has ruled that the state's school voucher program is constitutional. It isn't the first time a supreme court has made a questionable call but, apart from the legal argument, the decision doesn't mean that vouchers are a good educational or civic idea.Jack Nicas:They aren't.
Indiana is one of a growing number of states with school voucher programs. These allow public dollars to be used at private schools, including religious schools, including those religious schools that use creationist materials that teach anti-scientific notions such as the idea that the universe is no more than 10,000 years old, and that humans lived at the very same time as dinosaurs.
With Tuesday's decision by the Indiana Supreme Court, Indiana can now expand its program, in which more than 9,300 low-income students already are enrolled. Under the program, students in grades 1-8 can receive up to $4,500 annually for private school tuition, and high schoolers can get a little bit more. The court ruled that the money is going to families, who use it as they wish, rather than the schools themselves, which the justices believe is an argument that gets around the separation between church and state.
Indiana's Supreme Court upheld a law that lets taxpayer funds pay for private schools, boosting an effort to expand what is already the broadest such voucher program in the U.S. and rebuffing critics who say it undermines public education.The court's five judges unanimously rejected the argument of the state's largest teachers union and other plaintiffs that the Indiana voucher program violates the state Constitution because it uses public funds to support religious education. Most of the voucher funding goes to parochial schools. The judges, upholding an earlier trial-court decision, ruled that as long as the state maintains a public-education system, using Indiana tax dollars to help fund the private-school educations of low- and middle-income children doesn't violate the state Constitution.
Proponents say vouchers offer parents important alternatives to public schools. Twenty-two states and Washington, D.C., have some sort of program that funds private schools, but most limit eligibility to low-income or otherwise disadvantaged families, said Robert Enlow, chief executive of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, a national advocacy group for vouchers. In Indiana's two-year-old program, families are eligible if their income is up to 150% more than the threshold to qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch, which translates to as much as $64,000 a year for a family of four.
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Both of my parents are educators, and from my travels around the world, there is a clear understanding that we need a major change in how we educate students. The traditional model of education, born in the industrial age with a one-size-fits-all approach, is not meeting the needs of our knowledge economy. We can do much more to give the next generation a personalized educational experience that equips them with the skills, values, characteristics and knowledge they need to thrive in our modern society.The role of the employee in today's knowledge economy is very different from the role of the employee in yesterday's industrial economy. To prepare for industrial work, K-12 students were taught how to read and write, along with topics that could help them in their everyday lives such as history and arithmetic. The education system emphasized memorization and judged students by their ability to recall factoids on multiple-choice exams.
If the education system didn't provide the specific abilities to perform a function in a factory, the employer could fill the void. Employees could spend a few weeks of on-the-job training and be ready for a lifetime of work without the need for continued education.
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Why vote in this race?There are almost a million reasons.
If you are writing a column and you want people to take a nap while pretending to read it, try writing about the exciting race for Superintendent of Schools in Wisconsin.
But once you shake your head to rid it of exciting thoughts you may have a little space to consider an office that has wide-ranging impact on how we all live - those with children and not.
This is kind of a classic race. The incumbent is Dr. Tony Evers, a veteran educator with a decades-long file of experience. He's being challenged by Don Pridemore, a right-wing lawmaker from Hartford who has no meaningful education experience and has made a name for himself by saying single parenthood is the leading cause of child abuse and that abused women should just remember the good times and the reasons they got married in the first place.
See what I mean?
This is not the first time that we've had a candidate with experience and credentials being challenged by a weirdo. That's our system.
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The Madison girl who won the state spelling bee Saturday almost didn't show up for the event, even though she qualified to be there with a victory in last month's citywide bee.Aisha Khan, 13, said she felt too upset a few weeks ago after she and her parents returned from a sad visit to India, where they comforted Aisha's maternal grandmother in the days before she died of cancer at the age of 63.
The grandmother, Asgari Noor, helped raise Aisha, and the girl visited her for three months every summer, so it took some effort to overcome her grief. In the end, Aisha took her place in the state competition because of something her grandmother told her.
"That was the last thing she told me to do, 'Get first place,'" Aisha said.
Aisha did just that in the state bee, which is sponsored by the Wisconsin State Journal, by outlasting 47 other top spellers from around the state.
Aisha now advances to the national competition in Washington, D.C., held May 26 to June 1.
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President Obama will soon release his federal budget for 2014, and a top priority is likely to be early-childhood education, particularly for the poor. But will the proposal seek much funding for the growth of charter schools--at least more than the paltry 0.4% of federal education spending that currently supports these exciting and demonstrably successful schools?Last month, the respected private firm Mathematica Policy Research published a multiyear study (PDF) of students enrolled in KIPP (the Knowledge Is Power Program), a network of 125 charter schools serving 41,000 students in 20 states and the District of Columbia. The study found that after three years students in the KIPP program were 11 months ahead of their traditional-public-school peers in math and eight months ahead in reading. Also after three years (or four for some children in the study), KIPP students were 14 months ahead in science and 11 months ahead in social studies.
These gains are substantial. For every three (or four) years they spend in the program, KIPP students are benefiting from almost a full year of greater learning growth than they would if they remained in traditional public schools.
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My eldest grandson, Ben Mathews, just turned four. According to the New York Times, that is a perilous age in that big city. Many four year olds are toiling through exercises designed by their parents and tutoring companies to prepare for kindergarten gifted program entrance tests.It gets worse. Adults are fighting over the very nature of those exams. Should they, as they do now, measure how much academic preparation preschoolers have had? Or should they assess the magic essence of giftedness, something much talked about but so far poorly understood.
Ben can relax. The public schools where he lives in South Pasadena, Calif., like most schools in the Washington area, don't have gifted programs for kindergartners to compete for. Fairfax and Montgomery counties have separate elementary and middle school classes for those designated gifted, but like many other districts here they provide similarly imaginative teaching and opportunities for creative work to children who don't score that high on IQ tests. High schools in the Washington area, as well as South Pasadena High, offer the most challenging college-level courses to anyone, gifted or not, who wants to take them.
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In the race to head the state Department of Public Instruction - overseeing 870,000 public school students in Wisconsin - the incumbent superintendent and longtime public schools employee is facing a challenge from a Republican lawmaker who supports leaner government and private school vouchers.The election Tuesday will pit Tony Evers, the incumbent superintendent of public instruction, against Republican Rep. Don Pridemore from Erin in Washington County.
Officially, the state superintendent is a nonpartisan office. But Evers, 61, has historically won support from Democrats and teachers unions. He was opposed to Gov. Scott Walker's legislation that rolled back collective bargaining, and he signed the petition to recall Walker.
Pridemore, 66, wants to see more local control and believes teachers unions have monopolized education. He favored Walker's Act 10 legislation and has called for an audit of the Department of Public Instruction.
So where do the candidates stand on many of the state's other hot-button education issues?
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The internet headline was "engineering genius babies" out of China. Not true. But the reality is very interesting. We'll check it out.The headline flying all over the digital universe was head-turning: "China is engineering genius babies." "Superbabies" was the follow-on. And it was not exactly correct. But it wasn't entirely wrong, either.
And it's not just China stepping toward that brave new world. China is studying the genetics of intelligence, and how to apply them.
The whole world - the U.S. very much included - is studying genetics and reproduction. How to avoid defects and disease via the test tube. Will sex for reproduction soon look primitive?
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The Sun Prairie High School ProStart Culinary Team took first place in the state competition held mid-March in Milwaukee at the Wisconsin Restaurant Expo. The win makes the team eligible for the first time to go on to the national competition in Baltimore.Under guidance from Family and Consumer Educator and ProStart Coordinator Gerry Fritsch, the culinary team took first place out of 29 other schools had teams participating.
"The students earned this recognition because of their dedication to the industry and their passion for cooking," Fritsch said.
The culinary team chefs include students Claire Sanders, Darnell Morris, Zach Newby, Grace Singer, and Dillon Muir as an alternate.
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Teenage applicants from as far afield as India and Mongolia are catching western colleges' attention by taking so-called "massive online open courses" designed for older students.Schoolchildren taking courses on their own initiative already account for about 5 per cent of the 800,000 students at edX, the non-profit online venture founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Some have used their results to apply to the colleges that pioneered MOOCs.
Amol Bhave, a 17-year-old from Jabalpur, India, learnt last week that he had been accepted to MIT after scoring 97 per cent on edX's circuits and electronics course. He received the good news on March 14 - or "pi day", as he put it in a Skype conversation with the FT.
"I am like the first person in my city to get into MIT ever so I have become sort of pretty famous," he said. "I was so motivated by how we were taught [by edX] that I decided that maybe I belong to MIT after all."
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One wrong turn on the "road to school" issues, was embodied by Milton Friedman's idea of government funded school vouchers as free market enterprise to ostensibly create competition for government funded schools. Why advocates for private free market enterprise would not/could not grasp that no reasonable entity, whether private or government, ever funds its own demise through competition with itself, unless private schools were the target to be usurped by government control and regulation, is a question of the era. The idea of competitive free market enterprise has no conceptual room for funding with government funds which are obtained by virtue of government "power of the sword" to compel. There is simply no way to synthesize the two concepts except to confound the principles of free market and government funding. That is currently in high gear as well with what is called "public-private partnerships". The dichotomy of charter schools as "competition" in real terms being the darling of the "right" is equally as mystifying.Not possessing the ability to read minds, one can only wonder at the contradictions. The definition of political principles is becoming blurred as political parties become more meaningless with every election, labels for "Conservative" or "Liberal are also rapidly becoming obfuscated.
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Or, more accurately, what they could choose to eat if they happen to attend a Howard County public school.A few months ago at a New Year's Eve gathering I happened to meet Judith Schardt-Shure, who is the cafeteria manager for Burleigh Manor Middle School in Ellicott City. Over the course of the next 30 minutes, Judith proceeded to dispel one myth after another that I held about the HCPSS school lunch program.
Other people are noticing our school lunches, too. The Howard County Public School System's Food & Nutrition Service recently earned an "A+" grade from the Physicians Committee For Responsible Medicine. They also received, for all 73 schools, a HealthierUS Schools Bronze Award, which includes a letter from First Lady (and fitness maven) Michelle Obama.
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MADISON SCHOOL BOARD CANDIDATE FORUMThursday, March 28
6:30 - 8:30 p.m.
Sequoya Library
4340 Tokay BoulevardModerator: Charles Read, former Dean of the U.W. School of Education
Sponsored by the Harvard Club of Wisconsin and Madison Magnet
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. ALL ARE WELCOME!!!
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I wandered into Lit 311 at the beginning of my sophomore year at Cornell in September 1954. It was not that I had any interest in European literature, or any literature. I was just shopping for a class that met on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings so that I wouldn't have any Saturday classes, and "literature" also filled one of the requirements for graduation. It was officially called "European Literature of the Nineteenth Century," but unofficially called "Dirty Lit" by the Cornell Daily Sun, since it dealt with adultery in Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary.The professor was Vladimir Nabokov, an émigré from tsarist Russia. About six feet tall and balding, he stood, with what I took to be an aristocratic bearing, on the stage of the two-hundred-fifty-seat lecture hall in Goldwin Smith. Facing him on the stage was his white-haired wife Vera, whom he identified only as "my course assistant." He made it clear from the first lecture that he had little interest in fraternizing with students, who would be known not by their name but by their seat number. Mine was 121. He said his only rule was that we could not leave his lecture, even to use the bathroom, without a doctor's note.
He then described his requisites for reading the assigned books. He said we did not need to know anything about their historical context, and that we should under no circumstance identify with any of the characters in them, since novels are works of pure invention. The authors, he continued, had one and only one purpose: to enchant the reader. So all we needed to appreciate them, aside from a pocket dictionary and a good memory, was our own spines. He assured us that the authors he had selected--Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Robert Louis Stevenson--would produce tingling we could detect in our spines.
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MIT Strategy professor Michael Cusumano published a lengthy opinion piece where he argued that free online courses may have much higher costs and consequences than the socially minded people promoting them intended.I worry, however, based on the history of free products and services available on the Internet and their impact on the software products business as well as on the music, video, book publishing, and newspaper and magazine businesses. We have learned that there can also be "negative" network effects. In education, this would occur if increasing numbers of universities and colleges joined the free online education movement and set a new threshold price for the industry--zero--which becomes commonly accepted and difficult to undo. Of course, it is impossible to foresee the future. But we can think about different scenarios, and not all of them are good.The piece is a bit frustrating with some internal inconsistencies that would take too long to go through. But, by way of example, as I'll get to in a moment, Cusumano's concern is that free online courses by elite institutions may wipe out the non-elite ones but at the same time suggests that a free price sends a signal that those courses are of low value. So, on the one hand, their free price combined with high value will wipe out the non-elite courses while their free price sends a signal of low value compared to non-free courses offered by non-elite institutions. You can't have it both ways.
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There's no doubt about it. Madison is home to an embarrassing gap in achievement between white students and minority students, as well as between the well-to-do and the poor. In most discussions of the issue, the figure that is often used to convey the crisis is the dismal 50 percent graduation rate for African-American students.That figure, however, represents only the percentage of students who graduate in four years of high school. It leaves out a critical mass of kids who take longer to obtain their diplomas, some through alternative programs.
"If we concentrate only on that number then all of the hard work that you're doing is being ignored," T.J. Mertz, a candidate for Madison School Board, told a group of students last week at Operation Fresh Start, a program in Madison that helps high school dropouts obtain their GED or high school equivalency diploma (which is slightly more comprehensive). Participants in the program, which is partnered with AmeriCorps, split their time between working on a job site (either building housing or engaging in conservation projects) and the classroom.
The organization had invited all five School Board candidates to discuss their plans for the district with the students, as well as to take questions from the young adults, who range in age from 16-24. The only candidate who did not attend was Greg Packnett, who is challenging School Board President James Howard.
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Among the ways of calling people greedy, there is no more puzzling way than accusing them of wanting to "have their cake and eat it, too." It would seem that cake's inherent utility, without being eaten, is limited. What are you supposed to do with it if you don't eat it? Dress it up like Harry Potter? Use it as bait for a ring of international cake thieves?Thus, in order to characterize the avaricious nature of Wisconsin taxpayers, I have decided to coin my own soon-to-be-popular phrase. For instance, Wisconsin citizens want "to go on a date with a girl and have it end without her throwing a drink on them," which, given my past experience, is really the best-case scenario.
A Marquette University poll released last week shows that as taxpayers, we think we can have it all. In the poll, respondents strongly supported increasing funding for public schools - 71.9% believed the increase should be somewhere between 1.5% and greater than the rate of inflation. But when given a choice between increasing funding for schools and cutting property taxes, more respondents favored the tax cuts. The message: Go ahead and increase funding for schools, as long as we don't have to pay for it.
The highway funding system also gets similar treatment in the poll. A small number (27.9%) of Wisconsin residents support raising gas taxes or vehicle registration fees to pay for transportation projects, and an even smaller group (24%) supports borrowing money to build roads. Conversely, a much higher number (42.5%) of Wisconsinites oppose reducing transportation spending if it delays road projects. At least in the short term, these numbers appear to be incongruous, as it seems the state will have to pick one or the other.
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In the United Kingdom the number of reports of the verbal and physical abuse of teachers is growing at a sad and steady rate. In the United States as well, a number of fine teachers say that they are leaving the profession primarily because of the out-of-control attitudes and behavior of poorly-raised children who will not take any responsibility for their own education and don't seem to mind if they ruin the educational chances of their peers.
David McCullough tells us that when Harry Truman took over the artillery outfit, Battery 'D', "the new captain said nothing for what seemed the longest time. He just stood looking everybody over, up and down the line slowly, several times. Because of their previous (mis) conduct, the men were expecting a tongue lashing. Captain Truman only studied them...At last he called 'Dismissed!' As he turned and walked away, the men gave him a Bronx cheer....In the morning Captain Truman posted the names of the noncommissioned officers who were 'busted' in rank...the First Sergeant was at the head of the list...Harry called in the other noncommissioned officers and told them it was up to them to straighten things out. 'I didn't come here to get along with you,' he said. 'You've got to get along with me. And if there are any of you who can't, speak up right now, and I'll bust you back right now."
Now, I do realize the classroom is not a military unit, and that students cannot be busted back to a previous grade, however their behavior suggests that they don't belong in a higher grade. But Truman realized poor discipline would endanger the lives of the men in his unit, and teachers, however much they yearn to be liked, relevant, and even loved, need to realize and accept that poor discipline in their classes will destroy some of the educational opportunities of their students. As it turned out, his unit respected and loved Truman in time, and lined Pennsylvania avenue for his inauguration parade.
For years, the Old Battleaxe was offered as a stereotype of the stern, demanding teacher who represented the expectations of the wider community in the classroom and required students to meet her standards.
In The Lowering of Higher Education, Jackson Toby quotes the experience of one man with an Old Battleaxe:
"Professor Emeritus of Religion at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, Walter Benjamin, wrote about a demanding freshman English teacher, Dr. Doris Garey, whose course he had taken in 1946, in an article entitled 'When an 'A' Meant Something.' Professor Benjamin praised the memory of Dr. Garey and expressed gratitude for what her demanding standards had taught him.
'Even though she had a bachelor's degree from Mount Holyoke and a doctorate from Wisconsin, Miss Garey was the low person in the department pecking order. And physically she was a lightweight--she could not have stood more than 4-foot-10 or weighed more than 100 pounds. But she had the pedagogical mass of a Sumo wrestler. Her literary expectations were stratospheric; she was the academic equivalent of my [Marine] boot camp drill instructor...The showboats (other instructors) had long since faded, along with their banter, jokes and easy grades. It was the no-nonsense Miss Garey whose memory endured.'"
In my view, too many of our teachers have been seduced by the ideas that they should be making sure their students have fun, and that their teaching should include "relevant" material from the evanescent present of her students, their egregiously temporary pop culture, and from current events of passing interest.
Once discipline and student responsibility for their own learning is established and understood, there can be a lot of interesting and even entertaining times in the classroom. Without them, classes are in a world of trouble. Samuel Gompers used to read aloud for their enjoyment to a room full of employees making cigars, but they continued to make the cigars while he did it.
In education reform discussions in general, in my view practically all the attention is on what the adults are and/or should be doing, and almost no attention is given to what students are and should be doing. Leaving them out of the equation quite naturally contributes to poor discipline and reduced learning.
A suburban high school English teacher in Pennsylvania wrote that: "My students are out of control," Munroe, who has taught 10th, 11th and 12th grades, wrote in one post. "They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners. They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire, and are just generally annoying." And one of her students commented: "As far as motivated high school students, she's completely correct. High school kids don't want to do anything...It's a teacher's job, however, to give students the motivation to learn."
As long as too many of us think education is the teacher's responsibility alone, we will have failed to understand what the job of learning requires of students, and we will be unable to make sense of the outcomes of our huge investments in education.
-------------------------
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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(Reuters) - The Indiana Supreme Court on Tuesday unanimously upheld the nation's broadest school voucher program, which gives poor and middle-class families public funds to help pay private school tuition.Opponents, including the state teachers' union, had sued to block the program on grounds that nearly all the voucher money has been directed to religious schools.
Voucher systems have drawn criticism across the United States from critics who say they drain money from public schools and subsidize overtly religious education. Supporters say they offer families greater choice on where to educate their children.
In a 5-0 vote, the Indiana justices said that it did not matter that funds had been directed to religious schools, so long as parents - and not the state - decide where to use the tuition vouchers.
"Whether the Indiana program is wise educational or public policy is not a consideration," Chief Justice Brent Dickson wrote. The program is constitutional, he wrote, because the public funds "do not directly benefit religious schools but rather directly benefit lower-income families with school children."
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That the acronym MOOCs rhymes with "nukes" seems apt. Massive open online courses, or MOOCs -- led by two profit-making start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, founded by entrepreneurial Stanford professors -- are a new disruptive force in education. Leading universities have scrambled to join or offer alternatives like edX, a collaboration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and others.The MOOCs movement has been greeted with equal parts enthusiasm and angst. The MOOC champions predict a technology-fueled revolution in the distribution and democratization of high-quality education. The MOOC skeptics have a variety of qualms, but especially about what is lost in the retreat of face-to-face teaching -- a point eloquently made by Andrew Delbanco, a professor of American studies at Columbia University, in an article in the current New Republic, "MOOCs of Hazard."
Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., raises a different issue in an essay published this week: the economics of MOOCs and the implications.
His article appears in Communications of the ACM, the monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery, and he had circulated a version of it earlier to his M.I.T. colleagues. After reading it, L. Rafael Rief, M.I.T.'s president, asked Mr. Cusumano to serve on a task force on the "residential university" of the future, including online initiatives.
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After an hour-and-a-half rehearsing Tchaikovsky's Fantasy Overture "Romeo and Juliet" with a mixed youth orchestra from east London and Los Angeles, Gustavo Dudamel felt the need to sit down on the podium. "I must be getting old," he joked (in fact he had every reason to feel a little weary, having just returned from a flying visit back to Venezuela to conduct at the state funeral of Hugo Chávez). It was not entirely a joke, because Dudamel, in his thirties, a little bit more rounded than when I last saw him, suddenly appeared if not middle-aged, then old enough to be a (young) father to the youngest of the musicians in the orchestra.And not entirely a joke because one of Dudamel's great calling-cards has always been his youth; he has been the whizz-kid and posterboy of the classical music world, mamboing with the exuberant teenagers of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela in their Latin American encores. But time waits for no man or woman; the SBYOV itself is not as youthful as it was, and Dudamel is now chief conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a grown-up in a grown-up's world. Having enjoyed ecstatic press, he has had to endure a few critical brickbats.
If you wanted to be cynical, you might question the whole premise of a youth orchestra project carried out under the banner "Discover Dudamel". But then the man himself questions it: "I don't like that," he said, pointing at the "Discover Dudamel" T-shirts worn by all the members of the orchestra - a gesture which no doubt brought on unpleasant palpitations in a host of PR and marketing people. He hardly needed to explain further; the point was not really to discover Dudamel, but to explore and discover the music. In the end I think the young players from the Barbican Youth Orchestra, the Centre for Young Musicians, Junior Guildhall, the London boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Redbridge, Barking and Dagenham and Youth Orchestra Los Angeles discovered even more than the music. We will come to that.
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Days are getting longer, the weather is warmer. The smell of spring is in the air. But if you inhale deeply down by JSCEE, there's another smell. It's the smell of math. After years of sideways movement, the stars are aligned for systemic changes to math instruction in Seattle Public Schools.Related: Math forum audio/video and Seattle's "Discovery Math" lawsuit.When you look at Seattle kids' math achievement against other urban districts, Seattle might seem to be doing OK. As a district-level statistic, we're not too bad. But closer inspection of disaggregated data and the view from inside the system prompt a cry for help. Seattle still has a large number of struggling students and a persistent achievement gap which we can't shake. Outside tutoring has become commonplace, with math as the most frequent remediation subject. However, recent national and state developments have identified common ground and outcome-proven methods which can serve as a model for Seattle.
This brings us around to a community support initiative for math education. Seattle has a math-focused School Board, and Seattle's new superintendent, Jose Banda, came to Seattle from proven math success with a diverse student population in Anaheim. Recent news reports are that staff at JSCEE are planning a K-8 math instructional materials adoption soon. Examples of success are scattered through Seattle classrooms and it's time for those successes to take root across the district.
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f you are tired of all the talk about the achievement gap in our school district, take heart. Newly appointed Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham's entry plan is a promising beginning.Related: And, so it continues.From racial disparities in academics to the race politics in the School Board primary election, the feeling of frustration has been palpable. The YWCA Madison suggests the reason this talk hasn't created much tangible progress is that these issues are part of a larger system of racial inequalities. Individual strategies, action plans or initiatives are less likely to be successful if they are not part of a larger racial equity strategy.
So we are delighted to see Cheatham's plan is based on values including commitment to equity and systemic improvement. If our community is serious about racial equity in education, we will join Cheatham in learning what kids of color need to be successful, and then making those resources and solutions the priority.
We will also consider every education-related decision and discussion with racial equity in mind. We will think holistically about Dane County's future as a more racially diverse community and welcome and retain professionals, including educators, of color.
Let's be part of a community-wide commitment to equity, and let's remember that we're doing it for the kids.
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Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:
First, I provide some background on the private school voucher imposition proposal. Next, I list thirteen ways in which the proposal and its advocates are hypocritical, inconsistent, irrational, or just plain wrong. Finally, I briefly explain for the benefit of Wisconsin Federation for Children why the students in Madison are not attending failing schools.Related: Counterpoint by David Blaska.
According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, "for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we've reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap". Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level "is the original gap" that the board set out to close.2009: 60% to 42%: Madison School District's Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags "National Average": Administration seeks to continue its use. This program continues, despite the results.Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.
2004: Madison Schools Distort Reading Data (2004) by Mark Seidenberg.
2012: Madison Mayor Paul Soglin: "We are not interested in the development of new charter schools"
Almost half of Wisconsin residents say they haven't heard enough about voucher schools to form an opinion, according to the Marquette University law school poll. Some 27 percent of respondents said they have a favorable view of voucher schools while 24 percent have an unfavorable view. But a full 43 percent said they hadn't heard enough about them to form an opinion.More on the voucher proposal, here."There probably is still more room for political leadership on both sides to try to put forward convincing arguments and move opinion in their direction," pollster Charles Franklin said.
The initial poll question about vouchers only asked for favorability perceptions without addressing what voucher schools are. In a follow-up question, respondents were told that vouchers are payments from the state using taxpayer money to fund parents' choices of private or religious schools.
With that cue, 51 percent favored it in some form while 42 percent opposed it.
Walker is a staunch voucher supporter.
A close observer of Madison's $392,789,303 K-12 public school district ($14,547/student) for more than nine years, I find it difficult to see substantive change succeeding. And, I am an optimist.
It will be far better for us to address the District's disastrous reading results locally, than to have change imposed from State or Federal litigation or legal changes. Or, perhaps a more diffused approach to redistributed state tax dollar spending.
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Milwaukee Public Television 4th Street Forum:
Can parents make informed decisions? How does the community benefit from these school options? And how important are standards, accountability, and transparency?ALAN BORSUK is an education columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Until 2009, he worked full time for the paper as an education reporter. Mr. Borsuk is a Law and Public Policy senior fellow for Marquette University Law School where he continues his research and writing on education.
ANNELIESE DICKMAN, JD is the research director for Public Policy Forum, a Milwaukee-based, nonpartisan think tank. The focus of her research and writing is on education policy, including financing and governance. Ms. Dickman was the Forum's lead author of their 15th annual report on education, "Cost and Performance in Choice Schools."
LATISH REED, PhD is an assistant professor of educational leadership at UW-Milwaukee. Earlier in her career, she was a middle school teacher and an assistant principal for Milwaukee Public Schools. Professor Reed also helped to start a charter school, Malcolm X Academy, which has since closed.
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Question: When is $129 million not $129 million?Related: Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding.Answer: When it is the additional aid Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker promised to send to the state's public schools.
Despite the Governor's claimed increase for 2013-15─an anemic and inadequate one percent even if true─it is really only $39 million .... a paltry half-percent increase or $44.83 per student even if schools could spend it (but more on that later).
This is a cruel joke on kids who only want a quality education. It is also public policy that calls into question the moral commitment of the administration to public education.
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Marquette University Law School Poll:
A statewide Marquette Law School Poll conducted March 11-14 finds that voters view charter schools as enabling more choice in education options but are doubtful that students learn more in charter schools than in public schools. Seventy-one percent said charter schools offer more choice, while 18 percent disagreed. Thirty-four percent think students learn more in charter schools, but 51 percent disagree. The poll finds that voters have a mix of views about charter schools, reflecting varied evaluations of them as education alternatives.Poll topline views (PDF).Charter schools are publicly funded, independently operated schools that are allowed more flexibility over instruction and subject matter than traditional public schools. The poll also touched upon views of vouchers, which support students attending private and religious schools.
A large majority, 72 percent, think charter schools provide flexibility to meet student needs that may not be met in traditional public schools, while 16 percent disagree. Voters doubt that charter schools skim the best students: 31 percent think they do, but 58 percent disagree. Opinion is more evenly divided on whether charters take needed money away from traditional public schools: 40 percent think they do, while 48 percent think they do not drain money from traditional schools. Forty-six percent think competition with charter schools makes public schools better, but 42 percent disagree.
Voters are concerned that the public pays for charter schools but has little control over school quality, with 47 percent agreeing and 38 percent disagreeing.
Charter schools are viewed favorably by 42 percent of voters statewide, while 16 percent have an unfavorable view of them. However, 42 percent say they don't know enough about charter schools to offer an opinion. That is a higher favorability than toward voucher schools, which are seen favorably by 27 percent and unfavorably by 24 percent. An even larger segment, 49 percent, said they didn't know enough to express an opinion about voucher schools. Public schools, in contrast, were viewed favorably by 72 percent of the public with 18 percent having unfavorable views and 10 percent unable to say. Likewise, 24 percent said they were very satisfied with the public schools in their community and 57 percent said they were satisfied. Eleven percent were dissatisfied and 2 percent very dissatisfied
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Some Australian universities are paying about $100,000 a year each to employ full-time managers dedicated to working with ranking agencies and developing strategies aimed at climbing league tables.
The University of New South Wales recently advertised for a manager of strategic reputation, while La Trobe University was seeking a manager of institutional rankings. For $100,000, responsibilities included maintaining relationships with ranking agencies to "maximize" or "optimize" their positions in rankings.
Observers say such positions highlight the growing importance of rankings in influencing research and teaching plans. But there are concerns that the professionalized management of rankings risks warping university strategies and may prove more a marketing effort than an effort to boost the substance of an institution's performance.
The deputy vice chancellor at New South Wales, Les Field, said the position wasn't new and was part of a team that ensured the information sent to annual data collections and the ranking agencies was accurate.
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Dr Teresa Belton told the BBC cultural expectations that children should be constantly active could hamper the development of their imaginationShe quizzed author Meera Syal and artist Grayson Perry about how boredom had aided their creativity as children.
Syal said boredom made her write, while Perry said it was a "creative state".
The senior researcher at the University of East Anglia's School of Education and Lifelong Learning interviewed a number of authors, artists and scientists in her exploration of the effects of boredom.
She heard Syal's memories of the small mining village, with few distractions, where she grew up.
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It's been several years since I thought about tumult and division at the top of the Milwaukee Public Schools system, which was fine with me on several levels.The run ended last week with several conversations that left me wondering what lies ahead on several important fronts for the state's epicenter of education concerns.
To jump to the bottom line: My guess is that Superintendent Gregory Thornton will stay on for a while, the School Board, which will have one and possibly two new members after the April 2 elections, will stay on more or less the course it's on, and the school system as a whole will continue to be faced with big problems of declining enrollment and increasing challenges in serving students well.
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What is it like to teach 10,000 or more students at once, and does it really work? The largest-ever survey of professors who have taught MOOCs, or massive open online courses, shows that the process is time-consuming, but, according to the instructors, often successful. Nearly half of the professors felt their online courses were as rigorous academically as the versions they taught in the classroom.The survey, conducted by The Chronicle, attempted to reach every professor who has taught a MOOC. The online questionnaire was sent to 184 professors in late February, and 103 of them responded.
Hype around these new free online courses has grown louder and louder since a few professors at Stanford University drew hundreds of thousands of students to online computer-science courses in 2011. Since then MOOCs, which charge no tuition and are open to anybody with Internet access, have been touted by reformers as a way to transform higher education and expand college access. Many professors teaching MOOCs had a similarly positive outlook: Asked whether they believe MOOCs "are worth the hype," 79 percent said yes.
Princeton University's Robert Sedgewick is one of them. He had never taught online before he decided to co-lead a massive open online course titled "Algorithms: Part I."
Like many professors at top-ranked institutions, Mr. Sedgewick was very skeptical about online education. But he was intrigued by the notion of bringing his small Princeton course on algorithms, which he had taught for five years, to a global audience. So after Princeton signed a deal with an upstart company called Coursera to offer MOOCs, he volunteered for the front lines.
His online course drew 28,000 students when it opened last summer, but Sedgewick was not daunted. He had spent hundreds of hours readying the material, devoting as much as two weeks each to recording and fine-tuning videotaped lectures. The preparation itself, he said, was "a full-time job."
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What Alice in Wonderland has to do with electromagnetic theory, relativity, and Pluto."You are a mashup of what you let into your life," it's been said. Since creativity is combinatorial, the architecture of mind and character is deeply influenced by the intellectual stimulation we choose to engage with -- including the books we read. There is hardly anything more fascinating than the private intellectual diet of genius -- like this recently uncovered list of books computing pioneer and early codehacker Alan Turing borrowed from his school library. Though heavy on the sciences, the selection features some wonderful wildcards that bespeak the cross-disciplinary curiosity fundamental to true innovation. A few personal favorites follow.
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When it comes to laying blame for the high price of college, one culprit always comes to the fore: the size and the cost of faculty. Faculty salaries often account for the majority of a university's spend¬ing, and these salaries not only compensate faculty for their research but for directly instructing students as well. Yet this latter responsibility, fundamental to a faculty position, has in recent years been a declining part of the job.What does this decline mean for higher education?
As Andrew Gillen explains in Selling Students Short, the decrease in teaching loads has had a dramatic influence on the spiraling costs of higher education. As colleges face impending budget cuts and students and families find it harder to keep pace with rising tuition, increasing teaching loads could provide significant relief.
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Tineisha Scott remembers running out of the house in the middle of the night with no shoes on, scared, hiding to get away from the abuse and drug use overrunning her home. As a young man, Corey Saffold found himself racially profiled. Sherri Bester suffered from PTSD and anxiety so extreme she got severe panic attacks during tests.These three Madisonians faced personal struggles and obstacles that often seemed insurmountable. Fortunately, they also each encountered a class syllabus that included Plato, Whitman, Dickens, Shakespeare and Toni Morrison.
And they embarked on paths to success beginning in a classroom in the library on the south side of Madison.
Scott, Saffold and Bester are all graduates of the Odyssey Project, a free humanities course offered through UW-Madison's Division of Continuing Studies and English Department to adult students facing economic barriers to college. Each year, the Odyssey Project gives thirty students free tuition, textbooks and childcare--and access to life-changing discussions
of literature, philosophy, history and art led by UW
humanities faculty.
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Technology has always given us more control over time--especially now at the dawn of the digital age. But no matter how precisely we can count our milliseconds, neither our bodies nor our businesses are proving as programmable as our computers.Digital technology tends to make one minute look the same as any other. Still, try as we might to ignore them, the people who work for us, invest in us, and buy from us are guided by rhythms we ignore at our peril.
While our technologies may be evolving as fast as we can imagine new ones, we humans and our culture evolved over millennia and are slower to adapt. The body is based on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different clocks, syncing to everything from the sun and moon to levels of violence and available water. We can't simply declare noon to be midnight and expect our body to conform to the new scheme as if it were a Google Calendar resetting to a new time zone. Neither can we force our businesses to conform to an always-on ethos when the people we work with and for are still obeying a more deeply embedded temporal scheme.
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Cole Schenewerk has a tough choice ahead of him.The high-school senior from El Cajon, Calif., already has gotten an acceptance packet from Southern Methodist University and a preliminary scholarship offer from an Ivy League college. And he is still waiting to hear from seven other schools, which he expects will dangle a variety of financial-aid offers.
"Definitely, finances are a big deal," says Mr. Schenewerk, a coin collector who plans to work part-time in college while studying business. "A lot of these schools have really high sticker prices. If I don't get the scholarships I need, I won't be able to go there."
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Background for non-Americans: the US school system is a disaster, with very uneven quality. You have some good school districts, and you have some really bad ones, and it's all just pretty crazy. Very different from back in Finland, where education isn't just good, it's fairly reliably good. You don't have to worry too much about which school you go to, because while there are certainly differences, they simply don't tend to be all that marked.The US outspends and underperforms. MoreIn the US, if you care about education, you end up having to make sure you live in a good school district. Or you do the whole private school thing, or try to make sure you can transfer, or whatever. The one thing you do not do is to just take it for granted. You work at it.
I'm not a huge believer in private schools, and I actually wanted my kids to be able to walk to their friends houses, so we made sure to move to one of the better districts in Oregon.
Now, living in a good school district means that you end up paying a lot more for housing, so it's not actually necessarily really any cheaper than sending your kids to a private school. But you do also end up being in a community where people care about education, so it's not just the school: it's the whole environment around you and your kids.
But it's unquestionably unfair, and it unquestionably means that people who can afford it get a better education in the US. Despite the whole "public" part of the US public school system, it's like so much else in the US: you don't want to be poor. The whole "American Dream" is pretty much a fairy tale.
So the Oregon legislature is trying to fix the unfairness. Which I very much understand, because I really do detest the whole US school system - it was always one of the things that we talked about being a possible reason to move back to Finland when the kids needed to go to school. We ended up learning how the US system works, and made it work for us, but that doesn't mean that I have to like the situation. Because I've seen better.
So why is trying to make things fairer a peeve?
The way the Oregon legislature is trying to fix things isn't by making the average school better, it's by trying to make it hard to have the (fairly few) bright spots around.
In particular, let's say that you do have a good school district, where people not only end up paying for it in the property taxes (which is what largely funds the school), but also by having special local tax bonds for the school in addition to the big fund-raisers every year. Because the public US school funding just isn't that great, so the local community ends up fixing it - to the point of literally raising much of the money to build a new building etc.
Portland schools' 2012-2013 budget is $687,513,063 for 47,000 students or 14,627.93/student. Madison will spend $14,527/student during the 2012-2013 fiscal year.
US teacher content knowledge requirements are lag other countries.
Notes and links on Sweden's voucher system and Finland's schools.
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The U.S. public education system is trying any number of techniques--from charter schools to presidential initiatives to oil-company-run teacher academies--to catch up to countries like Finland and South Korea in math and science education. But policymakers seem to be overlooking one simple solution: requiring math and science teachers to progress further up the educational ladder before they teach those subjects to kids.Related: When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?The map above shows the minimum level of education each country requires teachers to obtain before working at the upper-secondary level. The map, based on data collected by Jody Heymann and the World Policy Analysis Center and subsequently published in Children's Chances: How Countries Can Move from Surviving to Thriving, illustrates that the United States lags behind most other countries in its requirements.
Many U.S. school systems defer to teachers with higher degrees when they hire faculty, and teachers are required to have some kind of state certification along with a bachelor's degree. However, the precise certification requirements vary, depending on how a teacher enters the profession and what state they teach in. The traditional route to becoming a teacher in the United States usually involves a bachelor's or master's degree in education along with a standardized test and other state-specific requirements. But most states have some form of an alternative route, usually involving a bachelor's degree and completion of an alternate certification program while a person simultaneously teaches full-time. There is no federal mandate for teacher education requirements, according to the World Policy Analysis Center. The federal Improving Teacher Quality State Grants program rewards states with funds when they meet the "highly qualified teacher" requirement set forth in the No Child Left Behind Act.
and,
Examinations for Teachers Past and Present by Dr. Richard Askey.
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Hang around the education debates long enough and you'll hear many times that schools are basically doing all they can to meet the needs of students, especially high-poverty students, so we should ease up on the pressure to do more. I don't think that's the case and you see a lot of variance in how well schools do with similar students.Related: Wisconsin Schools Superintendent Tony Evers: Wisconsin education chief: Governor's new report cards not 'ready for prime time'.In that spirit, here are three examples of ideas, some more more substantial than others - happening in some places but far from commonplace - that we could do to reach more students and families. It's hardly an exhaustive list but it makes the point.
24-hour school: Many of our cities, and not just Las Vegas and New York, are 24-hour towns these days. Yet other than night school we still don't engage students or parents that are on a 24-hour schedule. It would be absurd to make every school a 24-hour option but providing that option in places where many older students are, especially those who have left school, are working alternative schedules would help reach kids who are disconnected today. They are doing this in Vegas. And in this case what happens in Vegas, shouldn't stay there.
Back-to-school day: I recently heard a school superintendent, a generally progressive guy concerned about equity, congratulating all the parents taking part in a "Back-to-School Night" style event in his community for being the kind of involved parents the school system needs to be successful. Problem was, the event was at 8pm and a not-small proportion of parents in that community were beginning their work days around that time, not wrapping them up. Back to School nights are an evergreen feature of our schools, and necessary for many parents who work a traditional 9-5 schedule. But for many parents, and not just those working nights, a chance to visit during the day would make school engagement more accessible. If we were really serious about meeting more parents where they are, "Back to School Days" (in addition to 'back to school nights') would be a lot more common than they are. And even easier thing to jettison would be policies that limit parent-teacher conferences to just a few minutes in some places.
Responding to parents:
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Here's a good idea.In light of the retirement of Pope Benedict, Madison should demand a similar transition.
Pope John Matthews I, the Vicar of Madison Education, should step down from his throne. Admittedly this suggestion is informed by my participation on the board of the Urban League of Greater Madison and the now-defunct Madison Prep board.
But look, Matthews is still in good health. His $300K per annum package at the helm of Madison Teachers Inc. has placed him among the very one percent many of his followers revile. Like the Pope--and Don Vito Corleone--John has fought too many wars. He now prowls his mansion at night, toying with the local Democratic Party he has purchased, fighting enemies that do not exist, in battles that need not be waged.
No better example of why John's retirement would be good for our New Madison, rich with faces of many colors and voices, than The Manski Debacle. Never have Progressive White Folk appeared so utterly smug and ruthless as when Sarah made her dash.
First, it has to be asked: Why was Manski even running for the Madison School Board? Kids? No. A passion for education? No. So why? Because The John Father wanted it to be so.
So The John Father, like Don Corleone, unleashed his money and powerful networks. The usual list of progressive endorsers fell in line creating a snapshot for Manski whiter than Ronald Reagan's cabinet. The Cap Times played its part, never seeming to understand that "all white progressive" is an oxymoron. Did any of them think for a minute that the sea of white faces for Manski communicated something to minority Madison? This is how tone deaf they have become.
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This weekend I'm currently attending the national ASCD annual conference in Chicago with approximately 10,000 other educators from across the nation and around the world. With internationally known speakers, featured experts, over 400 sectionals, and hundreds of exhibitors covering a variety of topics during the three-day conference, it is truly a unique gathering of educators focused on issues of curriculum, teaching, and learning.Much more on Richard Zimman, here.Amidst all this I had an incredible morning by attending back-to-back presentations by real celebrities--people who are famous for their amazing achievements, unlike many of today's celebrities who are made famous by the pop culture media. It was my privilege to attend sessions by retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and poet/author Maya Angelou. Both women are in their eighties, both feisty as ever, and both still have sharp minds that focus on what's really important from their respective reflective perches from experience from eight decades of observing America. Needless to say, these ground-breaking women held audiences spell-bound.
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Continuous Professional Development, or CPD as it is more commonly known, has one basic proposition: Improvement. The teacher has the option of either passively waiting for someone else (the employer) to committ resources to CPD, or the teacher takes the initiative and actively seeks out CPD opportunities.One might take the position that if the employer wants the teacher to improve, then the employer will make the necessary resources available. The "resources" referred to are time, materials, and money.
The teacher would receive pay for the time they are investing in learning. Books, travel costs, and any fees would be paid for by the employer. However, to be honest, in Chile very few teachers find themselves in this utopian situation.
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May explain why former Chicago schools administrator Jennifer Cheatham sought greater opportunities here in Madison. The Chicago school system is closing 61 school buildings to address a $1 billion deficit; 140 of its 681 schools are at least half-empty. (More about that here.)Might not a tiny voice be whispering to Fighting Ed Garvey, John Nichols, Jeff Simpson, the UW School of Education, and other bitter-enders that perhaps the Chicago teachers union bears some responsibility for a) the financial deficit and b) the flight of students out of the public schools? It was, after all, the Chicago teachers union that walked out on students last September to fight performance measures and a longer school day.
Fighting Ed Garvey is not a stupid man. But he does suffer from labor union fixation disorder. Visit his blog on that subject today and tell me if Ed doesn't remind you of the guy stocking up on matches as his house burns down. Bad schools are how cities die.
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It's not just parents complaining about the cost of college, as state and national policymakers search for ways to balance it against the need for more graduates to fill future jobs.At a lecture to board members of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta last Tuesday, The Higher Education Bubble author and University of Tennessee Professor Glenn Reynolds reminded them of Stein's principle of economics which says, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
Since the price of tuition grows faster than personal income, it's rapidly becoming unaffordable to average families without reliance on their retirement savings, an inheritance or loans.
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Few high-tech entrepreneurs, pundits, or booster of online learning, much less, policymakers, would ever say aloud publicly that robots and hand-held devices will eventually replace teachers. Yet many fantasize that such an outcome will occur. High-profile awards to entrepreneurs, the occasional cartoon, and advocates who dream of online instruction anywhere, anytime transforming education feed the fantasy.Consider Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University (United Kingdom). He recently received the TED award of $1 million for creating learning environments where illiterate Indian children had access to computers in actual holes-in-walls on streets of New Delhi slums. Some of the children told him: "You've given us a machine that works only in English, so we had to teach ourselves English." Believing that children's sense of wonder and intrepid curiosity would spur them to use computers and learn English, science, and whatever else they were curious about on their own, Mitra said to his audiences and funders: "My wish is to help design the future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their innate sense of wonder and work together. Help me build the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can embark on intellectual adventures by engaging and connecting with information and mentoring online."
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After nearly 12 years living in the United States, I continue to be perplexed by this country. As I noted when acting as a respondent to Anya Kamenetz at ED Talks Wisconsin last Friday night, the US is an amazing place when it it comes to unleashing and scaling up a multiplicity of innovations related to higher education. Kamenetz's recent books capture many of these innovations; a veritable cacophony of experiments, some successful, some still with us, and some quickly dated (is anyone still talking about Second Life?!). This said, the US has a troubling history of seeking easy 'silver bullet' solutions to complex higher ed challenges that can only be addressed by the state and other stakeholders (including universities) in a strategic, systemic, and sustained way.Back on the ed innovation topic, as an economic geographer it is mandatory of me to point out that all innovations are placed; they're dreamt up, variably fueled, and then scaled up such that they can potentially leave their mark on multiple locales and/or larger numbers of people. The unruly process of innovation, being what it is, means that innovations are translated - the take-up/utilization process, the interpretation process, and the impact generation process, vary across space and time via the translation process.
A case in point is the phenomenon of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). While we can argue about important histories and practices, we do know that the first online MOOC was dreamt up and run in Canada (see 'What is a MOOC? 100k people want to know' and 'All about MOOCs') courtesy of some innovative scholars, state-run funding councils (the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the National Research Council), and the facilitative work of two universities (the University of Manitoba and the University of Prince Edward Island).
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"For the past 24 years as a criminal justice practitioner, what I've seen is the kids not succeeding in the schools are ending up in juvenile and ultimately our criminal justice system." Howard said he would continue to work for students at all achievement levels, and said his time on the board has taught him to be selective in approving programs to implement. "We have to figure out a way to raise all (test) scores up, and we're doing that by implementing a brand new literacy program in all our schools," he said. Howard, answering a question from Mertz, said he was concerned that raising property taxes by the maximum amount allowed puts too much of a burden on taxpayers. Mertz disagreed, saying schools need all the money they can get. For video on this story, visit the video section He cited trust as the district's biggest obstacle. "As a community, trust has been broken," he said. "We can't get at the achievement gap unless the parents trust the teachers, the teachers trust the administration, and the board trusts the administration."Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election and Madison's 14.5k per student spending, here.
......
Howard, answering a question from Mertz, said he was concerned that raising property taxes by the maximum amount allowed puts too much of a burden on taxpayers.Mertz disagreed, saying schools need all the money they can get.
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Educators and policy makers continue to debate whether computers are a good teaching tool. But a growing number of schools are adopting a new, even more controversial approach: asking students to bring their own smartphones, tablets, laptops and even their video game players to class.Officials at the schools say the students' own devices are the simplest way to access a new generation of learning apps that can, for example, teach them math, test them with quizzes and enable them to share and comment on each other's essays.
Advocates of this new trend, called B.Y.O.T. for bring your own technology, say there is another advantage: it saves money for schools short of cash.
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Madison School Board candidate Wayne Strong said Friday he mistakenly told Madison Teachers Inc.'s political action committee in a January questionnaire that he supported private school vouchers.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board elections, here.The issue of voucher support has loomed large in this spring's election. Ananda Mirilli, a former candidate for a separate seat, was falsely accused of supporting vouchers in an email from the husband of her opponent, Sarah Manski, who dropped out of the race after winning the primary. Mirilli finished third and will not be on the April 2 ballot.
The South Central Federation of Labor sent out a campaign flier this week supporting Strong's opponent Dean Loumos. The flier says Strong "has retracted an earlier statement that he supports the use of public funds for private and religious schools."
"I didn't retract it, I corrected it," Strong said. "It's always been my position that I did not support use of public money (for private voucher schools)."
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OK, congressional leadership. Let's talk American competitiveness. Where to start? Let's begin with the nursing shortage.Anyone hospitalized in our nation realizes pretty quickly that the nursing shortage is not a myth, and hospitals are taking drastic steps to try to maintain adequate patient care. Your nurse here in Washington may in fact be "traveling" from Georgia, living with relatives or taking a temporary apartment to commute for a period of time, and then return home or move on to another city. Migrant nurses you ask? Yes. We also have immigrant nurses from the Philippines, Canada, India and many other countries.
What exactly is going on here? And why aren't we talking about it?
Let's consider our veterans for a moment. How are they managing on their return from deployments around the world? They aren't spat upon and reviled, as was the case in the Vietnam era. They are welcomed home and told to make their way in an America with fewer jobs, less opportunity and decreased paychecks. For veterans, perhaps the only thing on the rise is the suicide rate, which reached a record high of 349 last year.
In both examples, I speak to the heart of the crisis in American competitiveness and that is the waste and abuse of our country's most valuable asset. It may be cliché, but it's true: The most important resource we have is our people. We are wasting our citizens' lives by not supporting their struggles to advance their education and train for a secure job.
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Citing the decision of a Dane County judge who struck down portions of a state law prohibiting most collective bargaining for public employees, the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association is asking the School Board to negotiate new contracts with its members.To press for action, the MTEA rallied supporters to wear red, make signs and attend the School Board's meeting en masse Thursday night.
The MTEA says a one-year contract with teachers, education assistants, substitutes and accountants could help keep qualified teachers in the classroom and help solve the district's impending teacher shortage. It would also maintain the salary structure of pay based on earned degrees and years of teaching experience for teachers.
Milwaukee's teachers have been shielded from the effects of Act 10, a state law enacted in 2011 that dramatically limits collective bargaining for most public workers and dictates higher employee contributions to benefits, because of a four-year bargaining agreement that does not end until June 30.
Teachers agreed to benefit concessions in that contract.
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The so-called creative class of intellects and artists was supposed to remake America's cities and revive urban wastelands. Now the evidence is in--and the experiment appears to have failed, writes Joel Kotkin.Among the most pervasive, and arguably pernicious, notions of the past decade has been that the "creative class" of the skilled, educated and hip would remake and revive American cities. The idea, packaged and peddled by consultant Richard Florida, had been that unlike spending public money to court Wall Street fat cats, corporate executives or other traditional elites, paying to appeal to the creative would truly trickle down, generating a widespread urban revival.
Urbanists, journalists, and academics--not to mention big-city developers-- were easily persuaded that shelling out to court "the hip and cool" would benefit everyone else, too. And Florida himself has prospered through books, articles, lectures, and university positions that have helped promote his ideas and brand and grow his Creative Class Group's impressive client list, which in addition to big corporations and developers has included cities as diverse as Detroit and El Paso, Cleveland and Seattle.
Well, oops.
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We are in the midst of an effort to explore what the new technologies enabled by powerful computing and reliable long-distance connection will mean to higher education. (There is, of course, a parallel effort in K-12, but that's another topic.)A new entrant is poised to make a bid, and it's worth some study.
The Minerva Project was initiated by Ben Nelson, the man behind Snapfish (a photo website). His vision is of a university that offers an "uniquely rigorous and challenging university education." (At a price, we might add, that is a relative bargain--reportedly, the target cost is something like half of what the Ivys charge).
The idea is that classes will be delivered via video, and students will then engage in discussion and debate. Importantly, and in pointed contrast to MOOCs, class size will be limited to 25.
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Students should be able to access government loans in order to study massive open online courses, a former education adviser to Tony Blair has said.Sir Michael Barber, now chief education adviser at publishing and education company Pearson, pointed to the emergence of a new breed of "pick-and-mix students" who assemble their learning from a range of sources rather than taking traditional campus-based degrees.
Such students were entitled to funding, he argued.
"If you're a student or a potential student, it is no longer a question of choosing a degree course you want to do at a university," he said. "It's a question of thinking...'How will I keep learning through my life, how do I combine a range of educational experiences not just from one university but also from a range of universities - potentially around the world?'"
Sir Michael, head of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit from 2001 to 2005, was speaking ahead of the publication on 11 March of a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research, which warns of a coming era of unprecedented competition in higher education, driven by proliferating online opportunities.
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From Brown vs. Board of Education to Connecticut's landmark case, Sheff v. O'Neill, to the language of the Connecticut constitution, the law has been clear. Children have a constitutionally guaranteed right to a public education that is not impaired by isolation based on race, ethnicity, national origin or disability. Therefore, it is unconstitutional to develop and fund education programs that intentionally or unintentionally limit access to educational opportunities based on racial or ethnic backgrounds, or disabilities.Yet recently, it was announced that schools exclusively for "gifted" children will be opening in Windham, New London and Bridgeport. Whether intended or not, the proposal takes Connecticut back to the ugly era of school segregation.
These three districts plan to pull what they characterize as "gifted" children from their schools and create separate schools "to highlight and encourage the potential" of these particular students. The schools are modeled after the Renzulli Academy in Hartford, named for University of Connecticut professor Joseph Renzulli, and serving "gifted" children in kindergarten and in fourth through ninth grades.
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It's the kind of motto one sees on a T-shirt in a shop in the touristy part of town, but over the last few years it's had a particularly painful ring of truth to it. Students in America are staying in education longer and are struggling to obtain full, gainful employment once they leave. This, combined with the rising costs of tuition, has seen the outstanding balance of student debt go past the one trillion mark and delinquency rates increase.Talk is in the air of a bubble, as pundits point to student loans themselves and to the securities that are built from them. But is what's going on "a bubble" in the usual sense? And more importantly, what does this say about college education in America?
Debt bubble by design
It does feel similar to the housing boom and bust of the last decade in that America has policies specifically aimed at encouraging people to take on a type of debt that is viewed as socially acceptable, even desirable. Government sponsored housing behemoths Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are without comparable peers -- the entities encouraged home ownership since their creation that is above and beyond what other many countries would even consider desirable.
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It seems like an odd jump from the flexible anti-structure that gives Brown its laid-back reputation to a school where kindergartners are called "scholars" and get demerits for slumping. But for the six Brown alums who work as tutors at Match Corps: Boston, it's not a question of autonomy -- it's a question of equality.
Match Corps is a one-year fellowship program that brings top college graduates to tutor disadvantaged youth in the Boston area. At Match charter schools, tutors work with small groups, often one-on-one, and form close relationships with students and their families, according to the program's website.
"Match's mission is to help all students succeed in college and beyond by giving them the best education they can get," said Match Corps COO Michael Larsson.
The program directs its efforts toward helping kids in city schools in an effort to overcome the stereotype that students in urban areas are unable to achieve their full potentials. If students in urban public schools are less equipped for success, it is because they are "historically extremely underserved in the education system," said Reuben Henriques '12, a current member of Match Corps.
Matching potential
Henriques said he is a firm believer that providing all students with "equal access to structures of power" through skills like reading and critical thinking is crucial not only for the individuals but also for society as a whole.
"A democracy needs people who can advocate for themselves and function in a healthy debate -- not just rich, white students, but everyone," he said.
More about the Match Public Charter School, the Match Corps, and the Match Teacher Residency Program here.
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This is the America that China's leaders laugh at, and the rest of the democratic world despairs of. Its debt is rising, its population is ageing in a budget-threatening way, its schools are mediocre by international standards, its infrastructure rickety, its regulations dense, its tax code byzantine, its immigration system hare-brained--and it has fallen from first position in the World Economic Forum's competitiveness rankings to seventh in just four years. Last year both Mr Obama and his election opponent, Mitt Romney, complained about the American dream slipping away. Today, the country's main businesses sit on nearly $2 trillion in cash, afraid to invest in part because corporate bosses cannot imagine any of Washington's feuding partisans fixing anything.Similar to the status quo battle in Madison. www.wisconsin2.orgYet there is also another America, where things work. . . . Pressed for cash, states are adopting sweeping reforms as they vie to attract investments and migrants. Louisiana and Nebraska want to abolish corporate and personal income taxes. Kansas has created a post called "the Repealer" to get rid of red tape and pays a "bounty" to high schools for every vocational qualification their students earn in certain fields; Ohio has privatised its economic-development agency; Virginia has just reformed its petrol-tax system. In this second, can-do America, creative policymaking is being applied to the very problems Congress runs away from.
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Five candidates are competing for three seats on the Madison school board, with the general election on April 2, 2013.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board, here.The political context for the races is explosive, given Gov. Scott Walker's revolutionary proposals for education in Wisconsin: cuts to public school funding, an expansion of the voucher program, and a revamping of teachers' evaluations and bargaining rights.
In Madison, the issues are particularly complex, with the intense disagreements over the district's achievement gap between white and minority students.
In the race for Seat 4, incumbent James Howard is running against Greg Packnett, a Democratic legislative aide.
In this competitive series of elections, there are numerous candidate forums and listening sessions under way, and we thought we'd pose our own questions to candidates.
This week, we ask the candidates about charter schools, whether they'd like to see their expansion in the district, and if so, how they should operate within the district. Another question focuses on teacher evaluation, and how the candidates think it should be conducted with regards to student test scores.
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I complained recently that college professors too often wrongly dismiss high school teachers as being unsuited to teach college-level classes such as the Advanced Placement courses so popular in the Washington region. Two scholars from distinguished universities gently chided me for being too hard on their academic colleagues. They might be right.After an e-mail exchange with John T. Fourkas, Millard Alexander Professor of Chemistry at the University of Maryland, and Bryan McCann, associate professor of history at Georgetown University, I concede that professors' concerns about AP often show no disrespect for high schools but instead stem from discomfort with the ill effects of colleges competing for AP students.
Fourkas and McCann like AP and similar college-level programs such as International Baccalaureate. They recognize that those classes have made high school more challenging and gotten students ready for long college reading lists and long exams.
"College professors love well-prepared students and are big fans of high school AP courses," Fourkas said.
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A report commissioned by ASAH, the NJ consortium of private special education schools found that students in these out-of-district placements have better outcomes than students placed within public districts in more inclusive settings.Today's NJ Spotlight interviews the researcher who compiled and interpreted the data, Professor Deborah Carran of Johns Hopkins University.
"The most amazing thing I found is that the number and proportion of these kids that are going into post-secondary education," said Carran in an interview. "They are going into junior colleges and four-year colleges. And they are employed and engaged."Ouch," say parents of kids with disabilities stuck in in-district placements. " Our kids are not going to be doing stuff! Better sue our districts to pay tuition to private schools.""They are doing stuff and not just sitting at home waiting for their parents to take care of them," she said.
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The Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS) seek to define "college and career readiness expectations." Forty-five states have adopted them, and are moving briskly towards full implementation in the coming year. Last January, I wrote that the standards "represent the greatest opportunity for history teaching and learning to be widely re-imagined since the Committee of Ten set the basic outlines for American education over a hundred years ago."While I stand by that statement, with each step towards implementation I see the opportunity being squandered. We cannot possibly continue to move solely in the direction of "college and career readiness" in History & Social Studies education without ensuring that "civic" readiness is valued equally. Additionally, we need to ensure that as states write new curricula, that they contain the proper balance of content, skills, and understandings. New curricula will need to ensure students use an inquiry-based approach to go in depth with a smaller amount of content to gain the wider breadth of skills and dispositions required for civic, college, and career readiness.
All teachers working in Common Core states are currently engaging with the changes demanded by the Common Core. In too many places, this is happening without sufficient time and supports, but it is happening very quickly nonetheless. The U.S. and state Departments of Education have poured over half a billion dollars into the assessments already, and, beginning this year, the results will be high-stakes for students and teachers. All systems are moving full speed ahead to assess core skills without sufficient consideration of the end to which these skills are applied. Two things need to happen to avoid driving off a cliff.
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The state's top education official warned the Legislature's budget committee Thursday that Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to tie funding and voucher expansion to new state report cards could undermine bipartisan reform efforts already underway.2008: "Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum". Parents, students and taxpayers might wonder what precisely the DPI has been doing since 2008? The WKCE has been long criticized for its lack of rigor.State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers said the new report cards "aren't ready for prime time" and will look "a lot different eight years from now."
Evers agreed with Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, a member of the Joint Finance Committee and chairman of the Senate Education Committee, that the report cards should be used "as a flashlight and not a hammer."
"If we use them as a hammer it's going to make all the other transformative efforts we're doing more difficult," Evers said, referring to new curriculum, testing and teacher evaluation systems that were developed by a bipartisan coalition of teachers, administrators, school boards and political leaders in recent years."Teachers will back off," he said.
Related: Matthew DeFour's tweets from Mr. Evers recent budget appearance.
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Part 1 in a series on e-book distribution to schools.Digital books are triggering tectonic shifts in education. One of the most fundamental, yet seemingly invisible, shifts is happening in the back rooms of district offices--not in the classrooms, not among teachers and students, and definitely not in the board rooms of most big-name publishers and textbook companies.
If ebooks are not actually books, what are they? School purchasing departments know.This profound, significant change is happening first in school district business offices, IT departments, and cubicles among staff members who work behind the scenes to acquire materials for today's students.
What exactly is this shift? It's a shift in awareness. A very subtle, yet primary, change in perception.
It's the revelation of the idea that ebooks are not books at all.
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Addressing the most contentious issue in Gov. Scott Walker's budget bill, state Schools Superintendent Tony Evers on Thursday called on members of the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee to reject a proposed expansion of voucher schools and to give more money to public schools.Citing figures from the Legislature's nonpartisan budget office, Evers said the $129 million in new state aid Walker included in his two-year budget bill drops to $39.2 million after accounting for how part of that money would go to private and charter schools under the proposal. Walker seeks to increase funding for existing and future voucher schools, expand them to nine new school districts and allow special-needs students from around the state to attend private schools at taxpayer expense.
At the same time, Walker wants to use the state public school aid to hold down local property taxes rather than increase spending on education.
Evers, who is running for re-election on April 2 against Rep. Don Pridemore (R-Erin), said Walker's budget pitted public schools against private schools by increasing state funding for voucher school initiatives by 32% while keeping overall revenue to schools flat.
"This has to stop. The state cannot continue to play favorites. We can and must meet our constitutional obligation to invest in all of our kids," Evers said.
In its third straight day of budget hearings, the Joint Finance Committee took testimony Thursday on Walker's 2013-'15 budget proposals for Wisconsin's K-12 schools, technical colleges and universities. The hearing made clear that the governor's education proposals will face resistance from some senators in the Republican-controlled Senate and have strong support from Republicans in charge of the Assembly, leaving its future in doubt.
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Under Tom Vander Ark's leadership the Gates Foundation pursued an education reform strategy focused on creating smaller high schools. The theory was that smaller high schools would create tighter social bonds between schools and students, preventing students from slipping through the cracks and increasing the likelihood that they would graduate and go on to college. Smaller high schools could also be more varied in their approaches and offerings, allowing students to choose schools that best fit their needs.But around the same time Vander Ark left the Gates Foundation at the end of 2006, the reform strategy shifted. Rather than fostering small, diverse schools of choice, the Gates Foundation now wanted to build centralized systems of what everyone should be taught (Common Core) and centralized systems of evaluating, training, and promoting teachers (Measuring Effective Teachers). As I've written before, the shift in Gates strategy was not prompted by research. In fact, the high quality random-assignment study that Gates had commissioned to evaluate the small high school strategy showed strong, positive results. But the post-Vander Ark leadership at Gates couldn't wait for the evidence. The knew the truth without any pesky research and had abandoned the small high schools strategy in favor of their new centralization approach years before those results were released.
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Matthew DeFour's tweets tell the unsurprising story (Wisconsin Schools Superintendent Tony Evers is testifying before the State's "Joint Finance Committee"):
Evers: If we use it as a hammer it's going to make all the other transformative efforts we're doing more difficult. Teachers will back off.
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
Olsen: What you're saying is report card needs to be used as a flashlight and not a hammer. #wibudget
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
Klemke: Efficiency is good, but what we need is transformation. Evers: I agree. That's what report cards, new tests and teacher evals are.
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
Evers: Increases over last decade are close to cost of living. Efficiency measures have been put in place. #wibudget
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
Klemke: What are you going to do to bend cost curve? You need to help me believe why your cost model isn't high. #wibudget
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
LeMahieu: "We don't think doing same old-same old for another decade is going to make it. We're looking for something different."
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
LeMahieu: Test scores stable and achievement gap growing over past decade, while spending grows from $9,000 to $13,000 per student #wibudget
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
Shilling: Rural schools that don't receive report card scores because of size worried they won't be eligible for incentive grants. #wibudget
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
GOP Rep. Dean Knudson says "key issue" facing budget comm., Legislature is whether to allow public school spending to increase
— Scott Bauer (@sbauerAP) March 21, 2013
Knudson: Won't districts be able to avoid cuts with referenda? Evers: if we're going to rely on referenda, the disequity will be tremendous.
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
Evers on incentive grants: We should be focused on best practices and not more money for wealthy school districts. #wibudget
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
Evers on report cards: this last year was a pilot year. It's just not ready for prime time. #wibudget
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
Strachota on incentive grants: We're putting money into schools in a different way. #wibudget
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
Evers: report cards were never meant to make high-stakes decisions, they're deficient in high school, but they will get better. #wibudget
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
Evers: Budget could mean new curriculum, testing, teacher evaluations in public schools "won't happen or won't happen well." #wibudget
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
Mason: GOP keeps defunding public education and then gives us this red herring of vouchers. A generation later, Milwaukee still struggles.
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
Mason: GOP keeps defunding public education and then gives us this red herring of vouchers. A generation later, Milwaukee still struggles.
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
Nygren: Voucher grad rate may be no better, but spending is less. Evers: I understand it's cheaper, but that shouldn't be our goal.
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
Nygren: to say we're continuing to defund education simply isn't accurate. #wibudget
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
Darling: Why do we spend more than states that are ranked higher in Ed Week? Evers: that ranking rewards states with less local control.
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
Evers: The budget as proposed creates too many winners and losers. It pits public school kids against charter and voucher kids. #wibudget
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
Evers: $130M in GPR for roads, $64M for school incentives and $73M for vouchers should go toward increasing school aids. #wibudget
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
Joint Finance has begun to hear testimony from State Sup. Tony Evers. #wibudget
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013
Madison's per student spending is $14,547 for the 2012-2013 school year (the number ignores differences in pre-k per student costs - lower, vs "full time" students).
Watch the committee hearing.
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By grade 4 they start programming in Logo. Starting with sequences of commands, then progressing to loops.By grade 5 they are writing procedures containing loops calling procedures containing loops.
At this point a quick comparison with the United States is in order. A couple of visits to San Francisco's magnet school for science and technology (Galileo Academy) revealed grade 11 and 12 students struggling with HTML's image tag. Loops and conditionals were poorly understood. Computer Science homework was banned by the school board.
It is an understatement to say that I was impressed with the Vietnamese primary school CS curriculum. I asked what I could do to help. Unexpectedly, the answer was "software". Educational software doesn't even exist in Vietnamese, and even if it did exist, there was no budget to purchase any. So the rest of my vacation was spent writing software. The result was the Blockly Maze, a self-teaching set of tutorials that introduces loops and conditionals. Everything had to be burned to CD because the school couldn't afford reliable Internet.
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"What should be the top priority for Ripon's next superintendent?" was this newspaper's readers' poll question in late-February.Much more on retiring Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman, here.Teaching is a people business, and the most significant school-based influence on the quality of a child's education is the classroom teacher. With so many retirements occurring these days as boomers are leaving their teaching jobs, did the readers choose hiring quality staff as the top priority?
Or were readers concerned about the numerous curriculum changes being required by the state as Wisconsin schools convert to the concepts of the Common Core and 21st century learning skills in order to prepare college and career ready graduates?
With our middle school facility approaching its 75th birthday and the building showing obvious strains as we try to prepare today's students with a building designed for a 1930's world, did readers rank updating our facilities the highest priority?
Sadly, those three priorities collected only twenty-five percent of the votes while another priority garnered three-quarters of the votes. What, you may ask, was so important that it won in a landslide against the aforementioned three priorities which are staring us in the face like a tidal wave on the horizon?
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But Cheatham, who served as what amounts to an area superintendent overseeing 25 schools and later as chief of instruction and curriculum for the entire 400,000-student, $5.1 billion-budget school system, not only got strong recommendations, she demonstrated intellect and ideas to Madison school officials, Passman said. The Madison School District, in comparison, has a $376 million budget and an enrollment of about 27,000.Pat Schneider refers to the Madison School District's $376,000,000 budget, yet Matthew Defour just a few days ago, put it at $394,000,000. A subsequent email from the District's Donna Williams placed the 2012-2013 budget at $392,789,303 for approximately 27,000 students, or $14,547/student about 12% more than Chicago's $12,750, according to Schneider's article.Board member Mary Burke told me she wasn't thrilled at first to be considering a candidate from the perennially troubled Chicago Public Schools. "I feel Madison is the type of district that should be able to attract people from the best school districts," Burke said. So she used a method that had served her well in hiring situations over a career that has included executive positions in the private and public sectors: Burke and other School Board members went beyond resumes and references and contacted additional people Cheatham had worked with in the past.
"They were very consistent in terms of what they said: She's a great instructional leader, really smart and hardworking, and the schools under her made incredible progress raising students' level of achievement," Burke told me.
Like the board members, I also turned to people Cheatham had worked with in Chicago to get a glimpse of how her skills and personality will dovetail with the Madison community.
Many notes and links on Jennifer Cheatham, here.
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Here's the larger point.Related: www.wisconsin2.org and Vietnam's primary school computer science curriculum.While much of this has been characterized as a racial split in our community, and it is, I believe this issue is just as much the result of a generational divide. The truth is that most of the people standing in the way of any kind of meaningful change are aging progressives in their late sixties and seventies, self-satisfied folks who are just sure that they have all the answers to every problem. They are at the highest levels of MTI and other unions, city government, and even a newspaper in town. They cling tightly to power, and they seem not to know when it's time to let a new and more diverse generation step up to leadership positions.
So, yes, much of the controversy surrounding our schools is race-based, but much of it also has to do with the tired leadership in a lot of major institutions in Madison. I don't think we'll make real progress on this or other serious issues facing our community until we get fresh faces and new ideas in place.
It's time for a change.
Yet, Madison's disastrous reading problems continue year after year.
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Five candidates are competing for three seats on the Madison school board, with the general election on April 2, 2013.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board elections, here.The political context for the races is explosive, given Gov. Scott Walker's revolutionary proposals for education in Wisconsin: cuts to public school funding, an expansion of the voucher program, and a revamping of teachers' evaluations and bargaining rights.
In Madison, the issues are particularly complex, with the intense disagreements over the district's 0 between white and minority students.
In the race for Seat 3, former La Follette High School teacher and low-income housing provider Dean Loumos is running against retired Madison police lieutenant Wayne Strong. The winner will replace retiring school board member Beth Moss.
In this competitive series of elections, there are numerous candidate forums and listening sessions under way, and we thought we'd pose our own questions to candidates.
This week, we ask the candidates about charter schools, whether they'd like to see their expansion in the district, and if so, how they should operate within the district. Another question focuses on teacher evaluation, and how the candidates think it should be conducted with regards to student test scores.
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Tony Evers WISTAX 2013 Election Interview Word Cloud: 
Don Pridemore WISTAX 2013 Election Interview Word Cloud: 
Links: A recent Wisconsin State Journal Evers endorsement.
Three weeks from today, Wisconsin voters will decide who will oversee K-12 public education for the next four years. Incumbent state Superintendent Tony Evers faces a challenge from Republican state Rep. Don Pridemore.Evers says he's proud of his accomplishments over the past four years. He highlights the implementation of Common Core Standards. The national initiative sets benchmarks for students to meet in English, Language Arts and Math, to make sure they're prepared for the workforce.
"We're developing new assessment systems and accountability systems. We have a new reading screener we've implemented at kindergarten that's been very good as far as providing information for classroom teachers to intervene early," Evers says.
Evers says his biggest challenge has been competing with choice or voucher schools for state funding. Students in Milwaukee and Racine can attend private schools - taking with them, the tax money that would have gone to the public system. Evers opposes Gov. Walker's plan to expand the voucher program to nine more school districts and increase funding for participating students.
"There's a zero dollar increase for our public schools per pupil and then on the voucher side there's a $1,400 per student increase for $73 million. To me that's a concept that isn't connected in any good way for our public schools," Evers says.
Evers opponent, Republican Rep. Don Pridemore of Hartford supports the expansion of choice. He says there would not to be need for it, if public schools better prepared students. Pridemore says if he's elected, he'll work to expand the program statewide.
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Graham Greene's observation has lost none of its salience in 50 years: innocence remains "like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."The latest illustration comes from Wisconsin, where the state's Department of Public Instruction website devotes a page to "Power and Privilege." Caucasians who volunteer in the state's AmeriCorps VISTA antipoverty programs are instructed to "set aside sections of the day to critically examine how privilege works"; "put a note on your mirror or computer screen as a reminder to think about privilege"; and, in order to underline white guilt, "find a person of color who is willing to hold you accountable for addressing privilege." The site generously provides a link to a "diversity document," recommending that Caucasians "wear a white wristband as a reminder about your privilege, as well as a personal commitment to explain why you wear the wristband."
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Illiteracy and its costs to individuals and to society has long been a focus of concern in public policy. A corresponding lack of ability in mathematics--innumeracy--has received increasing attention in the last few decades. The ability to use basic math is more and more important as modern day society grows more complex.Some children have a problem in learning to read that is disproportionate to any other academic challenge they face. Some children have a corresponding problem with math. For some reason, the ideas just don't come together for these students.
In a recent article, David Geary (2013) reviews evidence that one cause of the problem may be a fundamental deficit in the representation of numerosity.
Geary describes three possible sources of a problem in children's appreciation of number.
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Teachers and other school district employees would face $200 fines if they fail to report bullying incidents under a bill being circulated by a Republican lawmaker.But some school advocates worry the bill would have unintended consequences.
"I think it creates incentives in the wrong directions," said Dan Rossmiller, director of government relations for the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
He said he fears the proposal could lead to teachers over-identifying student behavior as bullying due to fears of being penalized, or districts narrowing the definition of bullying in an effort to avoid exhausting school resources on a flood of bullying investigations.
But the bill's sponsor, Rep. Garey Bies, R-Sister Bay, said parents have told him they talked to teachers about bullying problems but "nothing was ever done."
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Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system dramatically, but how? One of the hottest trends in education reform lately is looking at the stunning success of the West's reigning education superpower, Finland. Trouble is, when it comes to the lessons that Finnish schools have to offer, most of the discussion seems to be missing the point.The small Nordic country of Finland used to be known -- if it was known for anything at all -- as the home of Nokia, the mobile phone giant. But lately Finland has been attracting attention on global surveys of quality of life -- Newsweek ranked it number one last year -- and Finland's national education system has been receiving particular praise, because in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.
Finland's schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one study: the PISA survey, conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore. In the most recent survey in 2009 Finland slipped slightly, with students in Shanghai, China, taking the best scores, but the Finns are still near the very top. Throughout the same period, the PISA performance of the United States has been middling, at best.
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Let's start from some science. And you know, a lot of what I'll say today connects back to what I thought at first was a small discovery that I made about 30 years ago. Let me tell you the story.
I started out at a pretty young age as a physicist. Diligently doing physics pretty much the way it had been done for 300 years. Starting from this-or-that equation, and then doing the math to figure out predictions from it. That worked pretty well in some cases. But there were too many cases where it just didn't work. So I got to wondering whether there might be some alternative; a different approach.At the time I'd been using computers as practical tools for quite a while--and I'd even created a big software system that was a forerunner of Mathematica. And what I gradually began to think was that actually computers--and computation--weren't just useful tools; they were actually the main event. And that one could use them to generalize how one does science: to think not just in terms of math and equations, but in terms of arbitrary computations and programs.
So, OK, what kind of programs might nature use? Given how complicated the things we see in nature are, we might think the programs it's running must be really complicated. Maybe thousands or millions of lines of code. Like programs we write to do things.
But I thought: let's start simple. Let's find out what happens with tiny programs--maybe a line or two of code long. And let's find out what those do. So I decided to do an experiment. Just set up programs like that, and run them. Here's one of the ones I started with. It's called a cellular automaton. It consists of a line of cells, each one either black or not. And it runs down the page computing the new color of each cell using the little rule at the bottom there.
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Teachers at 142 of 1,269 schools that have been open for at least the past eight years were all marked "satisfactory" on the city's pass/fail system for reviewing job performance.
The schools are in all five boroughs. They include highly sought-after schools, such as Millennium High School in Manhattan, the High School of American Studies in the Bronx, and the Children's School in Brooklyn. They also include schools that have received low marks from the city, such as Public School 39 Francis J. Murphy Jr. in Staten Island and Intermediate School 349 Math, Science & Tech in Brooklyn.
The city data didn't include charter schools, which have their own policies on evaluating teachers. The Department of Education released the information in response to a public-records request from the Journal.
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Call it a math lesson. Why would a school pay $80 for a textbook that may quickly become irrelevant, when it could pay around $5 or less?The K-12 world is generally very slow to change. Some schools, like Avenues have gone completely electronic along with their own iTunes U channel.A cadre of so-called open-education publishers is slowly beginning to gain the trust of schools and university systems by posing that question. Using free, open-source education materials, firms like CK-12 and Boundless are building digital textbooks and learning materials (mostly for math and science) that students and teachers can use and edit as they wish. While no single outfit yet dominates, the better such offerings get, the more traditional textbook giants like Pearson (PSO), Reed Elsevier (RUK), and Cengage ought to fear for their business models.
The U.S. spends more than $7 billion every year on K-12 textbooks, according to the FCC. And college textbook prices have increased by a whopping 812% since 1978, according to the American Enterprise Institute, surpassing inflation, college tuition increases -- even the much-discussed rise in medical expenses during that time period. College students report that they pay an average of $655 a year on books and supplies, according to a 2012 report from the National Association of College Stores.
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Five candidates are competing for three seats on the Madison school board, with the general election on April 2, 2013.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.The political context for the races is explosive, given Gov. Scott Walker's revolutionary proposals for education in Wisconsin: cuts to public school funding, an expansion of the voucher program, and a revamping of teachers' evaluations and bargaining rights.
In Madison, the issues are particularly complex, with the intense disagreements over the district's achievement gap between white and minority students.
TJ Mertz, an Edgewood College history instructor and education blogger, is running unopposed after Sarah Manski dropped out of the race for Seat 5 following the February primary. Her name will appear on the ballot, but she is moving to California. Mertz will replace retiring school board member Maya Cole.
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The Wisconsin State Journal editorial board interviewed -- in person -- 20 candidates for the City Council and four for Madison School Board. Every candidate deserves praise for giving voters a choice.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.Yet the candidates pictured below are best prepared to tackle local challenges, including a dismal graduation rate for minority students and the need for a stronger economy and more jobs.
Seat 3Wayne Strong will bring urgency to narrowing the achievement gap for minority students in Madison schools, while insisting on high standards for all. A father of two Madison graduates and an active community volunteer, Strong served on the strategic committee that prioritized the gap for action. Strong promises more accountability for results, starting with the new superintendent. He also wants to improve the school climate for minority families to encourage more involvement. A retired police officer, he's well versed on effective strategies for reducing conflicts in schools that often lead to suspensions -- "the genesis of the problem." Strong's opponent, Dean Loumos, is impressive, too. But Strong seems more willing to try new strategies for success.
Seat 4James Howard likes to focus on school data to inform board decisions, rather than relying on assumptions or bowing to political pressure. The longtime economist and father of Madison students doesn't go along to get along. Yet his peers elected him board president, and he played a big role in hiring incoming Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham. Howard expects action toward better results for struggling students. He wants to hire more minority educators and let key staff work flexible hours to better engage parents. Unlike his opponent, Greg Packnett, Howard cites concern for the burden property taxes place on older homeowners. A legislative aide at the Capitol, Packnett shows promise. But Howard's experience makes him the clear choice.
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The Madison School Board voted Monday night to discontinue the district's dual-language immersion program at Chavez Elementary next year.I wonder how much of the previous Superintendent's initiatives (Dan Nerad) will unravel. Better to focus on the core reading issues, in my humble opinion.Current students will continue for one more year in the program, which offers a mix of Spanish and English instruction to both native Spanish and English speakers. Next year the district plans to work with families on how to continue the only dual-language program in the Memorial High School attendance area into the future, but there is no guarantee that it will continue.
The school district recommended discontinuing the program because of a shortage of Spanish-speaking families interested in participating. The program has been operating with some classes that have only native English speakers, which the board had not approved.
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When National School Choice Week kicked off at the end of January in Los Angeles, former California State Senator Gloria Romero was there to celebrate. 2013 may prove to be a banner year for Romero in her school-choice activism. As a state senator, Romero introduced and fought for the passage of "parent-triggered" school reform in 2010. The law allows for parents to force a school district to convert a failing public school into a charter program if they have enough community support.Toward the end of 2012, Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto, Calif., became the first school to successfully convert to a charter program through application of the parent-trigger law. A second school in Los Angeles is now on its way to join them.
Romero is also a Democrat, and thus her education reform activism has pitted her against the powerful education unions that are very politically influential within her party. She's now the California director for Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a group devoted to fighting for school choice from the left. Last month I interviewed Romero about recent school choice successes and the challenges of trying to fight for education reform within the confines of her own political party.
Reason: How do you feel National School Choice Week went this year?
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Amy Hua (left) from West High School is the 2012 Wisconsin Winner of the prestigious Siemens Award for Advanced Placement, making her one of the nation's top achievers in AP science and mathematics courses and a future leader in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).Amy is the first student at West High to receive this honor. The annual award honors up to 100 of the nation's top performers in AP science and math courses (Biology, Calculus BC, Chemistry, Computer Science A, Environmental Science, Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism, Physics C: Mechanics, and Statistics) with a $2,000 scholarship from the Siemens Foundation to one male and one female student in each state.
Amy has taken 11 AP courses during her high school years and lists calculus among her favorite such classes. Her initiative to enroll and excel in AP courses reflects potential to be a future leader in math and science and a role model for others. She advises to other students, "Collaborating with peers is a great way to learn new material since you can share ideas and synergistically approach complex problems."
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Incoming Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham (1.4MB PDF):.
More from Matthew DeFour.
Much more on Jennifer Cheatham, here along with a history of Madison Superintendents.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeannie Bettner email:
The University of Wisconsin is sponsoring a free 10-day public event which is designed to engage educators and community members in a conversation about efforts to renew and reinvigorate education in Wisconsin. All sessions are in the evening. Program titles, presenters and locations can be found on MTI's website (www.madisonteachers.org) or by contacting your MTI Faculty Representative. This week's sessions are:Related: www.wisconsin2.org
- Politics of School Choice in New Orleans & Milwaukee
Gloria Ladson-Billings, Professor of Education, Moderator Monday, March 18, 7:00 p.m., Union South- "The Finland Phenomenon: Inside the World's Most
Surprising School System" Documentary Film Viewing & Discussion Tuesday, March 19, 7:00 p.m., Union South- Higher Education Financing and Student Tuition Details Forthcoming (www.edtalkswi.org) Wednesday, March 20
- The Chicago Teachers Strike: Reframing Education
Reform and Teacher Unions Sara Goldrick-Rab, Professor of Education, Moderator Thurs., March 21, 7:00 p.m., Wisconsin Idea Room
Much more on the Wisconsin School of Education, here.
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"I'm a compulsive laundry room thief," says one Facebook confession. "I'm the reason the 'Public Urination is Illegal' signs were put up at Coyote Village," says another."I sold books for the semester to go to South Padre for spring break ... Gotta pay for the booze somehow," reveals yet another poster.
By turns rueful and raunchy, these anonymous admissions pop up on 'campus confession' pages unofficially linked to scores of high schools and universities.
Like many social media trends, the confession craze captivates teenagers and 20-somethings - but alarms teachers, law enforcement officers and counselors.
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Optimism is such a core impulse for Milwaukee School Superintendent Gregory Thornton that he began to tell School Board members at a meeting Thursday he was pleased to inform them of something - and then corrected himself to say he regretted to inform them.What he regretted - and a statewide roster of public school officials would agree - is that the news coming out of Washington and Madison when it comes to education funding is filled with uncertainty, confusion, and, from their standpoint, ill tidings.
Thornton said the meeting of the board's budget committee had been postponed a week in the hope there would be more clarity (and maybe better news) by the time the board sat down. In reality, he said, things were cloudier than before.
But the lack of clarity on what lies ahead only underscores how important signals from Madison and Washington are.
It isn't news that the capitals of the nation and state are the places to turn to if you want to get handles on what is going on in local education. Twenty-five years ago or so, that wasn't nearly so true, especially in a places such as Wisconsin, which was (and still says it is) a "local-control" state for schools. As education moved up the priority list, the influence of Washington and Madison increased.
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This year, the racial breakdown of admission offers at these three schools looks like this (race and ethnicity data were not available for all test-takers):Stuyvesant offered admission to 9 black students; 24 Latino students; 177 white students; and 620 students who identify as Asian.aBronx Science offered admission to 25 black students; 54 Latino students; 239 white students; 489 Asian students; and 3 American Indian/Alaskan Native students.
Brooklyn Tech offered admission to 110 black students; 134 Latino students; 451 white students; 960 Asian students; and 5 American Indian/Alaskan Native students.
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I'm going to be bold here and ask a question: "Does anyone pay attention in lectures?"Of course some students do, but the majority are busy with other things: Facebook, emails, applying to internships (I hope you see the irony of this), reading, texting and now - what is most trendy - viewing images. Obviously not just any images but powerful images. Witty images. Funny images. Cute images. Images that really spark an emotion. In a couple of my classes if I sit in the back and look around, I can see a handful of people that are using laptops looking at images on Imgur.
Warning: If you haven't been on sites like Imgur, 9gag, or Imgfav yet, you will get sucked in once you visit. You've been warned.
The days in which students could only spend boring classes napping are gone. The same goes with the age of merely texting. College students are notorious for multitasking. To think that we only text in class or only go on Facebook is outlandish.
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Every business school in the western world places enormous stock in its global appeal, but how many of these institutions are genuinely catering for the market they probably covet above all others?Latest OECD figures show that in 2010 the number of students studying internationally exceeded 4m for the first time, having topped 3m just five years earlier. The likes of India and Africa may have emerged as key targets, but it is China, inevitably, that demands special attention as the quest to expound the management wisdom of the west grows ever more competitive.
China needs entrepreneurs, but the notion that it is already a hotbed of innovation is a myth: it is still an imitator. Last year the Wall Street Journal, remarking on the findings of an investigation by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, observed that the typical Chinese entrepreneur might still be regarded as a restaurant owner or a farmer.
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British teenagers are in danger of pursuing careers which represent only a small fraction of future job vacancies, according to new research which exposes the gulf between pupils' aspirations and the demands of the labour market.The study of over 11,000 13 to 16 year-olds compared their career ambitions with projections of UK job availability over the next decade.
It showed that over a third of teenagers are interested in just 10 occupations. These included glamorous roles such as acting and professional sports and professions such as teaching, law, medicine and psychology.
The contrast is most stark among 15 to 16 year olds, a fifth of whom have ambitions to work in the culture, media and sport sector, which is projected to have only 2.4 per cent of the UK's new and replacement jobs between 2010 and 2020.
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Brenda Mueller was thrilled to have a creative outlet for her daughter, who attended a recent open art studio at the Monroe Street Arts Center for students with special needs."Sara loves to paint," Mueller said about her daughter, who has Down syndrome. "She does a lot of painting at home."
But the arts center program, called OASis, also gives the participants a chance to socialize with others, said Beth Jesion, art department head and lead art teacher.
OASis will be offered through May from 3:30 to 5 p.m. on the last Friday of each month except this month when it will run Friday, March 22, due to spring break for area students. It is open to those ages 6 and up, and registration by phone is encouraged.
The program is free due to a $1,000 grant from The Capital Times Kids Fund.
OASis started in September, and Jesion said it will be offered again next school year. The arts center also would like to expand the program in the future such as offering it twice a month or having a day-long program, she said.
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It's not exactly news that China is setting itself up as a new global superpower, is it? While Western civilization chokes on its own gluttony like a latter-day Marlon Brando, China continues to buy up American debt and lock away the world's natural resources. But now, not content to simply laugh and make jerk-off signs as they pass us on the geopolitical highway, they've also developed a state-endorsed genetic-engineering project.Related: New data reveal scale of China abortions and Eugenics.At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world's smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they're not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelligence by five to 15 IQ points. Within a couple of generations, competing with the Chinese on an intellectual level will be like challenging Lena Dunham to a getting-naked-on-TV contest.
Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist and lecturer at NYU, is one of the 2,000 braniacs who contributed their DNA. I spoke to him about what this creepy-ass program might mean for the future of Chinese kids.
Many links here.
In its scientific work, BGI often acts as the enabler of other people's ideas. That is the case in a major project conceived by Steve Hsu, vice president for research at Michigan State University, to search for genes that influence intelligence. Under the guidance of Zhao Bowen, BGI is now sequencing the DNA of more than 2,000 people--mostly Americans--who have IQ scores of at least 160, or four standard deviations above the mean.The DNA comes primarily from a collection of blood samples amassed by Robert Plomin, a psychologist at King's College, London. The plan, to compare the genomes of geniuses and people of ordinary intelligence, is scientifically risky (it's likely that thousands of genes are involved) and somewhat controversial. For those reasons it would be very hard to find the $15 or $20 million needed to carry out the project in the West. "Maybe it will work, maybe it won't," Plomin says. "But BGI is doing it basically for free."
From Plomin's perspective, BGI is so large that it appears to have more DNA sequencing capacity than it knows what to do with. It has "all those machines and people that have to be fed" with projects, he says. The IQ study isn't the only mega-project under way. With a U.S. nonprofit, Autism Speaks, BGI is being paid to sequence the DNA of up to 10,000 people from families with autistic children. For researchers in Denmark, BGI is decoding the genomes of 3,000 obese people and 3,000 lean ones.
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The city, he says, needs to help by providing kids with access to out-of-school programs in the evenings and during the summer. It needs to do more to fight hunger and address violence-induced trauma in children. And it needs to help parents get engaged in their kids' education.Related: "We are not interested in the development of new charter schools" - Madison Mayor Paul Soglin."We as a community, for all of the bragging about being so progressive, are way behind the rest of the nation in these areas," he says.
The mayor's stated plans for addressing those issues, however, are in their infancy.
Soglin says he is researching ways to get low-cost Internet access to the many households throughout the city that currently lack computers or broadband connections.
A serious effort to provide low-cost or even free Internet access to city residents is hampered by a 2003 state law that sought to discourage cities from setting up their own broadband networks. The bill, which was pushed by the telecommunications industry, forbids municipalities from funding a broadband system with taxpayer dollars; only subscriber fees can be used.
Ald. Scott Resnick, who runs a software company and plans to be involved in Soglin's efforts, says the city will likely look to broker a deal with existing Internet providers, such as Charter or AT&T, and perhaps seek funding from private donors.
Job one locally is to make sure all students can read.
Madison, 2004 Madison schools distort reading data by UW-Madison Professor Mark Seidenberg:
Rainwater's explanation also emphasized the fact that 80 percent of Madison children score at or above grade level. But the funds were targeted for students who do not score at these levels. Current practices are clearly not working for these children, and the Reading First funds would have supported activities designed to help them.Madison's reading curriculum undoubtedly works well in many settings. For whatever reasons, many chil dren at the five targeted schools had fallen seriously behind. It is not an indictment of the district to acknowledge that these children might have benefited from additional resources and intervention strategies.
In her column, Belmore also emphasized the 80 percent of the children who are doing well, but she provided additional statistics indicating that test scores are improving at the five target schools. Thus she argued that the best thing is to stick with the current program rather than use the Reading First money.
Belmore has provided a lesson in the selective use of statistics. It's true that third grade reading scores improved at the schools between 1998 and 2004. However, at Hawthorne, scores have been flat (not improving) since 2000; at Glendale, flat since 2001; at Midvale/ Lincoln, flat since 2002; and at Orchard Ridge they have improved since 2002 - bringing them back to slightly higher than where they were in 2001.
In short, these schools are not making steady upward progress, at least as measured by this test.
Madison, 2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed...and not before by Ruth Robarts:
According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, "for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we've reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap". Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level "is the original gap" that the board set out to close.Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.
In 1998, the Madison School Board adopted an important academic goal: "that all students complete the 3rd grade able to read at or beyond grade level". We adopted this goal in response to recommendations from a citizen study group that believed that minority students who are not competent as readers by the end of the third grade fall behind in all academic areas after third grade.
"All students" meant all students. We promised to stop thinking in terms of average student achievement in reading. Instead, we would separately analyze the reading ability of students by subgroups. The subgroups included white, African American, Hispanic, Southeast Asian, and other Asian students.
"Able to read at or beyond grade level" meant scoring at the "proficient" or "advanced" level on the Wisconsin Reading Comprehension Test (WRC) administered during the third grade. "Proficient" scores were equated with being able to read at grade level. "Advanced" scores were equated with being able to read beyond grade level. The other possible scores on this statewide test (basic and minimal) were equated with reading below grade level.
Madison, 2009: 60% to 42%: Madison School District's Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags "National Average": Administration seeks to continue its use.
Madison, 2012: Madison's "Achievement Gap Plan":
The other useful stat buried in the materials is on the second page 3 (= 6th page), showing that the 3rd grade proficiency rate for black students on WKCE, converted to NAEP-scale proficiency, is 6.8%, with the accountability plan targeting this percentage to increase to 23% over one school year. Not sure how this happens when the proficiency rate (by any measure) has been decreasing year over year for quite some time. Because the new DPI school report cards don't present data on an aggregated basis district-wide nor disaggregated by income and ethnicity by grade level, the stats in the MMSD report are very useful, if one reads the fine print.
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Several schools have suspended children for joking about guns in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings. A 7-year-old in Maryland was suspended for chewing a breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun, while others have received the same punishment for pointing their fingers like guns or using toy guns that blow bubbles. Suspension seems like a counterintuitive disciplinary tool, since many children would prefer to stay home from school, anyway. Why is suspension such a common punishment?
Because it's familiar, cheap, and convenient. It's also demonstrably ineffective. Its deterrent value is low: A 2011 study showed that Texas students who were suspended or expelled at least once during middle school and high school averaged four such disciplinary actions during their academic careers. Fourteen percent of them were suspended 11 times or more. Suspensions don't even seem to benefit the school as a whole. In recent years, while Baltimore city schools have dramatically reduced suspensions, the dropout rate has been cut nearly in half.
Still, surveys consistently show that parents support suspension, because it keeps those students perceived as bad apples away from their peers. Principals continue to rely on suspension, in part because it creates the appearance of toughness. Parents can't complain about inaction when a principal regularly suspends or expels bad actors. Administrators may also favor suspension because it edges problem students out of school: Students who have been suspended are three times more likely to drop out. Some researchers refer to a student who gives up on school after repeated suspension as a "push out" rather than a dropout.
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The minimum retirement age for public employees would increase by two years under a bill proposed by a state lawmaker who said the change would reflect increasing life spans and later retirement ages in general while possibly strengthening the pension system.Democrats and a prominent retiree group were skeptical, and the state Department of Employee Trust Funds said a thorough actuarial study was needed to make sure the change wouldn't cause unintended problems.
Most municipal workers, state employees and teachers in the Wisconsin Retirement System must work until they are 65 years old to collect full benefits, but they can retire at age 55 with reduced pensions.
Under a bill circulated by Rep. Duey Stroebel, R-Saukville, the minimum age would rise to 57. For police and firefighters, it would increase two years to 52.
"(Current laws) have been in place for many years and have not changed to reflect increased longevity, normal life work span or the changing demographics of our state," Stroebel said Friday in an email sent to state legislators in an effort to find co-sponsors.
Stroebel's bill would affect only people who are under 40, so nobody would be affected for more than a decade.
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My elementary School in San Mateo, Calif., had reading ability groups in every classroom. I arrived in the middle of third grade in 1952, and I was put in the lowest group, the canaries. By June, I had clawed my way up to the top group, the bluebirds.This pedagogical device made sense to competitive types like me. My mother, a teacher, thought it was a troublesome crutch, but it was too tightly woven into American culture to change.
Except that it did, as Brookings Institution education expert Tom Loveless reveals in a new report. The canaries, redbirds and other ability-group fauna took a huge hit from scholars studying inequity in American schools in the 1970s and 1980s. Teachers moved away from ability grouping.
Now, without much notice, they have moved back. Depending on your point of view, the No Child Left Behind law deserves credit or blame for the return of my bluebirds and lesser fowl.
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Cecilia Chang had always been a meticulous planner, so it made sense that she left three notes at the scene of her suicide, each prepared for a specific audience. The previous day (Monday, November 5, 2012), she'd tied up a loose end, testifying at her own trial and admitting to defrauding her employer, St John's, a private, Roman Catholic university in Queens, New York, in the United States. She'd stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars, living a super-rich life on a university salary that at its peak was US$120,000. On the Tuesday, as on every other day, she was flawlessly put together, her hair carefully arranged to conceal a thinning spot. She wore one of her flowery, silky blouses with a fitted black jacket.Then, in her Queens home, where the government said she'd forced scholarship students to clean and cook, she turned on the gas in the kitchen, slit her wrists and, when the desired result didn't come quickly enough, tossed a stereo cord over the ladder to the attic and hanged herself. The notes, carefully written in Chinese, were found at the scene. One was to her only son: "I love you," she wrote, and she apologised to him. Another, addressed to the judge and jury, with a politeness she maintained till the end, thanked them for their time and attention. The third, the most elaborate, she addressed to her employer, for whom she reserved her fury. She'd been a fundraiser at St John's for three decades, bringing in millions of dollars. And in the end, she felt the school had abandoned her. In her note, she described herself as a scapegoat.
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A number of figures stood out at the Ed Talks panel on the achievement gap that I attended last Wednesday night, part of a UW-Madison series of free conversations and presentations on educational issues. Here are two:• 50: The percentage of children currently defined as low-income in the Madison Metropolitan School District.
• 9: The percentage of children defined as low-income when Paul Soglin was first elected mayor in 1973.
It is not just the schools' responsibility to address the effects of such a dramatic increase in poverty, says the mayor, who participated on the panel along with School Board President James Howard and others.
"The school system has the children about 20 percent of the time," Soglin said. "The remaining 80 percent is very critical."
The city, he says, needs to help by providing kids with access to out-of-school programs in the evenings and during the summer. It needs to do more to fight hunger and address violence-induced trauma in children. And it needs to help parents get engaged in their kids' education.
"We as a community, for all of the bragging about being so progressive, are way behind the rest of the nation in these areas," he says.
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Matthew DeFour (and many others):
That led minority leaders to complain about the perceived control white Madison liberals -- including teachers union leaders -- exert on elections and on efforts meant to raise minority student achievement. Some local leaders have undertaken soul-searching while others say more minorities need to seek elective office.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here."You could not have constructed a scenario to cause more alienation and more mistrust than what Sarah Manski did," longtime local political observer Stuart Levitan said, referring to the primary winner for seat 5. "It exposed an underlying lack of connection between some of the progressive white community and the progressive African-American community that is very worrisome in the long run."
In the last few weeks:
- Urban League of Greater Madison president Kaleem Caire in a lengthy email described the failed negotiations involving him, district officials and Madison Teachers Inc. executive director John Matthews over Caire's proposed Madison Preparatory Academy geared toward low-income minority students.
- Ananda Mirilli, who placed third behind Manski for seat 5, released emails in which Sarah Manski's husband, Ben Manski, accused Caire of recruiting Mirilli to run for School Board and linking Caire to a conservative foundation. Caire confirmed the email exchange, but said he didn't recruit Mirilli. The Manskis did not respond to requests for comment.
- Two School Board members, Mary Burke and Ed Hughes, vigorously backed former police lieutenant Wayne Strong, who is black, to counter the influence of political groups supporting his opponent. In the seat 3 race, Strong faces Dean Loumos, a low-income housing provider supported by MTI, the Dane County Democratic Party, Progressive Dane and the local Green Party.
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The billionaires' club, with their long retinue of pundits, researchers, and other hangers-on, are giving their attention, some of the time, to education. But they are not paying attention to the academic work of students, or to their responsibility for their own education.
Mr. Gates spent nearly two hundred million dollars recently on a program for teacher assessment, but does he realize that in almost every class there are students as well, and that they have a lot to say about what the teacher can accomplish?
One pundit came to speak in Boston. When told that lots of good teachers were being driven out of the profession by the absence of discipline among students, he said, "They need better classroom management skills." I don't think he had ever "managed" a classroom, but I told him this story:
When Theodore Roosevelt was President, he had a guest one day in the oval office, and his daughter Alice came roaring through the room disturbing everything. The guest said, "Can't you control Alice?" And Roosevelt said, "I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice, but not both."
Lots and lots of teachers have students in their classes who have not been taught by KIPP, to "Work Hard, Be Nice." Their inability to control themselves and behave with courtesy and respect for their teacher and their fellow students frequently degrades and can even disintegrate the academic integrity of the class, which damages not only their own chance to learn, but prevents all their classmates from learning as well.
In 2004, Paul A. Zoch, a teacher from Texas, wrote in Doomed to Fail (p. 150) that: "Let there be no doubt about it: the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education." Nine years later that remains the problem with the Edupundits and their funders.
Of course, one problem for the edureformers is that you can fire teachers but you can't fire students. If students fail, largely through their own poor attendance, inattention and destructive behavior in class, we can't blame them. Only the teachers can be held to account. This is beyond stupid, verging on willful blindness.
The University of Indiana, in its most recent Survey of High School Student Engagement, interviewed 143,052 U.S. high school students and found that 42.5% of them spend an hour or less each week on homework and 82.7% spend five hours or less each week on their homework. The average Korean student spends fifteen hours a week on homework, and that does not include evening hagwon sessions of two or three hours. Can anyone see a difference here? And, by the way, American students spend 53 hours a week playing video games and using other sorts of electronic entertainment.
While they play, and consume expensive products of the technology companies, students in other countries are studying hard, behaving in class, and taking their educational opportunities seriously so they can eat our lunch, which they are starting to do.
But let's blame the teachers in the United States and ignore what their students are doing, in class and after class. That will work, won't it?
Of course what teachers and all the other employees of our school systems do is important. But ignoring students and their work, and blaming teachers for poor student academic performance, would be like blaming a trainer if his boxer gets knocked out in the ring, while not noticing that the boxer stands in front of his opponent with his hands at his sides all the time.
We need high academic achievement, but we will not get it by blaming teachers and driving them out of the profession, while not noticing that students have an important, and even crucial, responsibility for their own learning.
Ignoring the role of our students in their own education, which at the "highest" levels of funded programs we do, is not only dumb, it will virtually consign all the other efforts to failure. Think about it.
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
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Earlier this year, I was out to dinner with a friend and our combined eight kids. My 14-year-old son, Jonah, who has autism, was very excited about the imminent arrival of his hamburger and french fries, so he was acting as he does when he's happy: bouncing in his seat, clapping his hands, and vocalizing a mishmash of squawks and catchphrases from his favorite Sesame Street videos. He wasn't exceedingly loud, but the oddness of his behavior had clearly caught the attention of an older gentleman at the one other table occupied at that early hour."Shhhhhhh," he hissed from across the room.
Everyone at the table instantly froze--except, of course, for Jonah. "I'm sorry," I explained, rising from my seat and taking a few steps toward him so I wouldn't have to holler. "My son is autistic ... "
"Oh, sorry," he said.
"He's not trying to disturb you intentionally ... "
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Pearl Brady has a stable job with good benefits and holds two degrees, a bachelor's and a master's. But despite her best efforts, she has no savings, and worries that it will be years before she manages to start putting away money for a house, children and eventually retirement.Related: Madison's public school status quo senior advocacy group: Grumps."The elite make economic policy to benefit themselves, alone. The more they pay us, the less is left to them to buy yachts and senators."
"I'm in that extremely nervous category," said Ms. Brady, 28, a Brooklynite who works for a union. "I know how much money I'm going to be making for the near term. I hope in my 30s and 40s to be able to save, but I have no idea how. It's scary."
Ms. Brady has plenty of company. A new study from the Urban Institute finds that Ms. Brady and her peers up to roughly age 40 have accrued less wealth than their parents did at the same age, even as the average wealth of Americans has doubled over the last quarter-century.
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A lot of math grad school is reading books and papers and trying to understand what's going on. The difficulty is that reading math is not like reading a mystery thriller, and it's not even like reading a history book or a New York Times article.The main issue is that, by the time you get to the frontiers of math, the words to describe the concepts don't really exist yet. Communicating these ideas is a bit like trying to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen one, except you're only allowed to use words that are four letters long or shorter.
What can you say?
"It is a tool that does suck up dust to make what you walk on in a home tidy."
That's certainly better than nothing, but it doesn't tell you everything you might want to know about a vacuum cleaner. Can you use a vacuum cleaner to clean bookshelves? Can you use a vacuum cleaner to clean a cat? Can you use a vacuum cleaner to clean the outdoors?
The authors of the papers and books are trying to communicate what they've understood as best they can under these restrictions, and it's certainly better than nothing, but if you're going to have to work with vacuum cleaners, you need to know much more.
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In recent months there's been a lot of conversation in the Youth Services world about apps. Tablets loaded with pre-selected apps are available to users of some libraries, either on-site or for circulation. A long thread on the alsc-l listserv presented a number of strongly held opinions about the advisability of using apps during storytimes. Librarians are looking at the possibility of reviewing apps for developers and putting our expert imprimatur on their content and value, just as we already do for books and other formats. Regardless of where one stands on the issue of the best way to incorporate apps into services and programs for children, librarians seem to agree that they are important and they are here to stay.I believe that this conversation is timely and useful, but incomplete unless we expand it to include a discussion of how librarians can use apps with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The popular media and the ASD blogosphere is full of references to the amazing ways in which children with ASD have embraced tablet computers and apps, and these devices are taking the place of more expensive and cumbersome assistive technology. A number of developers are creating high-quality apps that are specifically designed for children with ASD. Other apps, written for the general population, are appealing to and useful for these kids. With the incidence of ASD at 1 in 88, we all need to think about how we are working with these children in our communities, and apps can play an important role.
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Over the last 10 years, the city of Madison has been subjected to a costly 2009 state law and hit with a string of unfavorable court rulings that together have effectively removed millions of dollars' worth of property value from city tax rolls.Related: Up, Down & Transparency: Madison Schools Received $11.8M more in State Tax Dollars last year, Local District Forecasts a Possible Reduction of $8.7M this Year.Meanwhile, it seems Mayor Paul Soglin and the Madison School District can't go a week without complaining about how Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled Legislature won't give them the state tax dollars they need or let them raise local property taxes enough to cover their bills.
So what do a pair of Democratic state lawmakers from Madison do? Well, propose to make yet another piece of Madison property exempt from property taxes, of course.
It's not like Sen. Fred Risser and Rep. Chris Taylor's bill to make the Bartell Theatre tax-exempt is a huge deal. The theater at 113 E. Mifflin St. only paid about $13,000 in taxes in 2012.
But it's counterproductive at best given the context of tight city budgets and the whittling away of taxable property value in a city already steeped in tax-exempt properties owned by state government, UW-Madison and nonprofit agencies.
"It's inappropriate," said Soglin, who said the lawmakers didn't talk to him about the bill. "If anything, the state should be working with us to close the loopholes."
and
Mr Munger observes that America's blockheaded debt-ceiling debate flows in part from a bipartisan commitment to the medieval theology of our tax code:The Republicans in Congress are prepared to sacrifice our immortal debt rating to the proposition that not one penny increase is possible, even though almost no one actually pays those rates.Republicans depend on selling indulgences, too, Mr Munger is keen to stress. Bowles-Simpson recommended closing some of the tax code's most egregious loopholes. But the political incentives led President Obama to refuse the chance to go after tax expenditures; he has mostly pushed for higher rates. This is all incredibly depressing. You know we're in trouble when Mr Munger, one of our sharpest scholars of political economy, is unable to offer useful advice beyond calling for a reformation, "a Martin Luther to speak out and tell the truth".The Democrats in Congress like high rates, so that they can sell indulgences.
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A few years ago, when Antonella Sorace visited the European Central Bank in Frankfurt to talk about her research into bilingualism, she was astonished to find the bank's multinational staff worrying about what should have been one of their families' principal assets. "They had all kinds of doubts about the benefits of multilingualism for their children; they worried that their children weren't learning to read or write properly - in any language," she says. "I found it very instructive."The Italian-born University of Edinburgh professor of developmental linguistics should set their minds at rest. Prof Sorace's research has shown that speaking another language offers not only utilitarian communication advantages, but also has cognitive benefits. Her message to business is: "Hire more multilingual employees, because these employees can communicate better, have better intercultural sensitivity, are better at co-operating, negotiating, compromising. But they can also think more efficiently."
Big multinational companies recognise the importance of language skills. McKinsey counts more than 130 languages spoken across the management consultancy, and offers a bursary to those who wish to learn another language before joining. Unilever estimates that up to 80 of the consumer products group's 100 most senior leaders speak at least two languages. Standard Chartered seeks out bilinguals for its international graduate training scheme.
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Last year, in its very first year of operation, St. John Fisher Academy, a voucher school, was forced to close its doors from lack of funding. The Northwestern Avenue school had counted on various grants and other funding coming in. But they didn't come through and, after months of teachers working without pay, the school announced its closing.Are all publicly funded school budgets well vetted?After that episode, which left students looking for a new school, it was especially concerning to hear about another voucher school with money issues -- Evergreen Elementary School.
This is a brand-new voucher school that wants to capitalize on the voucher program that started here in Racine during the 2011-12 school year. The program allows low- to middle-income students who live in the Racine Unified attendance area to attend participating private schools using state-funded $6,442 vouchers to pay tuition. There was a cap on the number of students who could attend the last two years, but the cap has been lifted for next year.
For a spirited entrepreneur, this is an opportunity to establish a new business and, possibly, that is what the founders of Evergreen were thinking.
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Can writing a sarcastic but clearly tame blog comment really land two cops at your doorstep?The 2006 Stasi film: "The Lives of Others" is well worth seeing. Wikipedia on citizenship.It happened to Blazingcatfur blogger Arnie Lemaire Wednesday for musing "OISE and the TDSB need to be purged, or burnt to the ground whichever is more effective."
He's, quite rightfully, upset about it.
But, often critical of the Toronto District School Board and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Lemaire said he will not back down from efforts to "intimidate" him.
"Dear TDSB, You Can't Silence Me," was a headline on the blazingcatfur.blogspot in response.
But, what they clearly can do, is bring in the police to investigate.
In what can be described as more TDSB theatre of the absurd, an obscure six-week-old blog comment resulted in police visiting his home like one might see back in the day of the Stasi in communist East Germany.
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Three private schools in Milwaukee continued to receive taxpayer money through the voucher program after losing their accreditation, under a loophole in state law that requires such schools to obtain that official approval but not maintain it.A related question: how many traditional public schools are in this position?Reports and records from the state Department of Public Instruction show that Dr. Brenda Noach Choice School, Texas Bufkin Christian Academy and Washington DuBois Christian Leadership Academy have accreditation that has either lapsed or been rescinded.
But on Wednesday, the head of the agency that rescinded its approval of Brenda Noach and Washington DuBois said that both of those schools have now been reinstated.
Still, the questions raised by the DPI accreditation reports illuminate an oversight hiccup for the voucher programs in Milwaukee and Racine. The accreditation issue has been a topic of discussion in Madison lately, and legislation is in the works to close the loophole and add other quality-control measures to the voucher program, which Gov. Scott Walker has proposed expanding to other cities.
School Choice Wisconsin, the state's largest advocate for voucher schools, supports the effort. The group has also been advising accreditation agencies to more closely evaluate the quality of private schools they approve, according to Jay Nelson, head of the Association of Christian Teachers and Schools.
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As online education platforms like Coursera, edX, and Udacity burst onto the scene over the past year, backers have talked up their potential to democratize higher education in the countries that have had the least access (see "The Most Important Education Technology in 200 Years"). These ambitions are now moving closer to reality, as more people begin to experiment with their setup, although significant challenges remain.Students in countries like India and Brazil have been signing up in droves for these massive open online courses, or MOOCs, offered for free from top-tier universities, such as Stanford, MIT, and Harvard.
Yet in the world's poorest regions, where even reliable high-speed Internet access capable of streaming course lecture videos is hard to come by, delivering a useful education to the masses is clearly not a straightforward operation, and experiments in doing so in an organized way are only just beginning (see "Online Courses Put Pressure on Universities in Poorer Nations").
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Five candidates are competing for three seats on the Madison school board, with the general election on April 2, 2013.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.The political context for the races is explosive, given Gov. Scott Walker's revolutionary proposals for education in Wisconsin: cuts to public school funding, an expansion of the voucher program, and a revamping of teachers' evaluations and bargaining rights.
In Madison, the issues are particularly complex, with the intense disagreements over the district's achievement gap between white and minority students.
In the race for Seat 3, former La Follette High School teacher and low-income housing provider Dean Loumos is running against retired Madison police lieutenant Wayne Strong. The winner will replace retiring school board member Beth Moss.
In this competitive series of elections, there are numerous candidate forums and listening sessions under way, and we thought we'd pose our own questions to candidates.
This week, we ask the candidates about where they think incoming superintendent Jennifer Cheatham should direct her attention. We also ask about the changes in collective bargaining wrought by Act 10: How have they affected the district, and how should it respond to this new policy?
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I was just asked a question by a faculty member about using Web of Science citation tracking as a preparation for tenure review. While I would never, at this point in time, advise anyone to NOT look or not make sure they have these figures in hand, the situation has gotten more complicated in recent years. For that reason, I wanted to share a lightly edited portion of my response to this faculty member, as possibly being of interest to others.What we did last time was to search Web of Science for your articles and citations to them, and you helped identify which of the articles were yours and not someone else with a similar name. You also helped identify citations to your articles that were variations of the right citation, but which still meant your article.
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"Complacent" British universities that fail to respond to the rise of online universities will be swept away by global competition, says a report into the future of higher education.Sir Michael Barber, chief education adviser for Pearson, says online courses will be a "threat and opportunity" for the UK's universities.
This "avalanche" could see some middle-ranking universities closing, he says.
"There are too many universities doing the same thing," says Sir Michael.
The report, An Avalanche is Coming, argues that higher education faces an unpredictable global revolution, driven by the impact of the rise in online universities.
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Madison Prep was the mouse that roared. How can you explain the fear and loathing Madison's power elite directed at the Madison Urban League's proposed charter school?The Urban League's Madison Prep charter school would have been just one school amid 50 Madison public schools. It would have taught 800 kids out of 27,000 enrolled in the district. The school board would have retained the ultimate authority to shut it down. So why the sturm und drang over this niche school? Two reasons:
• Because it would have been non-union.
• Because it might have succeeded. The Democratic Party cannot allow one small chink in the solid teachers union barricades.
How else does one explain Sarah Manski's endorsement from the leader of the State Assembly Democrats, Peter Barca of Kenosha? How else does one explain an endorsement from the leader of the State Senate Democrats, Chris Larson of Milwaukee?
The purpose of the Manski campaign was all about staving off any threat to the teachers union hegemony. The power structure encouraged her to run after Ananda Mirilli, an immigrant Latina who supports the charter school (a public school, by the way), entered the race.
Husband Ben Manski said as much in his notorious December email blast.
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When campus president Wallace Loh walked into Juan Uriagereka's office last August, he got right to the point. "We need courses for this thing -- yesterday!"Uriagereka, associate provost for faculty affairs at the University of Maryland in College Park, knew exactly what his boss meant. Campus administrators around the world had been buzzing for months about massive open online courses, or MOOCs: Internet-based teaching programs designed to handle thousands of students simultaneously, in part using the tactics of social-networking websites. To supplement video lectures, much of the learning comes from online comments, questions and discussions. Participants even mark one another's tests.
MOOCs had exploded into the academic consciousness in summer 2011, when a free artificial-intelligence course offered by Stanford University in California attracted 160,000 students from around the world -- 23,000 of whom finished it. Now, Coursera in Mountain View, California -- one of the three researcher-led start-up companies actively developing MOOCs -- was inviting the University of Maryland to submit up to five courses for broadcast on its software platform. Loh wanted in. "He was very clear," says Uriagereka. "We needed to be a part of this."
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Over the last 50 years, Milwaukee has been at the center of a series of experiments in public education -- desegregation and "school choice," as well as the rise of specialty schools and the expansion of a nationally known voucher system.But these experiments, as well as the economic collapse of manufacturing in this blue-collar American city, have left a school system filled with massive inequalities, argues author Barbara J. Miner in "Lessons From the Heartland: A Turbulent Half-Century of Public Education in an Iconic American City."
In the book, Miner, a Milwaukee resident and former reporter for both the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Rethinking Schools, a teacher-led education publication, looks at the story of public education in Milwaukee. "Lesson From the Heartland" is both a history of the school system and a look at the ways that education intersects with housing, economic opportunity and the values of democracy; Miner tries to discern how Milwaukee fell from grace and whether there is a chance for redemption in the years to come.
Miner comes to the book with both professional and personal experience, having worked as a reporter and writer in Milwaukee and being a parent of daughters who graduated from the Milwaukee Public School System. From that background, Miner positions herself as critical of the decisions that led to the current state of education in Milwaukee, while still recognizing that there are teachers, students and schools that are thriving.
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Chinese doctors have performed more than 330m abortions since the government implemented a controversial family planning policy 40 years ago, according to official data from the health ministry.China's one-child policy has been the subject of a heated debate about its economic consequences as the population ages. Forced abortions and sterilisations have also been criticised by human rights campaigners such as Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal activist who sought refuge at the US embassy in Beijing last year.
China first introduced measures to limit the size of the population in 1971, encouraging couples to have fewer children. The one-child rule, with exceptions for ethnic minorities and some rural families, was implemented at the end of the decade.
Since 1971, doctors have performed 336m abortions and 196m sterilisations, the data reveal. They have also inserted 403m intrauterine devices, a normal birth control procedure in the west but one that local officials often force on women in China.
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Katherine Q. Seelye
New York Times
BOSTON -- The Boston School Committee, once synonymous with fierce resistance to racial integration, took a historic step Wednesday night and threw off the last remnants of a busing system first imposed in 1974 under a federal court desegregation order.Instead of busing children across town to achieve integration, the plan adopted by the committee is intended to allow more students to attend schools closer to home.
That was the objective sought by Mayor Thomas Menino, who appointed a special advisory group last year to overhaul the system. He said that keeping students closer to home would encourage more parental involvement, develop neighborhood cohesion and ultimately improve the schools.
"Tonight's historic vote marks a new day for every child in the city of Boston," the mayor said in a statement.
But numerous parents and activists complained during a hearing before the committee's deliberations that the new system would leave some children -- mostly black and Hispanic -- in the lowest-performing schools.
"No way we can stand around the playground and say, 'Yeah, we're all getting a fair shake,' " one father testified.
They were angry, too, that the committee had not tackled what many agree is the district's fundamental problem -- the scarcity of good schools.
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A red flag is signaling the potential deterioration of quality at a significant number of law schools. LSAT medians rise and fall by a point or two over time at many law schools, usually in conjunction with changes in the size of the overall applicant pool and the standing of a particular school. That in itself is not a concern--problems arise, however, when law schools accept students who would not have gained admission in years past. Applicants with low LSAT/GPA scores, in particular, have a higher risk of failing out and a higher risk of not passing the bar exam.Rapidly rising acceptance rates provide ample reason to worry. A decade ago, for the entering class of 2003, only 4 law schools accepted 50% or more of their applicants (the highest at 55.4%).
Jump ahead to 2009, when 35 law schools admitted 50% or more of their applicants to the entering class. Within this total, at 31 law schools the acceptance rate was between 50% and 59%; 4 schools accepted between 60% and 69%, and zero law schools accepted 70% or above.
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Mining asteroids on the moon; background reports on job applicants and internet metasearch. It's quite a broad portfolio for one entrepreneur, and yet Naveen Jain still finds time for philanthropy and running the World Innovation Institute. Bdaily recently talked $10bn global problems and re-thinking our approach to education with Jain. In part one of our interview, Jain discusses his thoughts on education.m"Often, when people are trying to tackle large global problems, they're coming from a philanthropic angle. They're not using the latest technological innovations or the entrepreneurial principles which will serve them in solving the problem," he says.
"If you look at education, many people think you need more schools; better lighting in schools; better training of teachers, and so on. The problem is that billions of people around the world that have no access to education.
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New Jersey's new criteria for grading teachers ultimately will benefit students. Last week the New Jersey Department of Education (DOE) released regulations for AchieveNJ, the blueprint for an entirely new rubric for teachers and even principals. It puts more emphasis on student performance as a benchmark for how well educators are doing.Under the new proposal, teachers who instruct students in areas that have standardized tests will have between 35% and 50% of their evaluations based on student academic growth. (The DOE recommends the lower number.) For those who teach in untested areas, 15% of evaluations will be based on general school test scores. The rest of the annual evaluation, which eventually results in a rating on a scale that ranges from ineffective to highly effective, will be based on traditional subjective measures like classroom observations, lesson plans, classroom management, etc.
Will there be teachers and administrators who are misjudged? Sure. It happens in every profession. Is AchieveNJ new and imperfect? Of course, but it's better than our vestigial, adult-centric system that defaulted in favor of teachers. Now we can default in favor of kids
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Legislation will be introduced in the California Senate on Wednesday that could reshape higher education by requiring the state's public colleges and universities to give credit for faculty-approved online courses taken by students unable to register for oversubscribed classes on campus.If it passes, as seems likely, it would be the first time that state legislators have instructed public universities to grant credit for courses that were not their own -- including those taught by a private vendor, not by a college or university.
"We want to be the first state in the nation to make this promise: No college student in California will be denied the right to move through their education because they couldn't get a seat in the course they needed," said Darrell Steinberg, the president pro tem of the Senate, who will introduce the bill. "That's the motivation for this."
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For Peter Sokolowski, a high-profile event like the 9/11 attacks or the 2012 vice-presidential debate is not just news. It's a "vocabulary event" that sends readers racing to their dictionaries.Sokolowski is editor at large for Merriam-Webster, whose red-and-blue-jacketed Collegiate Dictionary still sits on the desk of many a student and editor. In a print-only era, it would have been next to impossible for him to track vocabulary events. Samuel Johnson, the grand old man of the modern dictionary, "could have spent a week or a month writing a given word's definition and could never have known if anyone read it," he says.
Today, Sokolowski can and does monitor what visitors to the Merriam-Webster Web site look up--as they're doing it.
With the spread of digital technologies, dictionaries have become a two-way mirror, a record not just of words' meanings but of what we want to know. Digital dictionaries read us.
The days of displaying a thick Webster's in the parlor may be past, but dictionaries inhabit our daily lives more than we realize. "There are many more times during a day that you are interacting with a dictionary" now than ever before, says Katherine Connor Martin, head of U.S. dictionaries for Oxford University Press. Whenever you send a text or an e-mail, or read an e-book on your Nook, Kindle, or iPad, a dictionary is at your fingertips, whether or not you're aware of it.
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LearnBoost launched at the beginning of this recent resurgence in ed-tech entrepreneurialism, and in many ways, I thought it encapsulated much of the promise that new ed-tech startups are supposed to hold: great technology, great product, great team, grassroots adoption, freemium pricing, and so on.To me, Corrales' departure now serves to highlight some of the serious tensions, if not grave problems, that this new "ed-tech ecosystem" is facing. Indeed, what sort of "ed-tech ecosystem" are we really building here? Will it thrive? Which startups will survive? Whose values does this "ecosystem" reflect?
On VC-Backed Companies and Expectations for Growth: What happens when a startup raises venture capital? What happens when it raises a little bit of capital (e.g. LearnBoost)? What happens when it raises a lot (e.g. Edmodo)? Do the expectations of investors -- for growth, for revenue, for a "return on investment" and for the timeline in which that will happen -- match the needs of education (particularly public education) (e.g. Coursera)? Are investors looking at the right signals (growth in signups versus, say, intellectual growth of users)? Can venture-backed startups build long-term, sustainable, non-exploitative businesses in education? Or is "the exit" always on the horizon once VCs get involved?
On Business Models and Marketing: Can startups really be "lean" and find success in building for and selling to schools? Can a startup afford to eschew building a giant marketing team? And can education afford an ed-tech industry that cares more about marketing than product? Is the freemium business model, combined with grassroots user adoption, a viable path to sustainable revenue, particularly when startups are up against those enterprise corporations with deep pockets and deep talons -- contracts, licenses, and so on -- deep into schools and districts?
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A powerful California lawmaker wants public college students who are shut out of popular courses to attend low-cost online alternatives - including those offered by for-profit companies - and he plans to encourage the state's public institutions to grant credit for those classes.The proposal expected today from Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat and president pro tem of the state Senate, aims to create a "statewide system of faculty-approved, online college courses," according to a written statement from Steinberg's office. (A spokesman for Steinberg declined to discuss the bill.)
Faculty would decide which courses should make the cut for a pool of online offerings. Likely participants include Udacity and Coursera, two major massive open online course providers, sources said. Another option might be StraighterLine, a low-cost, self-paced online course company.
Those online providers are not accredited and cannot directly issue credit. But the American Council on Education (ACE) offers credit recommendations for successfully completed StraighterLine courses and is currently reviewing MOOCs for credit recommendations, with five from Coursera already gaining approval. Potentially credit-bearing MOOCs will likely include efforts to verify students' identities and proctored exams.
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The consultant the Madison School Board hired to conduct its recent superintendent search defended its work in a statement Thursday, saying that the district hired "a top-notch leader" and that the company provided the board with detailed background information about all candidates.The statement from Gary Ray, president of Ray and Associates of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which the board hired for $31,000, comes more than a month after the district hired Jennifer Cheatham, a Chicago Public Schools administrator who will start April 1.
It says the company provided the board "with all of the Internet information" regarding Springfield, Ill., superintendent Walter Milton Jr. before he was named with Cheatham as a finalist for the job on Feb. 3 and said reports to the contrary are "totally erroneous."
Ray also issued a statement on Madison School Board letterhead dated Feb. 11 stating, "Ray and Associates did make the board aware of earlier allegations about Dr. Milton as well as Dr. Milton's assurances that the claims were unfounded."
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In mathematical logic, Tarski's high school algebra problem was a question posed by Alfred Tarski. It asks whether there are identities involving addition, multiplication, and exponentiation over the positive integers that cannot be proved using eleven axioms about these operations that are taught in high school-level mathematics. The question was solved in 1980 by Alex Wilkie who showed that such unprovable identities do exist.
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Allie Johnson, via a kind reader's email:
Mayor Paul Soglin said it is important for school districts to address parental involvement because it is one of the essential ways to create successful education. He explained it is important to engage parents in school and make them feel they have significant say in the education of their child.Related: Madison's achievement gap and disastrous reading scores."It is not good enough to send a note home in a backpack," Soglin said. "That is not engagement."
Soglin also emphasized the importance of getting parents involved in their children's education early. He cited efforts in other cities to engage parents started with talking to parents before their children are even born.
The community also needs to focus on specific needs of students, according to Soglin. It is a tremendous challenge to learn in schools today, he said. Many households do not have computers, and if that is not recognized, it can impede ability of students to succeed, he said.
Related: Madison school district in disarray by Marc Eisen:
Because he hasn't, Caire is shunned. The latest instance is the upcoming ED Talks Wisconsin, a progressive-minded education-reform conference sponsored by the UW School of Education, the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, the mayor's office and other groups. Discussion of "a community-wide K-12 agenda" to address the achievement gap is a featured event. A fine panel has been assembled, including Mayor Paul Soglin, but Caire is conspicuously absent.How can progressives not bring the Urban League to the table? Agree or disagree with its failed plan for the single-sex Madison Prep charter school, the Urban League has worked the hardest of any community group to bridge the achievement gap. This includes launching a scholars academy, the South Madison Promise Zone, ACT test-taking classes and periodic events honoring young minority students.
But Caire is branded as an apostate because he worked with conservative school-choice funders in Washington, D.C. So in Madison he's dismissed as a hapless black tool of powerful white plutocrats. Progressives can't get their head around the idea that the black-empowerment agenda might coincide with a conservative agenda on education, but then clash on a dozen other issues.
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Providence Journal
PROVIDENCE, R. I. -- Bloomberg Philanthropies has chosen Providence as the top winner of its Mayor Challenge.The $5 million prize will be used to implement Mayor Angel Taveras' initiative, Providence Talks, to increase the vocabulary of young students living in low-income homes before their fourth birthday. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg previously said the challenge was launched in the fall of 2012 to inspire innovation in local government, and spread the very best ideas. Three hundred and five cities competed, and Providence was awarded the top prize because it had "the best potential to take root and spread," read challenge rules. The initiative coincides with the mayor's goal to increase reading proficiency to 70 percent for entering fourth graders by 2015. In Providence, less than half of the district's fourth-grade students scored at or above proficiency on the state reading assessment in 2011.
More about "Providence Talks" here and here.
This initiative is based on the research done by Hart and Risley, as described in their book "Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Life of Young American Children."
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The Madison School District stands to lose millions of dollars in state aid under Gov. Scott Walker's budget proposal, district officials said Wednesday.One would hope that any budget article should include changes over time, which DeFour unfortunately neglects. Madison received an increase of $11.8M in redistributed state tax dollars last year.The district is projecting an $8.7 million, 15 percent reduction in state aid, Superintendent Jane Belmore said in an interview.
She cautioned that the amount is a preliminary estimate based on the governor's 2013-15 budget proposal, which could undergo changes by the Legislature.
The district is preparing its 2013-14 budget, and it's unclear when a proposal will be finalized. School districts typically develop spending plans for the following year before knowing exactly how much money they'll get in state aid.
Walker's budget calls for a 1 percent increase in state aid, but Belmore said when district staff put the amount through the state's complicated funding formula it resulted in the reduction. State Department of Public Instruction officials couldn't verify the district's estimate.
This year's $394 million school budget included $249.3 million in property taxes, a 1.75 percent increase over the previous year.
In addition, DeFour mentions that the current budget is 394,000,000. The most recent number I have seen is $385,886,990. where has the additional $8,113,010 come from? where is it being spent? was there a public discussion? Per student spending is now $14,541.42.
Related: Ed Hughes on School District numbers in 2005: in 2005::
This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker - and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member - believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.
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Starting in second grade, I took a school bus from my middle-class neighborhood to downtown Louisville, Ky., where my grade school was surrounded by public housing projects, as part of an effort to desegregate schools. The year I started there, I was identified as "gifted" and put in a separate, accelerated class, where my classmates were mostly other white boys and girls from the suburbs.Related: English 10 and the talented and gifted complaint.In 1975, the school system in Louisville had launched the district-wide "Advance Program," which offered an enriched curriculum, just as the desegregation plan went into effect. All Louisville schools were required to have a mix of black and white students so that the number of black students never fell below or rose above a certain cutoff. (It varied over the years, but the range was around 20 to 40 percent.) In the Advance Program, however, the rules didn't apply because classroom assignments within schools were exempt. The percentage of black students in the gifted program was 11 percent.
I had the choice to leave the school in fourth grade, as did my suburban peers, but most of us stayed at our inner city school because our parents liked the program so much. From second grade until my senior year in high school, my classes never had more than two black students at a time.
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In her budget address before the Legislature, Gov. Maggie Hassan pledged to repeal the nascent Opportunity Scholarship Act, which grants tax credits to businesses that help low-- and middle-income students afford independent and home schooling.If the governor's goal is saving money, as she claims, then she should oppose the repeal. The fiscal note prepared by the Department of Education states that repealing the OSA would actually cost the state half a million dollars over the next biennium.
The OSA was designed to aid low-- and middle-income families while saving money. The maximum average scholarship size is only $2,500, significantly lower than the more than $4,300 that the state allocates for each public school student, and vastly lower than the total public school spending figure of $15,758 per pupil.
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Those with a mind for controversy or whimsy may recall the outrage last year over a certain talking pineapple on the New York State eighth-grade reading exam. The unfortunate pineapple passage was sliced, diced, and served up as an example of all that is wrong with standardized testing. Asking students to inhabit the shared mental landscape of some chatty anthropomorphized forest animals and tropical fruit, as the questions did, was deemed both ridiculous and unfair. The author of the excerpted passage criticized the exam's adaptation of his story as "barely literate." And the state quickly announced that it would not count on the test's scoring.And so the talking pineapple joined the long tradition of conflict and contention over educational reform in America, from Thomas Jefferson's revolutionary plan for public education in Virginia, to the Texas State Board of Education's recent demotion of Jefferson from its ranks of revolutionary thinkers. The current obsession with testing (and pineapples) belongs to the standards movement, which began in the nineteen-eighties. Now, one of its more unusual battles is being fought in Seattle, where, in December, teachers at Garfield High School voted to boycott the Northwest Evaluation Association's Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) exam.
The Garfield teachers are not boycotting all standardized tests. Their complaints, as outlined by Kris McBride, the school's testing coordinator, are focussed squarely on the MAP, which, as an assessment tool, can be categorized as a low-stakes test: according to the MAP-makers at the N.W.E.A., it is an "interim assessment."
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Sebastian Thrun left his tenured teaching job at Stanford University after 160,000 students signed up for his free online version of the course "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence." The experience completely changed his perspective on education, he said, so he ditched Stanford and launched the private Web site Udacity, which offers online courses. "Having done this, I can't teach at Stanford again," Thrun said. "You can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture to your 20 students, but I've taken the red pill and I've seen Wonderland." (Thrun is staying at Stanford as a research professor, but will not be teaching there).What exactly was the "Wonderland" that Thrun saw that sent him into such euphoric zeal that he discarded his position at a premier institution of higher education like he was trading in an old clunker at the car dealer? He saw those phenomenal numbers signing up for his class, and it made him dizzy with delight. Anybody with a Twitter account or Facebook page can understand the feeling. Your number of followers or friends can be a source of affirmation, proof that what you have to say is important. I was on Twitter for several weeks following anybody I found remotely interesting, and then someone told me that it is better to have more followers than followees, so I promptly started culling my list. I didn't want to be a Twitter loser. But surely those adolescent impulses don't affect scholars like Thrun.
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Many in the world of higher education suspect they are witnessing the beginning of a revolution. The agent provocateur is the Mooc (massive open online course) and, if some pundits are proved correct, it could change the way all students experience learning - including those at business schools - and put a few professors out of a job.Why the nerves? Moocs are free, millions have signed up and no one knows what the scene will look like after the dust has settled. Anant Agarwal, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and president of edX, a Mooc provider, thinks the result will be positive.
"I view online learning as a rising tide that will lift all boats. It will not only increase access, it will also improve the quality of education at all our universities."
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When asked about the use of social media tools in the classroom, Mike Nicholson, director of global learning at Durham University Business School in the UK, fondly remembers an ex-colleague, now retired, who used to position a bucket of water at the front of his classroom with the label: Phone disposal unit."He actually would drop phones into it if he found students using them in class," he says, laughing at how times have changed since then. Indeed, in spite of his own initial misgivings, he has adapted his teaching technique to suit the growing trends of social media in education.
Or, as he would say, "flipped" things round so that he delivers lectures via YouTube video clips, to be watched at home and then sets his students work to do when they come to class, integrating Twitter and Vine, a mobile app by Twitter that enables its users to create and post short video clips.
"It's working really well," Dr Nicholson says. When he first set the task of using Vine to explain what Apple should do next, his students split into groups and were moving all round the school filming things. The six second limit of Vine worked like the 140 character limit of Twitter in ensuring they remained succinct in their responses.
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For the first time, probably in UW-Madison's history, we are enrolling more legacy students than first-generation students.Related: Madison High School Freshman enrollment at UW System schools, including UW-Madison.Enrollment of Wisconsin residents is at an historic low, while enrollment of international students is at an historic high.
Enrollment is a function of applications, admit rates, and yield. Arguably, changes in policies around cost and campus climate (e.g. the Madison Initiative for Undergraduates-- see below) most often affect the yield. So let's look at the yield rates-- the percent of students who accept the admissions offer and choose to attend Madison. They are quite stable for some groups, but declining for others.
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Like many interested observers around the country, I've been following the school board elections in Los Angeles. That's partly out of general interest in a high profile drama involving the politics of education, the same way I'd pay some attention to a large district election almost anywhere in the country. It's also a personal interest in my hometown, in a district where I was a student, and where I have friends and relatives attending the schools and teaching in them. Yet at the same time I think every Californian involved in education is affected to some extent by what happens in Los Angeles Unified School District. I've referred to that district as the Jupiter of our solar system. Looking at the situation less metaphorically, consider the significance of LAUSD in our state legislature. This one huge district covers a densely populated area represented by at least a dozen state legislators. Meanwhile, my state legislators in the San Francisco Bay Area might be representing dozens of school school districts.So, yes, I pay attention to the gravitational force of LAUSD politics and policy. I also pay close attention to the words people choose, perhaps just as part of my nature or perhaps as a result of many years teaching English. Looking at a recent report on the LAUSD school board elections, I found some very interesting word choices in this article posted at L.A. School Report: "Defiant Mayor Promises Continued Involvement."
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The Madison School Board will face difficult, perhaps definitional, choices in the next several years. To make those choices, the board must have the right mix of members. Members must be absolutely committed to public education. Yet that's not enough. They must have varied experience and bold visions for how to address the district's challenges. With this in mind, we recommend: Howard, Mertz (Primary winner Sarah Manski dropped out of the race, remains on the ballot), StrongMuch more on the 2013 Madison School Board elections, here.
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Five candidates are competing for three seats on the Madison school board, with the general election on April 2, 2013.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.The political context for the races is explosive, given Gov. Scott Walker's revolutionary proposals for education in Wisconsin: cuts to public school funding, an expansion of the voucher program, and a revamping of teachers' evaluations and bargaining rights.
In Madison, the issues are particularly complex, with the intense disagreements over the district's achievement gap between white and minority students.
TJ Mertz, an Edgewood College history instructor and education blogger, is running unopposed after Sarah Manski dropped out of the race for Seat 5 following the February primary. Her name will appear on the ballot, but she is moving to California. Mertz will replace retiring school board member Maya Cole.
In this competitive series of elections, there are numerous candidate forums and listening sessions under way, and we thought we'd pose our own questions to candidates. This week, we ask the candidates about where they think incoming superintendent Jennifer Cheatham should direct her attention. We also ask about the changes in collective bargaining wrought by Act 10: How have they affected the district, and how should it respond to this new policy?
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Five candidates are competing for three seats on the Madison school board, with the general election on April 2, 2013.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board elections here.The political context for the races is explosive, given Gov. Scott Walker's revolutionary proposals for education in Wisconsin: cuts to public school funding, an expansion of the voucher program, and a revamping of teachers' evaluations and bargaining rights.
In Madison, the issues are particularly complex, with the intense disagreements over the district's achievement gap between white and minority students.
In the race for Seat 4, incumbent James Howard is running against Greg Packnett, a Democratic legislative aide.
In this competitive series of elections, there are numerous candidate forums and listening sessions under way, and we thought we'd pose our own questions to candidates. This week, we ask the candidates about where they think incoming superintendent Jennifer Cheatham should direct her attention. We also ask about the changes in collective bargaining wrought by Act 10: How have they affected the district, and how should it respond to this new policy?
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This is the time of year when high school seniors across the country are checking the mail obsessively. They're rushing down the driveway whenever an unusually loud car goes by, hoping the letter carrier has delivered that all-important, life-altering piece of paper: the acceptance letter to their dream school.You should know, however, that not everyone is paying attention to the mailbox. Some teenagers are making plans to engage in self-directed learning.
All your life, parents, teachers, and guidance counselors have drilled the idea into your head that you must go to college. It has been made clear that if you don't get good grades and attend a four-year college, the rest of your life will be a dismal failure.
I'm arguing that all of this is wrong. The social cues that defined what you thought about education ought to be questioned.
There is a community of people who are making a different choice. Instead of going into debt, they are taking the future into their own hands. They are using the real world to find mentors and learn practical skills. They are traveling, volunteering, interning and apprenticing.
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The minute you walk through the door, the clock is ticking on time to connect with your kids.According to a recent study, what happens in the first couple of minutes after parents return home from work makes a big difference in how parents and kids relate to each other for the rest of the evening.
The study, described in this article in The Atlantic, was conducted by a team of UCLA researchers who tracked the lives of 32 dual-earning, middle-class families living in Los Angeles between 2001 and 2004.
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To students in Jennifer Burg's computer science classes, making music is the main objective. But her goal is to get them to understand how the underlying technology works--and to love it so much they decide on a science-based career path.
And that, Burg's study has shown, has helped Wake Forest University fulfill the national imperative to increase the number of majors in the STEM disciplines of science, technology, engineering and math.
The results of Burg's research, "Computer Science 'Big Ideas' Play Well in Digital Sound and Music," will be published during the upcoming Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education conference, on March 9 in Denver. The study was funded through two National Science Foundation grants totaling $700,000.
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My students might have a coronary if I fail to answer an email at 10pm on a weekend.With the creation of email, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, it's near impossible for the human part of a teacher to go without notice in settings less familiar than school. Comfortably seated with my iPad and iPhone on either side of me and my Macbook Pro serving as heating pad to my belly, I'm in bed conferencing with my students using powerful new social mediums.
Whether answering quick project direction questions, putting out fires of uncooperative technology when an assignment is due, or chasing down newspaper leadership to make sure deadlines are met, I'm certain some of my older colleagues would writhe with discomfort at how available I am to my students.
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The entrance to Henley Business School's Greenlands campus is reminiscent of a Jane Austen film, with its sweeping driveway leading to a stunning white country house. Indeed, once inside, most corners of the 19th-century building are conducive to afternoon tea. Oversized sofas and armchairs face each other, windows overlook the river Thames and nearby tables are stacked with selections of hot drinks.Queen Elizabeth I is known to have visited the house on more than one occasion. But today, those most likely to be found drinking tea at the now triple accredited business school, founded in 1945, are students and faculty from the its executive education programmes, including the three-year flexible MBA which blends online learning with optional face-to-face workshops.
Since merging with the University of Reading in 2008, there is also the Whiteknights campus in Reading - a former country estate of the Marquis of Blandford - where Henley's undergraduate, postgraduate taught masters, professional management and PhD programmes are delivered.
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Amid the fanfare surrounding the nascent massive open online course (Mooc) movement have been looming questions concerning their economic viability. Leading platforms, including Coursera and edX, have committed themselves to providing higher education content online for free.Until now, the costs of developing Moocs have been shouldered by the platforms themselves and the universities supplying courses, rather than consumers of the content.
Coursera, a for-profit Mooc platform that has more than 2.8m students, has raised venture capital to cover development costs. A $16m injection from Silicon Valley-based Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers - an early investor in Amazon and Google - has been the most notable. Udacity, a for-profit platform that does not partner with universities, has raised more than $21m in venture capital.
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A MacBook, or any laptop, is usually the default educational tool of choice for students but there are signs that our latter-day electronic versions of slates are making serious inroads in modern education.Apple disclosed in February that it had sold more than 8m iPads directly to educational institutions worldwide, quite apart from the unquantified number sold to individual students.
With Android and Windows devices benefiting from updated operating systems and software, as well as student-friendly accessories such as digital pens, tablets are set to storm the bastions of education.
In terms of screen size, Apple recognised the popularity of the 7in category when it launched the iPad mini in October.
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James Dean: 'Using traditional education as the gold standard is outmoded'Can an online MBA programme be of the same high quality as a campus-based programme?
From a teaching and learning perspective, there can no longer be any doubt that online education can match and, in some ways, exceed the performance of conventional education.
Online MBA programmes match or exceed the quality of on-campus programmes when done right. Doing it right does not mean simply transmitting taped lectures or using Powerpoint slides with a voice-over lecture. It does mean:
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Massachusetts lawmakers are considering eliminating a cap on the number of charter schools that can operate in the lowest-performing school districts, including here in the capital city.Madison appears to be going in the opposite direction.While other states also have weighed lifting caps, charter advocates point to left-leaning Massachusetts as a somewhat unlikely model for the movement. "This demonstrates that charter schools are a viable reform," said Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, a nonprofit aimed at advancing the movement. "If it can happen in Massachusetts, it can happen anywhere."
Charter schools receive public funding but, unlike public schools, employ mostly nonunion teachers and have autonomy in school districts, which allows them to set their own conditions, such as longer school days. They have long been embraced by Republicans for introducing choice in education, but have been assailed by some teacher unions and others as hurting traditional public schools.
Related: Madison Mayor Paul Soglin: We are not interested in the development of new charter schools"
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Google Docs is being used for phishing. Oxford University felt that it had to block the service because Google isn't responding to takedown requests quickly enough.Think about this in light of my essay on feudal security. Oxford University has to trust that Google will act in its best interest, and has no other option if it doesn't.
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Traditional red brick universities risk extinction unless they respond creatively to growing competition from free online courses, private providers and increasing globalisation in higher education, a former government education adviser has warned.The study, "An Avalanche is Coming", is published after global university rankings this month showed a greater polarisation between elite "superbrands" such as Oxford and Cambridge, and others such as Leeds, which has dropped out of the top 100 for the first time. The league, compiled by the Times Higher Education magazine, signals that British universities are losing ground to institutions in emerging Asian economies.
Sir Michael Barber, the report's author, is a former adviser to Tony Blair and chief education adviser at Pearson, which owns the Financial Times. He identified "the ordinary red brick university that just ticks over" as most vulnerable, but said it was hard to predict when the "avalanche" would strike.
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Higher education is entering a new era in which educational technology will bring - as the president of Stanford University John Hennessy put it recently - a tsunami of change. The MBA will be no exception. But how should it change?Rooted in Silicon Valley among some of the most innovative organisations in the world, people ask me: "Why not make the MBA an online degree?" My answer? While technology can greatly enhance the learning experience, it simply cannot replace the faculty-student interaction, experiential learning and self-discovery that occur in the MBA classroom.
The issue is an incremental experience versus a transformational one. The two-year, residential MBA is an immersive experience that delivers a life-changing process for those who embrace it.
In Stanford's two-year programme, students learn about themselves and how they want to lead others through highly interactive eight-person leadership labs in which coaches and fellow students provide real-time, personal feedback. They engage in hands-on, multidisciplinary classes where new products or processes go through brainstorming exercises and rapid prototyping sessions with scores of ideas flying across work tables as one student builds on another's idea. MBAs serendipitously bump into potential business partners in the dining pavilion, which draws engineering, law and other students.
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The physical sciences all went through "revolutions": wrenching transitions in which methods changed radically and became much more powerful. It is not widely realized, but there was a similar transition in mathematics between about 1890 and 1930. The first section briefly describes the changes that took place and why they qualify as a "revolution", and the second describes turmoil and resistance to the changes at the time.The mathematical event was different from those in science, however. In science, most of the older material was wrong and discarded, while old mathematics needed precision upgrades but was mostly correct. The sciences were completely transformed while mathematics split, with the core changing profoundly but many applied areas, and mathematical science outside the core, relatively unchanged. The strangest difference is that the scientific revolutions were highly visible, while the significance of the mathematical event is es- sentially unrecognized. The section "Obscurity" explores factors contributing to this situation and suggests historical turning points that might have changed it.
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Michael Corkery & Jeannett Neumann:
For years, Illinois officials misled investors and shortchanged the state pension system, leaving future generations of taxpayers to foot the bill, U.S. securities regulators allege.The Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday charged Illinois with securities fraud, marking only the second time the agency has filed civil-fraud charges against a state.
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But the agency and the state also announced that a settlement had already been reached in which Illinois won't pay a penalty or admit wrongdoing.
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Politics K12 reports on Diane Ravitch's new anti-reform organization, The Network for Public Education:Education historian Diane Ravitch, a fierce critic of current education reform trends, is launching a new advocacy organization that will support political candidates who oppose high-stakes testing, mass school closures, and what her group calls the "privatizing" of public schools.The new Network for Public Education is meant to counter state-level forces such as Democrats for Education Reform, Stand for Children, and Students First--all of which are promoting their own vision of education reform and supporting candidates for office, including with donations. That agenda backs things such as charter schools and teacher evaluations tied to student growth. Other powerful outside groups are also pushing such an agenda, though without the political donations, including former Gov. Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education and Chiefs for Change.
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Although Kevin Werbach has made his name teaching about games, there are some things that the Wharton business school professor takes very seriously. One of those is the latest generation of online courses - Moocs, or massive open online courses - and just how his Ivy League institution, the University of Pennsylvania, can take advantage of them."They are an extraordinary opportunity for us," says Professor Werbach. "For me it's a platform to experiment on ... I think these online resources free us up to do in the classroom the things that can only be done in the classroom."
Though Moocs have been around for less than a year, they are one of the trendiest topics in education, says Jeff Seamen, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group, which publishes an annual report on online learning. "What we see at the moment is a genuine excitement that this represents a fundamental change in the way we can deliver education."
On campus, business schools have often been quick off the mark to adopt the latest technologies. From Kindles to iPads, and from videoconferencing to the latest online networking, MBA programme directors have been enthusiastic adopters.
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The honeymoon's over. After years of attacking Gov. Christie and his education agenda full throttle - and losing authority, gravitas, and public support - NJEA's leadership had seemed to undergo a makeover, fully backing the bipartisan bill that reformed teacher evaluation and tenure in New Jersey. Heck: NJEA even backed the Urban Hope Act, which allows charter operators to take over some of our worst-performing schools in Trenton, Camden, and Newark.Of course, the Legislature made a huge concession to NJEA in negotiations over TEACHNJ, the tenure reform bill, at the last minute deleting the section of the bill that would have eliminated seniority-based lay-offs. Nonetheless, the resulting resolution was a huge step in partnership and collaboration.
Judging by today's NJ Spotlight story, however, NJEA's leadership has suffered a relapse, reverting back to the reactionary stance that undermined its brand in the first days of the Christie Administration. The first symptom was NJEA President Barbara Keshishian's screechy response to Gov. Christie budget proposal, which increases state school aid, although not to the unattainable levels of Corzine's School Funding Reform Act. The second symptom is covered in the Spotlight story, which recounts the union leadership's retro reaction to the DOE's proposed regulations for implementing the new tenure law.
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The value of the university once lay in its providing a nurturing space for what English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold called "the free play of the mind upon all subjects," which would foster the "instinct prompting [the mind] to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespective of practice, politics, and everything of the kind."Critical to these enterprises is the notion of academic freedom--the ability to study, teach, and talk about subjects, no matter how controversial, without fear of retribution or censorship. For only by discussing openly a wide range of subjects can the liberally educated mind "make the best prevail," as Arnold put it, and turn "a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically."
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During her sophomore year at Madison East High School, Awa Fofana was facing a personal health crisis and her parents' divorce when a teacher recommended she join the AVID/TOPS program.Now a senior and headed to UW-Madison next fall to study nursing, Fofana credits the program, a partnership between the Madison School District and Boys & Girls Club of Dane County, with helping her succeed where other students facing similar challenges at home often do not.
"It's hard to find someone who would support you through times like that," Fofana said. "(AVID/TOPS) has been that push to do the things I need to do."
AVID/TOPS -- a college preparatory program for students in the academic middle -- is one of the central pieces of an ambitious $15 million expansion the local Boys & Girls Club is planning over the next six years.
The expansion represents a shift for the organization from recreational after-school programming to academic support services. It comes as the School District renews its focus on raising low-income and minority student achievement, and reflects increasing ties between the club and the district.
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Social graces are just as important to success as mastering astrophysics or engineering. But how do you take someone who's grown up in the world of pocket protectors and get them thinking about suits, bow ties and the proper way to hold a wine glass, be it of red or white?To help the next generation of nerd overlords be as socially savvy as they are smart, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology runs an annual day of etiquette classes it calls Charm School.
Founded in 1993, Charm School just celebrated its 20th birthday with classes in alcohol and gym etiquette, how to dress for work (for men and for women) and how to visit a contemporary art museum. There are also classes on how to make a charming first impression, the right way to tweet and even how to dance at weddings.
"We're giving our students the tools to be productive members of society, to be the whole package," Alana Hamlett of MIT's Student Activities and Leadership Office told the Los Angeles Times. "It gets them thinking about who they are and what their impact and effect is, whether they're working on a team in an engineering company, or in a small group on a project, or interviewing for a job."
Because, as Charm School's course listing says, "What you do or don't do in the interview can make the difference in getting the job."
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When President Barack Obama unveiled plans to vastly expand preschool access across the U.S., he singled out Oklahoma as a model--a state that shows the promise and the challenges of the undertaking.In 1998, Oklahoma lawmakers passed one of the nation's first state-funded preschool programs for all 4-year-olds. Since then, the number of children enrolled in preschool programs has soared to 40,000 this year, up from 9,000 when the program first started.
Many Oklahoma children now arrive in elementary school so well prepared that some districts have overhauled their kindergarten curricula.
Kim Jones, a kindergarten teacher at Western Oaks Elementary School near Oklahoma City, has seen the difference. She used to teach her students to recognize capital letters, add numbers up to five, follow directions and take turns. Now, most arrive from preschool with that knowledge. "We can jump right into the academics the first week," Ms. Jones said.
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Tuition at public colleges jumped last year by a record amount as state governments slashed school funding, the latest sign of strain in the U.S. higher-education sector.The average amount that students at public colleges paid in tuition, after state and institutional grants and scholarships, climbed 8.3% last year, the biggest jump on record, according to a report based on data from all public institutions in all 50 states to be released Wednesday by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Median tuition rose 4.5%.
The average state funding per student, meanwhile, fell by more than 9%, the steepest drop since the group began collecting the data in 1980. Median funding fell 10%. During the recession, states began cutting support for higher education, and the trend accelerated last year.
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How high do we want to turn up the heat? Where's the line between "justifiable and productive" and "we'll be sorry"?Not questions that are easy to answer, but they deserve very serious thought, especially as the state budget process heats up. The questions involve money, of course, but they also involve the huge amount of change that is going on within schools - the pressure for better results, major changes in learning standards and teaching styles, and new approaches to evaluating teachers and principals that could carry big career implications.
I've visited several schools lately, both city and suburban, and I've seen some really big changes in what is going on, much of it appealing and promising when it comes to how students get engaged in their learning and what is expected of them. Cool stuff.
But I've also talked to teachers who went from describing great work with their students, and, within seconds, have tears in their eyes when talking about how things are going for them personally and for their schools. These are people - some of the best we have in classrooms - working under enormous stress. It is in everyone's long-term interest for teaching to be good and ultimately doable work. Negative forces can - and are - putting that at risk.
For the moment, let's focus on how much money public schools will get for the next two years, to be determined by the state budget to be set this spring.
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Andrew Statz recalls playing the city-building computer game SimCity in the mid-1990s when UW-Milwaukee called to offer him a teaching position in their urban planning graduate program.Andrew has always been most cordial, professional and helpful in my experience.His assignment: teaching college students how to play SimCity.
"It was serious geekdom," said Statz, 43, the Madison School District's chief information officer since January 2011.
Statz, who lives on the East Side with his wife, Ronda, worked as a state budget analyst under three governors before becoming former Madison mayor Dave Cieslewicz's efficiency expert.
Now as the School District's numbers guru (he also oversees the enrollment office and information technology), Statz is applying his love for systems analysis to helping the district make data-driven decisions.
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The past year has been a watershed year for learning online. At one end of the market, highly-ranked business schools have realised the value of teaching online, launching high-cost programmes for high-calibre students. But the past year has also seen an exponential growth in the number of free courses, or Moocs. Can these different types of programme co-exist?On Wednesday, March 13, 2013, between 14.00 and 15.00 GMT, a panel of experts will answer these questions and others here on FT.com. Post your questions now to ask@ft.com and they will be answered on the day.
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Why are children so, well, so helpless? Why did I spend a recent Sunday morning putting blueberry pancake bits on my 1-year-old grandson's fork and then picking them up again off the floor? And why are toddlers most helpless when they're trying to be helpful? Augie's vigorous efforts to sweep up the pancake detritus with a much-too-large broom ("I clean!") were adorable but not exactly effective.This isn't just a caregiver's cri de coeur--it's also an important scientific question. Human babies and young children are an evolutionary paradox. Why must big animals invest so much time and energy just keeping the little ones alive? This is especially true of our human young, helpless and needy for far longer than the young of other primates.
One idea is that our distinctive long childhood helps to develop our equally distinctive intelligence. We have both a much longer childhood and a much larger brain than other primates. Restless humans have to learn about more different physical environments than stay-at-home chimps, and with our propensity for culture, we constantly create new social environments. Childhood gives us a protected time to master new physical and social tools, from a whisk broom to a winning comment, before we have to use them to survive.
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The request caught the attention of Dr Mary Cartwright, lecturer in mathematics at Girton College Cambridge. She was already working on similar "very objectionable-looking differential equations" (as she later described them).She brought the request to the attention of her long-term colleague at Trinity College, Professor JE Littlewood and suggested that they combine forces. In a memoir written later in her life, she explained that he already had the necessary experience in dynamics, having worked on the trajectories of anti-aircraft guns during World War I.
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Jane Belmore, Interim Superintendent (PDF):
Background Information: The Model School concept, to develop culturally relevant teaching practices, was approved as part of the Achievement Gap Plan.The recommendation for a Cultural Practices that are Relevant (CPR) Model School addresses three primary needs:
Additionally, the CPR model school's combination of culturally responsive instruction, high expectations for achievement, early and extended learning, character development, and strong community partnerships will serve as an incubator for instructional improvement efforts in the district.
- The need for the creation of better programs and services to increase achievement for underserved students. The need to create better support for teachers around implementing Response to Intervention (RtI) with cultural relevance at the core, according to the state and national RtI models, and
- The need for a school-based professional development environment on culturally and linguistically responsive practices, with an emphasis on promoting rigor in the content areas--beginning with literacy.
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Dylan Pauly, Legal Counsel; Steve Hartley, Chief of Staff:
During last month's Committee meeting, we presented a new, rewritten Policy 10000. At that time, we explained that the changes contained therein were intended to reflect the time the Board has spent reviewing and discussing Dr. Julie Mead's work regarding principle-based policymaking. Over the course of the last meeting, several members suggested changes for and improvements to Draft 1 of the rewritten Policy 10000. Tonight we present Draft 2, which we believe incorporates the Board's suggestions and input. Attached hereto is a redline draft highlighting the differences between Draft 1 of the rewritten policy and Draft 2.Related: Madison Mayor Paul "We are not interested in the development of new charter schools" Soglin Asked Sarah Manski to Run for the School Board; "Referred" her to MTI Executive Director John Matthews.The changes include:
The changes in Draft 2 do not reflect any of the proposed statutory amendments contained in Governor Walker's biennial budget. At this time, the changes are only proposals and may or may not be passed as law. Obviously, if any of the proposed changes, which primarily relate to independent and instrumentality charter schools, do become law, we will need to review Policy 10000 again to insure compliance.
- Express language stating only instrumentality schools will be considered (p. 10-1)
- Refinement of the guiding principles (pp. 10-1and10-2)
- Revisions to the timeline to include more Board involvement and specificity (p.10-3)
- Board review and approval of Initial Applications (p. 10-5)
- Clarification of the timing of the Superintendent's Administrative Analysis (p. 10-6)
- Removal of the term "qualified" in Section IV (p. 10-7)
- Additional detail regarding location requirements (p. 10-8)
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Harvard secretly searched the e-mail accounts of several of its staff members last fall, looking for the source of news media leaks about its recent cheating scandal, but did not tell them about the searches for several months, people briefed on the matter said on Saturday.The searches, first reported by The Boston Globe, involved the e-mail accounts of 16 resident deans, but most of them were not told of the searches until the last few days, after The Globe inquired about them. Resident deans straddle the roles of administrators and faculty members, teaching classes as lecturers while living in Harvard's undergraduate residential houses as student advocates and advisers.
In August, an administration memo to the resident deans, on how to advise students being brought up on cheating charges before the Administrative Board, a committee of faculty members responsible for enforcing regulations, made its way to news organizations. The e-mail searches were intended to find the source of leak, but no one was disciplined in the matter.
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One small governmental entity has shown the way. The West Bend School District went self-insured years ago, then bid out its network needs, then went CDHP and now is putting in its own on-site clinic. It's in the vanguard in learning from the private sector payers about what works and being a fast-follower.Smart, anti-orthodoxy thinking.Result? It is delivering first class health care for less than $10,000 per employee. That's half of what many districts are playing for fully insured plans.
Think about the numbers. At a savings of $10,000 per employee and about 1000 employees, it is saving the taxpayers $10 million per year.
The district is giving raises; it has found funds for deferred maintenance; it found $5 million in reserves to put against a $25 million bond program for school construction.
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In 2004, fresh off the plane in Beijing, I was asked to judge an English competition for high-school seniors. My two co-judges were pleasantly cynical middle-aged sociologists, both professors at Tsinghua University. After listening to the umpteenth speech about how China used to be poor, but was now rich and powerful, I remarked to one of them that the students seemed a little sheltered.'They don't know anything!' she spat. 'They don't have any idea about how people live. None of this generation do. They're all so spoilt.'
It's a view I've heard time and again over the past eight years, and one of which the Chinese media never tire. The young get it from left and right. This January alone, the jingoistic Major General and media commentator Luo Yuan condemned the young for being physically and mentally unfit, ranting: 'Femininity is on the rise, and masculinity is on the decline. With such a lack of character and determination and such physical weakness, how can they shoulder the heavy responsibility?' Meanwhile the writer and social critic Murong Xuecun blasted them in the US magazine Foreign Policy because 'fattened to the point of obesity with Coca-Cola and hamburgers [ ...] the young generation only believes official pronouncements; some even think contradicting the official line is heretical. They do not bother to check the details'.
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Note the irony here: The only education system that actually worked for him was the self-education kind. And it is what is going to help him work his way into the highest-paying career.His top-20 law school and private education in general are not to blame; they're in the business (yes, the business) of providing a service that's in demand, no matter how misinformed their "customers" may be. If you've got foolish customers who will overpay for something worthless, who's really to blame? Oh, right, the institutions that hand them the money, at high rates of interest, so they can buy the goods--law degrees, for instance--that won't work for them. Cheap financing of education can put a young life underwater, just as junk loans for McMansions did in the housing market, where older lives were put underwater. Too much debt, too little equity in the product itself: the worker or the house.
The current administration has pursued a cheap-money approach to student loans in order to produce as many four-year-degree students (and not always graduates) as possible. Instead, the goal should be to assess which schools and degrees can be the quickest to bring well-trained workers to market. When workers emerge from their initial education and find jobs, they'll soon learn what skills can drive their careers forward; that's the time for graduate school or further training courses. That's when speculation turns into investment: a known need, and then a wise outlay to meet it. Our economy needs the most cost-effective education/hire ratio possible, and we should also measure retention to make sure schools are meeting needs. Mr. Overqualified trusted that his expensive education was an investment; instead, it was a fraud. Let's stop this nonsense.
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Matthew Stoltzfus could never get his students to see chemistry like he sees chemistry until he added a digital component to his lesson plan.Stoltzfus, a chemistry lecturer at Ohio State University, struggled for years to bring complex chemical equations to life on the blackboard, but always saw students' eyes glaze over. Then he added animations and interactive media to his general chemistry curriculum. Suddenly, he saw students' faces light up in understanding.
"When I see a chemical reaction on a piece of paper, I don't see coefficients and symbols, I see a bucket of molecules reacting," Stoltzfus said. "But I don't think our students see that big bucket of molecules. We can give students a better idea of what's happening at a molecular level with animations and interactive elements."
And many such students are getting this multi-faceted education on tablets. Tablets are reinventing how students access and interact with educational material, and how teachers assess and monitor students' performance at a time when many schools are understaffed and many classrooms overcrowded. Millions of grade school and university students worldwide are using iPads to visualize difficult concepts, revisit lectures on their own time and augment lessons with videos, interactive widgets and animations.
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Yale's libraries amassed new physical and digital holdings and expanded their influence on academia during the 2011-'12 academic year, University Librarian Susan Gibbons said in an annual report posted on the library's website last week.After working at the University for nine years, former University Librarian Alice Prochaska announced in June 2009 that she would be leaving Yale for a position at Oxford. Over the next two years, Yale's libraries faced a rapidly changing digital world and significant cuts to library budgets under two interim University librarians, Gibbons told the News. But the library gained a measure of stability in July 2011 when Gibbons took over Prochaska's position, and Gibbons said in her annual report that Yale's librarians took great strides last year toward meeting modern needs for digital content while balancing their simultaneous roles as librarians, educators and teachers.
"This first year felt as if we were trying to reset ourselves, adjust to the new economic realities and chart a new course forward," Gibbons said.
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Children have long been graded not just for academics, but also for elements of "character" -- particularly behavior and emotional maturity. However, in the last few decades, socially eccentric children have seen their awkwardness or aloofness factored into their grades in math, language arts, and social studies. Ironically, this trend has coincided with a rise in diagnoses of autistic spectrum disorders.For children on the autism spectrum, new social studies curricula pose a particular challenge. Once restricted to readings, worksheets, and essays on history, government, and politics, the subject increasingly requires students to reflect on their connections within their local communities. They are asked to present projects to their classmates (even in primary school), spend much of class time working in groups, and evaluate scenarios such as this one, from a worksheet for 3rd graders:
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The gangly young American Van Cliburn's victory in the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow in 1958, six months after the first Sputnik went into orbit, was more than just a pianistic event. The innocent Texan (who died last month) suddenly became one of the key players in the cold war - or a cold war anti-warrior, an American emissary in a counter-war of peace and culture. While nuclear submarines and missiles squared up to each other across the Bering Strait, Van Cliburn's sensitive fingers became one of the prime instruments of American soft power, matching or even outdoing the Soviets at what they thought they did best.He became, in other words, part of a diplomatic great game which was bound, in the end, to swallow and swamp his pianistic gifts. The game was played with considerable skill by both American and Soviet political machines. When the jury at the Tchaikovsky in 1958 wanted to award Cliburn the first prize, it felt it had to ask permission from the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. "If he is the best, give it to him," Khrushchev is reported to have replied. He was either being scrupulously honest and open, or playing a blinder by seeing that the USSR would gain by granting the prize to an American - showing its lofty impartiality and adherence to artistic standards, and keeping the Tchaikovsky as the gold standard of piano competitions.
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Here's a novel way to address the problems caused by rising income inequality: give children the vote.Yes.One virtue of this iconoclastic idea, recently advanced by the Canadian economist Miles Corak, is that it sidesteps the usual partisan debates. After all, the right and left have profound moral disagreements about economic inequality. But whatever your political stripe, you almost certainly believe in equality of opportunity.
Unfortunately, some of Corak's most celebrated work has been to show that rising income inequality and declining social mobility go together. This relationship, which Alan B. Krueger, the head of President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, has dubbed the Great Gatsby Curve, is one of the most powerful reasons to care about rising income inequality.
That's where the kids come in. In a policy paper published last month by Canada 2020, a Canadian progressive research group, Corak points out that the group that suffers most from declining social mobility is the young. As it happens, this is also one of the last human constituencies that doesn't have the right to vote. That relationship may not be coincidental.
"Older individuals, and those with more education working in higher-skilled occupations, are more likely to vote," Corak writes in the paper. "But, in addition, there is a broad bias by virtue of the simple fact that children are disenfranchised. Children's rights are not adequately recognized and they have a reduced political voice in setting social priorities."
Corak has a simple and radical solution to that bias: Give children the vote. "When you first hear about it, it sounds like a crazy idea, and that was my first reaction," Corak told me, speaking by phone from Ottawa.
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#1: The gobsmacking amount of holidays
This is the main incentive or loving the exam days. The holidays. In our school (which is one of the meanest there), we get only 1 holiday between exams (as opposed to the 3 or 4 the others generously give).But let's not complain. Holidays are great. They are certainly one of my most productive times. This blog was started during my half-yearlies for example.
#2: Half-days
Even on the days we have school (3/7 in a week), we have half-days -- i.e., we're left at 11:30 instead of 1:30. That might not seem like much, but it's a huge difference, really.
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Sleepless nights at a train station and state-sponsored discrimination. This is the story of how my father came to finally attend college as a teenager in the Soviet Union.In 1970 my father was 17 years old, living with his parents and brother in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. He was interested in radio electronics, having built radios and clocks as a teenager. His father (my grandfather) was an electrical engineer, working at the time for the Uzbekistan Department of Auto-Transportation. My grandfather was a military man, having fought and been wounded at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943. He encouraged my father to pursue a military career in electronics and telecommunication.
My father graduated from Tashkent High School #94 in May 1970. He knew he wanted to study telecommunications but his father insisted it be at a military university. At the time, my dad was reading electronics textbooks published by professors working at St. Petersburg's Navy Academy. This specific academy trained sailors to man the country's nuclear submarine fleet. The school had one of the premier telecommunication programs in the country, so my dad decided to apply there.
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The Onion, via a kind reader's email:
According to an alarming new report published Wednesday by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, third-graders in China are beginning to lag behind U.S. high school students in math and science.Related: www.wisconsin2.orgThe study, based on exam scores from thousands of students in 63 participating countries, confirmed that in mathematical and scientific literacy, American students from the ages of 14 to 18 have now actually pulled slightly ahead of their 8-year-old Chinese counterparts.
"This is certainly a wake-up call for China," said Dr. Michael Fornasier, an IEA senior fellow and coauthor of the report. "The test results unfortunately indicate that education standards in China have slipped to the extent that pre-teens are struggling to rank among even the average American high school student."
"Simply put, how can these third-graders be expected to eventually compete in the global marketplace if they're only receiving the equivalent of a U.S. high school education?" Fornasier added.
Fornasier stressed that while the gap is not yet dramatically sizable, it has widened over the past two years after American high schoolers tested marginally higher in algebra, biology, and chemistry than, shockingly, most of China's 8- and 9-year-olds.
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Now that budget sequestration is under way, it looks less like the fiscal apocalypse that had been predicted and more like a long-overdue intervention with politicians who are addicted to borrowing and spending.Fabius Maximus has more.I agree with President Obama that sequestration's across-the-board rather than specific cuts are a "dumb" way to reduce spending. That is why I voted against the plan two years ago. But if sequestration is dumb, it's even dumber not to cut spending at all.
Cutting spending can be a powerful pro-growth strategy, but the outcome of sequestration depends on how the administration chooses to cut. Not all dollars are spent equally: The Obama administration's decision to spend federal dollars studying how cocaine affects the reproductive habits of Japanese quail didn't multiply anything other than quail.
Shifting money to working families from quail research--and thousands of other frivolous expenditures--would mean fewer government workers furloughed. The $181,000 quail study alone could prevent 62 furloughs. If the federal government stopped sending unemployment checks to millionaires, it could save $14.8 million a year (according to IRS data) and prevent 5,103 furloughs. Smart savings would mean that single moms and others on a tight budget don't have to work as much to finance wasteful government spending--and can keep more of their own money to spend, fueling economic growth in the process.
Sequestration will force cuts to waste that wouldn't otherwise be cut. The administration has claimed that its hands are tied and terrible things will happen, yet its warnings seem calibrated to sound scary but not too scary. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said that cuts to air-traffic control will force flight delays but won't compromise safety or cause air disasters.
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Should students who want to attend medical school have to slog through a year of physics, memorize the structures of dozens of cellular chemicals or spend months studying for the MCAT? Not necessarily.There are a few nontraditional paths into medical school. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, for example, has admitted a quarter of its incoming students for the last 25 years through a program that gave early admittance to humanities students who didn't have to take the full premed slate of science classes.
"It was designed to attract humanities majors to medicine who would bring a different perspective to education and medical practice," says Dr. Dennis Charney, dean of the school. And it worked so well, he says, that the school expanded the program on Wednesday.
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Lost in the burgeoning debate in Madison over Special Needs Scholarships that would provide some public funding for children with disabilities in private schools is the fact that the current system already does exactly that - although not in a fair or logical or effective way.The current system in Wisconsin is similar to the one in most other states.
It is driven by the federal law that entitles each child with a disability to a "free, appropriate public education" through the age of 21. The current method recognizes, at the same time though, that parents and public school officials often differ over what constitutes an "appropriate" education for a child with a disability. So it contains provisions designed to assure that such children in private schools -- while they do not have the same absolute right to public resources -- are assured of "equitable participation" in some federal funding and services.
Unfortunately, that doesn't always happen for a variety of reasons.
The current system gives responsibility for finding, identifying and evaluating children with disabilities -- including those attending private schools -- to local education agencies, or LEAs, that are almost always local school districts. It also essentially gives the local districts responsibility for ensuring the so-called equitable participation by private school children as a group.
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It happens every time. As I hand the test out to my middle school students, one of them will invariably look up, pencil at the ready, and ask, "Does spelling count?"mLet's ignore the fact that my students should know better than to even ask this question in the first place. I've answered it more times than I care to remember, usually in the fall of the new school year, and it goes something like this:
Yes. Spelling counts. I have lots of witty quips loaded up in my quiver about why it counts, but my new favorite comes from homeschooling mom of four Jodi Jackson Stewart who tweeted me with her answer to this question: "Spelling counts here because spelling counts out there."
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Students in the Madison Metropolitan School District's Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) and the Boys & Girls Club's Teens of Promise (TOPS) programs (www.avidtops.org) are achieving higher GPAs, enrolling in more advanced placement courses, and scoring higher on tests, according to a new analysis of the programs provided by the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education (WISCAPE)."We are so pleased that our ongoing partnership with the Boys & Girls Club is having a consistently positive impact on our students," Superintendent Jane Belmore said. "It is because of this success that we have expanded AVID to middle schools this year. I want to thank the Boys & Girls Club for their work to make this partnership so effective."
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A week or so ago, we gave my five year old son a little solar powered pocket calculator to play with. He explored the key pad and it didn't take long before he had a question we didn't really know how to answer. He saw the square root symbol and wanted to know what it was.We -- adults, generally -- understand them, at least in a cursory way. The square root of 4 is 2, or 9 is 3, of 16 is 4, etc. until probably 100 or 144. But we learned it a long time ago, and we probably can't remember how we learned it. And almost certainly, we learned the concept well after preschool. So not only do we not know how to teach the concept generally, but we certainly aren't good at teaching it to people who are much, much younger than typically learn it.
But five year olds can be persistent so I gave it a go. I don't know how much he understands the concept, but my son definitely gets some of it.
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The secrecy that attended the Madison School District's pick of a new superintendent was bad form and bad public policy.A bit of history on Madison Superintendents. I fully agree with Lueders. I continue to be astonished at the ongoing lack of transparency in such public matters, from the local School District's Superintendent search to the seemingly simple question of American citizen's constitutional due process rights (is this being taught?)Prior to making its selection, the district announced just two finalists, one of whom was found to have a closet full of skeletons that prompted his withdrawal. The remaining finalist, Jennifer Cheatham, got the job.
State law requires that at least the top five contenders for such a position be named, but does not specify when. The Madison School District decided to do so after it was too late to matter.
And then, to add insult to injury, the district's lawyer, Dylan Pauly, dissed the disclosure law that the district complied with only belatedly.
"We believe that by releasing these names, pursuant to our legal obligation, we are negatively contributing to the chilling effect that is occurring across the state with respect to school boards' abilities to recruit and hire highly qualified individuals as superintendents," she wrote.
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When Miriam Oakleaf was 10 months old, her parents noticed something was wrong.By 2 1/2 she had been formally diagnosed with autism, epilepsy and a rare skin and central nervous system condition called linear nevus sebaceous syndrome.
Now 8 and in second grade at Crestwood Elementary School in Madison, Miriam's schooling requires extensive support and planning from a variety of education professionals - administrators, therapists, teachers and aides - in addition to her parents.
The story of Miriam and children like her is at the heart of a $21 million proposal in Gov. Scott Walker's state budget that would allow 5% of kids with disabilities in Wisconsin to attend private or public schools outside their home districts on a taxpayer-funded voucher.
The proposal has driven a wedge through the state's network of special-needs parents. Some believe it would open up more schooling options for their children while others contend it will drain more resources from their local public schools.
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"I think this is a special time for technology in education," he began. But then he immediately cautioned, perhaps in light of some less-than-successful early Gates-funded initiatives (such as small high schools within high schools), "we try not to be naïve about how complex it's going to be."On cost. During the last wave of interest and investment in education technology in the 1990s, Gates said that "it could cost several hundred dollars to store an hour of video on the Internet." The balance in the money equation has now changed, and that same video storage costs pennies, he said.
But although most costs for educational technology are coming down, "Internet access is the most expensive piece" of edtech -- even more so than student hardware devices. That, he said, has to change, since Internet access is not just important in the classroom, but for learning to continue at home.
On investment. Despite concerns over whether the recent increase in investor and tech press interest in edtech and startups may be overheated, Gates said the question should be if the investment in education is commensurate with its importance: "I would say absolutely not." Instead, he contended not enough money is going into education R&D compared with other important sectors. "It would," he said, "be rational for society for it to be a lot larger."
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When Facebook FB -0.72% founder Mark Zuckerberg hosted a fundraising event at his home in Palo Alto, Calif., last month for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the event set tongues wagging. The billionaire's interest in the New Jersey politician was thoroughly dissected by the chattering class. Too bad there hasn't been as much interest in analyzing Mr. Zuckerberg's $100 million commitment to support the struggling public schools in Newark, N.J., or in studying the effectiveness of the many other education grants made by foundations to help in Newark.To be fair, it is difficult to judge how well the philanthropy in Newark is working because precious few data have been collected. Truly useful metrics, therefore, haven't been developed. The gap between good intentions and measurable results will be familiar anywhere in the country where philanthropies join efforts to improve education.
To address the shortfall in Newark, our organization, the Newark Trust for Education, has undertaken an effort to collect information about the foundations' work that will help clarify for school administrators, principals, teachers, parents and students how best to improve K-12 public education.
Our primary objective: follow the money. Which philanthropies are spending how much, to do what, in which schools? No one really knew. In collaboration with the funding community, we created a tool called the NET Navigator. It allows anyone with an interest in tracking the tens of millions of philanthropy dollars now flowing into Newark schools to conduct online searches by funder, by school or by specific program. Soon the database will include individual school achievement data.
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A new assessment released today by the United Nations Children's Fund estimates that some Syrian children have missed out on as much as two years of education in the midst of their country's ongoing civil struggle."The education system in Syria is reeling from the impact of violence," said Youssouf Abdel-Jelil, UNICEF's Syria representative, in a statement. "Syria once prided itself on the quality of its schools. Now it's seeing the gains it made over the years rapidly reversed."
According to the report, schools are increasingly being used by armed groups and displaced persons seeking shelter. More than 1,500 schools have been damaged or converted into shelters, a problem illustrated in the map above.
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The Department of Public Instruction and several state education organizations plan to hold a school safety summit this summer.In announcing the event, State Superintendent Tony Evers didn't mention last December's massacre at a Connecticut elementary school that killed 20 children and six adults. But he referred to the national debate about school safety that has emerged since.
"Providing safe and respectful schools is an essential piece of our work to ensure every child can graduate ready for college and career," Evers said. "As a state, and as a country, we have made this a serious focus, and building on that proactive tradition is as important as ever."
Billed as the first "Wisconsin School Safety Summit," the event will focus on four topics: policies and procedures, physical environment, climate and culture, and mental health services.
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Monday 3/11/13!#31113RECOMMIT with @mtimadison and @werwisconsin ! Keep fighting, never give up! Details: bit.ly/15AxzdJ
— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) March 7, 2013
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It's a painful irony for Ananda Mirilli that the School Board run she tried to use to call the community to come together to do better for Madison kids ended up embroiled in such controversy.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board elections, here."I'm seeing an even bigger divide in the community, and I'm sad that we are in that place," Mirilli told me Wednesday. "But I'm hoping to continue to work to find healing in our community. We really need to have a conversation about the achievement gap."
Mirilli, a Latina who lost her bid for Seat 5 on the Madison School Board in the Feb. 18 primary, decided against a write-in campaign when primary winner Sarah Manski dropped out of the race just two days later. But Mirilli hasn't given up hope that the election -- despite Manski's surprise withdrawal and the allegations of dirty politics and hypocrisy it incited -- can yet be made an occasion to bring together people now sometimes working at odds to improve education in Madison schools.
And as the Restorative Justice Program manager at YWCA Madison, Mirilli is wondering if restorative justice principles might be the way to do it.
"I'm wondering if we could hold a circle -- not to find out the truth, but to see how we can move forward on this," Mirilli told me.
Mirilli says she was wrongly depicted by Manski as pro-voucher because of a supposed association with Kaleem Caire of the Urban League of Greater Madison. Caire on Wednesday resurrected allegations of double-dealing by leaders of Madison Teachers Inc. in negotiating his Madison Preparatory Academy charter proposal that was rejected by the School Board two years ago.
I appreciate Schneider's ability to add links to her articles. This continues to be a rare event in Madison's traditional media circles.
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As The Capital Times prepares to make endorsements in Madison School Board races that will be decided April 2, our editorial board will ponder issues ranging from the reactions of candidates to Gov. Walker's voucher plan, the achievement gap and the challenge of maintaining quality schools in a time of funding cuts and shortfalls.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board Elections, here.Our editorial board will make endorsements in two contested races, for Seat 3 between former La Follette High School teacher and low-income housing provider Dean Loumos and retired Madison police lieutenant Wayne Strong, and for Seat 4 between incumbent James Howard and challenger Greg Packnett, a legislative aide. The candidates all have strengths, and present voters with distinct options.
In the third race, there isn't really a race. Candidates TJ Mertz and Sarah Manski won the primary Feb. 19. Then Manski surprised the community by dropping out of the contest several days later -- announcing that her husband has been admitted to graduate school in California and that she would not be able to finish a term. We didn't editorialize about the primary race. But after Manski dropped out, we said she had done the right thing because it would have been entirely inappropriate to maintain a campaign for a term she could not complete. But, as a board, we were disappointed by the loss of competition and urged the candidate who finished third in the primary, Ananda Mirilli, to make a bid as a write-in contender.
Mirilli made a great impression during the primary race and, had she waged a write-in campaign, she would have done so as an innovative thinker about how best to make great public schools work for all students. As the parent of an elementary-school student and a big proponent of public education, I'm familiar with a number of the people who organized Mirilli's primary campaign, and who would have supported a write-in run. They form an old-fashioned grass-roots group that recalls the sort of organizations that traditionally backed School Board candidates in Madison. They could have mounted a fine campaign. But I also respect Mirilli's decision not to run. The race would have been expensive and difficult. We've spoken several times, before the primary and since, and I'm convinced Mirilli's voice will remain a vital one in local and state education debates. There's a good chance she will eventually join the School Board, just as current board member Marj Passman was elected a year after she lost a close race to another current School Board member, Maya Cole.
Unfortunately, with Mirilli out of the running, the Seat 5 race is an uncontested one. That's focused a good deal of attention on Manski, who I've known since she was writing for the Daily Cardinal on the University of Wisconsin campus. Among the several boards I have served on over the years, including those of the media reform group Free Press and Women in Media and News, I've been on the board of the reform group Liberty Tree, for which Manski has done fundraising work. Manski's husband, Ben, worked for Liberty Tree before he left to manage Green Party candidate Jill Stein's presidential run.
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Kaleem Caire, president of the Urban League of Greater Madison, is speaking out against the campaign of deception waged against people of color and others who support doing something now about Madison's yawning achievement gap instead of blaming Gov. Scott Walker.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.In a statement issued this week, Caire writes, "As the 2013 Madison school board race continues, we (the Urban League) are deeply concerned about the negative politics, dishonesty and inaccurate discussions that have shaped the campaign. ... We are concerned about how Madison Prep has become a red herring ...."
Walker had not even been sworn in as governor when the Urban League proposed establishing a charter school, Madison Preparatory Academy, to address an achievement gap in which barely half of black and Hispanic children graduate from high school in the Madison public schools.
Caire mentioned as the two worst offenders in this campaign of dishonesty T.J. Mertz, candidate for School Board seat #5, and Green Party activist Ben Manski.
Manski's wife, Sarah, jumped into the seat #5 race hoping to squeeze out an already announced candidate, Latina immigrant Ananda Mirilli. Sarah Manski's candidacy was apparently encouraged by both Mayor Paul Soglin, who gave her a glowing campaign testimonial, and teachers union boss John Matthews, to whom Soglin referred Sarah Manski. On Dec. 30, Ben Manski blasted an email containing this outright distortion of minority candidate Ananda Mirilli's position:
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Five candidates are competing for three seats on the Madison school board, with the general election on April 2, 2013.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.The political context for the races is explosive, given Gov. Scott Walker's revolutionary proposals for education in Wisconsin: cuts to public school funding, an expansion of the voucher program, and a revamping of teachers' evaluations and bargaining rights.
In Madison, the issues are particularly complex, with the intense disagreements over the district's achievement gap between white and minority students.
TJ Mertz, an Edgewood College history instructor and education blogger, is running unopposed after Sarah Manski dropped out of the race for Seat 5 following the February primary. Her name will appear on the ballot, but she is moving to California. Mertz will replace retiring school board member Maya Cole.
In this competitive series of elections, there are numerous candidate forums and listening sessions under way, and we thought we'd pose our own questions to candidates. We start by asking the candidates about their experience, and how they would address the achievement gap in the district.
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Sarah Manski did a lot of damage to Madison on her way out of town.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board Election, here.When she won the school board primary, sucking up endorsements from prominent local officials -- apparently knowing all the while that she might not be hanging around to sit on the board -- she did a major disservice to our community. As Madison Times editor A. David Dahmer observed, her highhanded use of the school board seat as a "backup plan" smacks of contempt for the people who care deeply about what is happening in our schools. Those people happen to include both of Manski's opponents: school-policy blogger and educator TJ Mertz and Ananda Mirilli, a longtime advocate for Madison youth who's on the board of the Spanish immersion charter school Nuestro Mundo.
Since Manski withdrew after she won the primary, her name -- and not third-place finisher Mirilli's -- will appear on the ballot. That has convinced a lot of people of color that white liberals, including school board member Marj Passman, deliberately colluded to keep a woman of color off the board.
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You don't want to get caught texting in Andrew Reiner's class.At the beginning of each semester, Reiner, a lecturer at Towson University in Maryland, makes his cellphone policy crystal clear.
"If there's one thing that you will do that will really (tick) me off, that will completely send me through the roof, have your cellphone in your lap, under the desk, texting," Reiner says.
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EARLIER this week, I spotted, among the job listings in the newspaper Reforma, an ad from a restaurant in Mexico City looking to hire dishwashers. The requirement: a secondary school diploma.Years ago, school was not for everyone. Classrooms were places for discipline, study. Teachers were respected figures. Parents actually gave them permission to punish their children by slapping them or tugging their ears. But at least in those days, schools aimed to offer a more dignified life.
Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican population that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more illiterate people in Mexico now than there were 12 years ago. Even if baseline literacy, the ability to read a street sign or news bulletin, is rising, the practice of reading an actual book is not. Once a reasonably well-educated country, Mexico took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a Unesco assessment of reading habits a few years ago.
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This probably sounds familiar: You are with a group of friends arguing about some piece of trivia or historical fact. Someone says, "Wait, let me look this up on Wikipedia," and proceeds to read the information out loud to the whole group, thus resolving the argument. Don't dismiss this as a trivial occasion. It represents a learning moment, or more precisely, a microlearning moment, and it foreshadows a much larger transformation--to what I call socialstructed learning.,Socialstructed learning is an aggregation of microlearning experiences drawn from a rich ecology of content and driven not by grades but by social and intrinsic rewards. The microlearning moment may last a few minutes, hours, or days (if you are absorbed in reading something, tinkering with something, or listening to something from which you just can't walk away). Socialstructed learning may be the future, but the foundations of this kind of education lie far in the past. Leading philosophers of education--from Socrates to Plutarch, Rousseau to Dewey--talked about many of these ideals centuries ago. Today, we have a host of tools to make their vision reality.
Socialstructed learning is an aggregation of microlearning experiences driven not by grades but by social rewards.
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Update: Kendra from Harvard sez, The online course called CopyrightX is a version of the HLS Copyright course taught on edX by Prof. Fisher. It's facilitated by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the efforts of a number of HLS students. The materials are free and accessible at Prof. Fisher's website: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/CopyrightX_Homepage_2013.htm The site linked in the current post is a student created website - not an official part of the course.
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Sarah Carr, a former Milwaukee education reporter who moved to New Orleans in 2009 to cover schools in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, sees some similarities in both troubled public education systems."I think they both have their strengths and their weaknesses," Carr said in a recent interview.
"I think both places have great and awful schools."
In her new book , titled "Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City and the Struggle to Educate America's Children," Carr writes about the New Orleans school system by focusing on the personal lives of various figures struggling to educate students in a city still suffering from the aftermath of Katrina.
Her book reports the progress of three different New Orleans schools in a city where charter reform movement has brought about drastic change for poor minority students , administrators and teachers. Carr took a personal approach to interviewing her subjects in order to tell the greater story of the challenges involved in a community where social conditions have a large impact on the education of students.
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It's an education bombshell.Related: The Madison School Board & the District's disastrous reading scores.Nearly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates need to relearn basic skills before they can enter the City University's community college system.
The number of kids behind the 8-ball is the highest in years, CBS 2′s Marcia Kramer reported Thursday.
When they graduated from city high schools, students in a special remedial program at the Borough of Manhattan Community College couldn't make the grade.
They had to re-learn basic skills -- reading, writing and math -- first before they could begin college courses.
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The suicide of the Internet wunderkind Aaron Swartz has given rise to a great deal of discussion, much of it centered on whether the penalty sought against him by the prosecutor was proportional to his "crime."The consensus so far has been that Swartz did something wrong by accessing and releasing millions of academic papers from the JSTOR archive. But perhaps it is time to ask whether Swartz did in fact act wrongly. We might entertain the possibility that Swartz's act of civil disobedience was an attempt to help rectify a harm that began long ago. Perhaps he was not only justified in his actions but morally impelled to act as he did. Moreover, we too might be morally impelled to take action.
To put it bluntly, the current state of academic publishing is the result of a series of strong-arm tactics enabling publishers to pry copyrights from authors, and then charge exorbitant fees to university libraries for access to that work. The publishers have inverted their role as disseminators of knowledge and become bottlers of knowledge, releasing it exclusively to the highest bidders. Swartz simply decided it was time to take action.
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Earlier this week, I spotted, among the job listings in the newspaper Reforma, an ad from a restaurant in Mexico City looking to hire dishwashers. The requirement: a secondary school diploma.Years ago, school was not for everyone. Classrooms were places for discipline, study. Teachers were respected figures. Parents actually gave them permission to punish their children by slapping them or tugging their ears. But at least in those days, schools aimed to offer a more dignified life.
Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican population that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more illiterate people in Mexico now than there were 12 years ago. Even if baseline literacy, the ability to read a street sign or news bulletin, is rising, the practice of reading an actual book is not. Once a reasonably well-educated country, Mexico took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a Unesco assessment of reading habits a few years ago.
One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, "How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?"
...
This is not just about better funding. Mexico spends more than 5 percent of its gross domestic product on education -- about the same percentage as the United States. And it's not about pedagogical theories and new techniques that look for shortcuts. The educational machine does not need fine-tuning; it needs a complete change of direction. It needs to make students read, read and read.
But perhaps the Mexican government is not ready for its people to be truly educated. We know that books give people ambitions, expectations, a sense of dignity. If tomorrow we were to wake up as educated as the Finnish people, the streets would be filled with indignant citizens and our frightened government would be asking itself where these people got more than a dishwasher's training.
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WITH Republican control of state government now firmly consolidated, Mississippi is poised for wholesale education reform. In his state-of-the-state address in January, Governor Phil Bryant proposed a robust, if rather familiar, basket of reforms: expansion of the state's current (and highly restrictive) charter-school laws, merit pay for teachers, and higher standards for teacher training. More controversially, Mr Bryant proposed allowing students to enroll in schools outside of the district in which they live (so-called open enrollment), as well as privately-funded scholarships for students to attend private schools. With the exception of these last, the proposals have been enthusiastically embraced by the state legislature.The question is whether they will work. Some charter schools have proven successful and the much-touted KIPP programme has produced marked improvement in test scores for low-income children. The worst fears of sceptics (that charter schools would siphon better teachers and better prepared students away from traditional public schools; that the result would intensify economic and ethnic segregation) have not been realised. But taken as a whole, school choice has failed to produce across-the-board improvements in student learning.
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That's H.F. No. 826, which requires schools -- including private schools that get any "public funds or other public resources" -- to ban, among other things, "bullying" at school, defined asuse of one or a series of words, images, or actions, transmitted directly or indirectly between individuals or through technology, that a reasonable person knows or should know, under the circumstances, will have the effect of interfering with the ability of an individual, including a student who observes the conduct, to participate in a safe and supportive learning environment. Examples of bullying may include, but are not limited to, conduct that:
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Five candidates are competing for three seats on the Madison school board, with the general election on April 2, 2013.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.The political context for the races is explosive, given Gov. Scott Walker's revolutionary proposals for education in Wisconsin: cuts to public school funding, an expansion of the voucher program, and a revamping of teachers' evaluations and bargaining rights.
In Madison, the issues are particularly complex, with the intense disagreements over the district's achievement gap between white and minority students.
In the race for Seat 4, incumbent James Howard is running against Greg Packnett, a Democratic legislative aide.
In this competitive series of elections, there are numerous candidate forums and listening sessions under way, and we thought we'd pose our own questions to candidates. We start by asking the candidates about their experience, and how they would address the achievement gap in the district.
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The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings employ the world's largest invitation-only academic opinion survey to provide the definitive list of the top 100 most powerful global university brands. A spin-off of the annual World University Rankings, the reputation league table is based on nothing more than subjective judgement - but it is the considered expert judgement of senior, published academics - the people best placed to know the most about excellence in our universities.
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An impasse over the shape of the federal budget keeps boiling down to this basic plotline: Democrats say the solution to high deficits must include more tax revenue, while Republicans say the fundamental problem is spending.Failure to reach a middle ground has prompted automatic spending cuts known as the "sequester" to go into effect. This wasn't Plan A, or even Plan B, for either side.
As the politicians look for a way forward, conservative lawmakers say that new budget projections make their case for them. Federal tax revenue is forecast to hit a record $2.7 trillion this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
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"Ms K, I need to do my work with Ms. V. My education plan is my civil right!" Deon's entire body was contorted in a geometric impossibility, the better to shout at me from the back of the room."Hey, Ms. K! Come here! What if both numbers are negative?" Sticks was waving me over.
"If the rise and run are both negative, the slope's positive. Just like multiplying!" Jack argued, as Cal watched dispassionately.
Welcome to the first month of my math support class, for juniors and seniors who haven't yet passed California's High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE). Snapshots from a typical day:
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Almost 3 million students are enrolled in a fully online program, and that number is only expected to grow. Learn who these students are and what they are looking for in a landmark new study. The Learning House, Inc. and Aslanian Market Research surveyed 1,500 former, current and future online students to discover who earns online degrees and why.In the "Online College Students 2012: Comprehensive Data on Demands and Preferences" report, learn:
How students select online schools
Which fields of study interest online students
Which program features online students seek
What prompts students to choose online study
And more!
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For years, Los Angeles has been ground zero in an intense debate about how to improve our nation's education system. What's less known is who is shaping that debate. Many of the biggest contributors to the so-called "school choice" movement -- code words for privatizing our public education system -- are billionaires who don't live in Southern California, but have gained significant influence in local school politics. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's recent contribution of $1 million to a political action committee created to influence next week's LAUSD school board elections is only the most recent example of the billionaire blitzkrieg.For more than a decade, however, one of the biggest of the billionaire interlopers has been the Walton family, heirs to the Walmart fortune, who have poured millions into a privatization-oriented, ideological campaign to make LA a laboratory for their ideas about treating schools like for-profit businesses, and treating parents, students and teachers like cogs in what they must think are education big-box retail stores.
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There has been a lot of controversy about whether student assessments should be used to evaluate K-12 teachers. The media is full of debate about this topic (e.g., Wall Street Journal) and the Seattle Times has had many editorials pushing for the use of assessments such as MAP to evaluate teachers. And several foundations, supported by rich contributors, like the League of Education Voters and the Gates Foundation, are pushing teacher evaluation through student assessments.I would like to argue that using student assessments to evaluate teachers not only has issues, but is putting the cart before the horse. First, we need to test teachers in a robust way to evaluate their knowledge of the subjects they are teaching and only allow teachers with strong subject knowledge to teach.
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Incoming Madison School District Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham will begin her new role in just a matter of weeks.April 1 is the start date specified in Cheatham's contract, which the School Board unanimously approved Wednesday evening.
The date is significantly earlier than the July 1 start date of her predecessor, Dan Nerad. School Board President James Howard said the goal was to begin the transition to the new superintendent right away.
"We didn't have a superintendent, and we wanted to get a superintendent on board as soon as possible," he said.
Cheatham will make $235,000 annually -- the same amount the School Board offered her last month. That amount is higher than Nerad's $201,000 salary but less than the roughly $250,000 salary that was advertised for the position.
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Drew Faust and L. Rafael Reif:
IN 1837, the Massachusetts Board of Education devoted part of its first annual report to praising a recent classroom innovation called the blackboard. This "invaluable and indispensible" innovation enabled the "rapid and vivid communication of knowledge." It created opportunities for teachers to engage learners in ways that had been unimaginable just a generation earlier.The same and more will be said of online learning tools. We are at the beginning of a technology-led revolution in pedagogy: Our innovation is not the blackboard, but instead an evolving suite of tools that allows interactive learning online. While one outcome of this revolution has rightly caught the world's attention -- the power to democratize access to education on a scale never seen in history -- we are just as excited about the promise that these new tools hold for colleges and universities throughout the world.
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Freezing public school spending in Wisconsin would be a mistake, given previous cuts and rising costs.That's the most glaring problem with Gov. Scott Walker's two-year, $68 billion state budget proposal.
The Republican governor also stalls his considerable progress toward an honest and truly balanced budget. Having slain a giant budget gap two years ago, Walker shouldn't be backtracking even a bit.
The Legislature has some fixing to do.
Yet some of Walker's priorities are strong, including:
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If higher education has a group of quintessential insiders, it's probably the American Council on Education. Yet from a perch atop the higher education lobby's headquarters here, the membership association of 1,800 college presidents is backing high-profile "disruptions" to the industry it represents.The council says it wants more students to earn college credit for learning that occurs outside the college classroom. Some of these credit pathways are trendy and new; others have been around for decades. But interest in prior learning assessment has grown rapidly, particularly during the last six months, and ACE is riding the wave.
ACE's leaders say they are giving a boost to alternative credit pathways because of the college "completion agenda," work force development and money worries that are buffeting colleges.
"We are experiencing a confluence of forces of change," Molly Broad, the council's president, recently told the University of Wisconsin System's Board of Regents. "All of this coming together is persuasive that business as usual is not in the future cards and we must innovate."
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Gov. Scott Walker's ambitious plan to expand taxpayer-funded private schools faltered in the Legislature on Wednesday, with several influential GOP lawmakers making clear the proposal would need major changes to pass.The lawmakers from the governor's own party largely acknowledged that some expansion of voucher schools will pass the Legislature in the coming months. But the legislators - who included the top two Senate leaders and chairmen of the Legislature's education committees - said the expansion would be different from the proposal Walker laid out in his budget bill last month.
Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) said a majority of GOP senators do not support Walker's proposal as currently written. Fitzgerald said that he called a meeting held Tuesday with Walker's aides, Assembly Republican leaders and representatives of voucher schools to see if a compromise proposal might be worked out.
"Some people in our caucus looked at what the governor proposed and said, 'Hmm, let's maybe think about that,' and I must say the governor was open to that. He's not dug in on anything," Fitzgerald said of changes to the governor's budget.
Walker is seeking to increase funding for voucher schools, expand them to nine new school districts in the state and allow special-needs students from around the state to attend private schools at taxpayer expense. At the same time, he wants to provide $129 million in new state aid to public schools over two years but keep schools' spending in state aid and property taxes flat, ensuring that the state money will be used to lower local property taxes.
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The credit hour is still higher education's gold standard, even after President Obama's vague endorsement last month of competency-based education and its focus on "performance and results" rather than seat time.
It's unclear whether Obama's call could help open the door for competency-based approaches by spurring changes to the current system of accreditation or the rules governing federal financial aid. Even so, colleges aren't waiting on the feds.Several institutions have continued to expand competency-based offerings aimed at working adults. And while all but one are still grounded in the credit hour, these online degree programs are typically self-paced and emphasize the testing of competency, sometimes even of learning that occurs outside of the traditional classroom.
A notable example is the continued growth of Western Governors University, which is launching two new state-based versions of its online, low-priced model -- in Missouri and Tennessee. Governors of the two states announced the new universities last month, and both said they hope to cover some of the start-up costs with money from state coffers. The two new WGUs will join similar branches in Indiana, Texas and Washington.
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HAPPY National Grammar Day, everyone. Today's offering is only marginally on grammar. We've asked "What is grammar anyway?" here at Johnson. The layperson would almost certainly answer "those difficult rules that are drilled into you in school about how to use the language." The linguist would reply with nearly the opposite: grammar is made up of the rules of language that a competent native speaker uses almost without effort, by the definition of "competent native speaker". You use grammar every time you construct a sentence, not just those times when you're scratching your head about whether to use "who" or "whom".Here's a good example of how laypeople and linguists differ on grammar: OnlineSchools.com has created this handy infographic on the much-discussed punctuation mark known as the Oxford comma.
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Education budgets at the national, state, and local levels have all taken huge hits over the past few years. And while we all want our schools to have sufficient funding to educate our children, more money is not the magic bullet solution for what our educational system needs.The truth is, our educational system is badly broken, and not just because the systems, structures, and philosophies that guide it are woefully out of date. Our educational system is grossly ineffective because the way we teach our children doesn't align with what we know about how the brain learns.
In fact, the current system is the worst learning environment we could put our children into. And that's not just my opinion. It also belongs to John Medina, noted molecular biologist and author of Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School.
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Roger Cohen
THIS is America's college town par excellence. Kids from all over the world flock to Boston to learn. I have a son who is a freshman here. Last autumn, as he entered school, I listened to warnings about the dangers of binge drinking. I think they missed the point. The real epidemic involves so-called smart drugs, particularly Adderall, an amphetamine prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (A.D.H.D.) but so freely available as to be the pill to take whenever academic pressure requires pulling an all-nighter with zero procrastination to get a paper done.
"Just popped an Addie, so I'm good to go" -- this sort of pretest attitude has become pervasive. Conversations with several students suggested Adderall was always available, costing from $2 to $5 a pill. Adderall has become to college what steroids are to baseball: an illicit performance enhancer for a fiercely competitive environment. What to say to doctors to get a prescription is now so widely known among students -- "It's like my thoughts are channel-surfing and I can't stop" -- as to have become a kind of joke.
"If there are no A.D.H.D. symptoms prior to college I have a very hard time writing a prescription," Jill Kasper, a pediatrician, told me. "But if somebody wants a prescription for Adderall, they can find someone to give it to them." The problem is that Adderall is dangerous, a Class 2 controlled substance like cocaine. While it has helped countless A.D.H.D. sufferers, it can also lead down a dark road of dependency, ever higher doses, fight-or-flight anxiety levels, sleeplessness and depression.
Here, in his own words, is the Adderall story of Steven Roderick, 24, a smart, soft-spoken, lost senior studying health science at the University of Massachusetts Boston:
I started taking it my first year in college. My performance had always fluctuated a lot. It was hard to pay attention, even in classes I was interested in. I was getting D's. I felt something had to change. Adderall flies around campus. The first time I took it I wrote a paper for an astronomy class that was out of this world. I could not believe it -- I was so inspired it made me want to be a doctor! I thought -- oh my God! -- this is the whole problem. You have the ability. You are intelligent. You just don't have the link between intelligence and the capacity to be productive. The pill is the link. I felt literally unstoppable.I went to the doctor, said I'd like to give Adderall a try. There were no diagnostic procedures. Doctors give in too easily. I did not think there could be a risk later on. I started on 20 milligrams. I went from D's and F's to straight A's. But your brain adapts, you have to increase the dose, and by 2011 I was up to 45 milligrams. In the spring of that year I started to feel Adderall was my best friend and my worst enemy at the same time. Because I could not sleep I went to see my psychopharm, and she prescribed me Ativan to sleep. That worked O.K. for a while. But I really ran into trouble last year. I was up to 65 milligrams, and then during finals went to 80, even 120, milligrams, and I was just locked into this Adderall-Ativan cycle. My doctor seemed scatterbrained. She'd prescribe something but not follow up.
It's a complicated dependency. I mean I never took Adderall to get high, never took it in a way that was not academically oriented; and I think there's a distinction between dependency and addiction, taking something for a purpose or for a rush. But I feel awful. My baseline anxiety level would be most people's highest anxiety level. The drop of a pin makes me spin around. I am living at home. My parents are clueless, and it is hard to discuss with them, although my Mom helps me now. I alternate between 'on' and 'off' states -- I come off the Adderall, take Ativan and sleep for days. I miss appointments. I know I need to go to the appointments, but I wonder if I will be functional enough.
Adderall suddenly turned its back on me. It enabled me to focus, got me to a higher place academically. But then I could no longer rely on it. I was on my own. And although I have less than three credits to go, I may have to withdraw from school because I have not been able to make it to enough classes. "Look, I am in a culture that constantly justifies the means to an end. So how do we persuade people not to take it? All you hear is how impossible it will be to get a job when you get out, and you are going more and more into debt, and you think without this I won't be top of the class. With other drugs you know you are ruining your life. But Adderall manipulates you into thinking you are doing what is needed to have a great life.
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Kaleem Caire, via a kind email
March 6, 2013The Memorandum from Kaleem Caire to John Matthews (Madison Teachers, Inc)
Dear Madison Leaders.
As the 2013 Madison school board race continues, we (the Urban League) are deeply concerned about the negative politics, dishonesty and inaccurate discussions that have shaped the campaign. While I will not, as a nonprofit leader, speak about the merits of individual candidates, we are concerned about how Madison Prep has become a red herring during the debates. The question of all the candidates has been largely narrowed to, "Did you support Madison Prep or did you not?"...as if something was horribly wrong with our charter school proposal, and as though that is the most important issue facing our school children and schools.
While the Urban League has no interest in partaking in the squabbles and confusion that has unfortunately come to define public conversation about our public schools, we do want to set the record straight about deliberations on Madison Prep that have been falsely expressed by many during this campaign, and used to dog individuals who supported the school proposal more than one year ago.
Here is how things transpired.
On May 9, 2011, Steve Goldberg of the CUNA Mutual Foundation facilitated a meeting about Madison Prep, at my request, between Madison Teacher's Incorporated President, John Matthews and me. The meeting was held in CUNA's cafeteria. We had lunch and met for about an hour. It was a cordial meeting and we each discussed the Madison Prep proposal and what it would take for the Urban League and MTI to work together. We didn't get into many details, however I was sure to inform John that our proposal of a non-instrumentality charter school (non-MTI) was not because we didn't support the union but because the collective bargaining agreement was too restrictive for the school model and design we were proposing to be fully implemented, and because we desired to recruit teachers outside the restrictions of the collective bargaining agreement. We wanted to have flexibility to aggressively recruit on an earlier timeline and have the final say on who worked in our school.
The three of us met again at the Coliseum Bar on August 23, 2011, this time involving other members of our teams. We got into the specifics of negotiations regarding the Urban League's focus on establishing a non-instrumentality school and John's desire to have Madison Prep's employees be a part of MTI's collective bargaining unit. At the close of that meeting, we (Urban League) offered to have Madison Prep's teachers and guidance counselors be members of the collective bargaining unit. John said he felt we were making progress but he needed to think about not having MTI represent all of the staff that are a part of their bargaining unit. John and I also agreed that I would email him a memo outlining our desire to work with MTI, and provide the details of what we discussed. John agreed to respond after reviewing the proposal with his team. That memo, which we have not released previously, is attached [336K PDF]. You will see clearly that the Urban League initiated dialogue with MTI about having the teacher's union represent our educators.
John, Steve and I met for a third time at Perkins restaurant for breakfast on the West Beltline on September 30, 2013. This time, I brought representatives of the Madison Prep and Urban League Boards with me: Dr. Gloria Ladson Billings, John Roach and Derrick Smith. It was at the close of this meeting that John Matthews told all of us that we "had a deal", that MTI and the Urban League would now work together on Madison Prep. We all shook hands and exchanged pleasantries. Our team was relieved.
Later that evening, I received calls from Matt DeFour, a reporter with the Wisconsin State Journal and Susan Troller of The Capital Times. They both asked me to confirm what John had told them; that we had a deal. I replied by confirming the deal. The next day, The Capital Times ran a story, Madison Prep and MTI will work together on new charter school. The State Journal ran an article too, Prep School agrees to employ union staff. All was good, or so we thought.
Unfortunately, our agreement was short-lived. The very next day after the story hit the newspapers, my team and I began receiving angry letters from social workers and psychologists in MMSD who were upset that we did not want to have those positions represented by MTI. We replied by explaining to them that our reasoning was purely driven by the fact that 99% of the Districts psychologists were white and that there were few social workers of color, too. For obvious reasons, we did not believe MMSD would have success hiring diverse staff for these positions. We desired a diverse staff for two reasons: we anticipated the majority of our students to be students of color and our social work and psychological service model was different. Madison Prep had a family-serving model where the school would pay for such services for every person in a family, if necessary, who needed it, and would make available to families and students a diverse pool of contracted psychologists that families and students could choose from.
That Monday evening, October 3, 2011, John Matthews approached me with Steve Goldberg at the School Board hearing on Madison Prep and informed me that his bargaining unit was very upset and that he needed to have our Physical education teacher be represented by MTI, too. Our Phy Ed model was different; we had been working on a plan with the YMCA to implement a very innovative approach to ensuring our students were deeply engaged in health and wellness activities at school and beyond the school day. In our plan, we considered the extraordinarily high rates of obesity among young men and women of color. However, to make the deal with MTI work, that evening I gave MTI the Phy Ed teaching position.
But that one request ultimately became a request by MTI for every position in our school, and a request by John Matthews to re-open negotiations, this time with a mediator. At first, we rejected this request because we felt "a deal is a deal". When you shake hands, you follow through.
We only gave in after current school board president, James Howard, called me at home to request that the Urban League come back to the negotiating table. James acknowledged not feeling great about asking us to do this after all we had been through - jumping through hoop after hoop. If you followed the media closely, you would recall how many times we worked to overcome hurdles that were placed in our way - $200K worth of hurdles (that's how much we spent). After meeting with MMSD leadership and staff, we agreed to come back to the table to address issues with MTI and AFSCME, who wanted our custodial and food service workers to be represented by the union as well. When we met, the unions came to the negotiation with attorneys and so did we. If you care to find out what was said during these negotiations, you can request a transcript from Beth Lehman, the liaison to the MMSD Board of Education who was taking official notes (October 31 and November 1, 2011).
On our first day of negotiations, after all sides shared their requests and concerns, we (ULGM) decided to let AFSCME represent our custodial and food service staff. AFSCME was immediately satisfied, and left the room. That's when the hardball towards us started. We then countered with a plausible proposal that MTI did not like. When we couldn't get anywhere, we agreed to go into recess. Shortly after we came back from recess, former MMSD Superintendent Dan Nerad dropped the bomb on us. He shared that if we now agreed to have our staff be represented by MTI, we would have to budget paying our teachers an average of $80,000 per year per teacher and dedicating $25,000 per teacher to benefits. This would effectively increase our proposal from $15M over five years to $28M over five years.
Why the increased costs? For months, we projected in our budgets that our staff would likely average 7 years of teaching experience with a Master's degree. We used the MTI-MMSD salary schedule to set the wages in our budget, and followed MMSD and MTI's suggestions for how to budget for the extended school day and year parts of our charter school plan. Until that day, MMSD hadn't once told us that the way we were budgeting was a problem. They actually submitted several versions of budgets to the School Board, and not once raising this issue.
Superintendent Nerad further informed us that MMSD was going to now submit a budget to the Board of Education that reflected costs for teachers with an average of 14 years' experience and a master's degree. When we shockingly asked Nerad if he thought the Board of Education would support such a proposal, he said they likely would not. We did not think the public would support such a unusual request either. As you can imagine, we left the negotiations very frustrated. In the 23rd hour, not only was the run we thought we had batted in taken away from us in the 9th inning, we felt like our entire season had been vacated by commissioners.
When we returned to our office that afternoon, we called an emergency meeting of the Urban League and Madison Prep boards. It was in those meetings that we had to make a choice. Do we completely abandon our proposal for Madison Prep after all we had done to see the project through, and after all of the community support and interests from parents that we had received, or do we go forward with our original proposal of a non-instrumentality charter school and let the chips fall where they may with a vote by the Board? At that point, our trust of MMSD and MTI was not very high. In fact, weeks before all of this happened, we were told by Nerad in a meeting with our team and attorneys, and his staff and attorneys, that the Board of Education had voted in closed session to unilaterally withdraw our charter school planning grant from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. They reversed this decision after we informed them we would file a lawsuit against them. We were later told that a certain Board member was pushing for months to have this done. Then, after months of not being able to get certain board members to meet with us, Marj Passman, decided to meet with me alone in my office. During that meeting, she told me that we (ULGM) didn't have the votes for Madison Prep and that we were never going to get the school approved. She the offered to donate her personal funds to Madison Prep, if we pulled our proposal and decided to do a private school instead. I told her that I appreciated her offer, but declined.
After finally meeting with all seven board of education members, both the Madison Prep and ULGM boards decided unanimously that we must in good conscience go forward, put the needs and future of our children first, and reintroduce the non-instrumentality proposal to the School Board. You know the rest of the story.
Over the next 45 days, we (ULGM) were categorically painted as an anti-union conservative outfit who proposed a flawed school model that divided Madison and threatened to join the Scott Walker effort to eliminate unions. We were made to be the great dividers (not the achievement gap itself) and me, "an Angry Black Man". Lost in the debate were the reasons we proposed the school in the first place - because so many children of color were failing in our schools and there was no effective strategy in place to address it even though the school system has known about its racial achievement gap since it was first document by researcher Naomi Lede for the National Urban League in 1965. That gap has doubled since then.
Ironically, two of the people behind the attacks on ULGM were Ben Manski and TJ Mertz. They were uniquely aligned in their opposition to Madison Prep. John Matthews even weighed in on video with his comments against us, but at least he told a story that was 80% consistent with the events that actually transpired. Watch the video and listen to the reason he gave for why he didn't support Madison Prep. He didn't call us union haters or teacher bashers. He knew better. So why all the fuss now? Why have those who knew exactly what went on in these negotiations not told the true story about what really happened with Madison Prep? Why has a charter school proposal been made the scapegoat, or defining lever, in a school board race where there are so many other more important issues to address?
If all it takes to win a seat on the school board now is opposition to charter schools, rather than being someone who possesses unique experiences and qualifications to serve our now majority non-white and low-income student body and increasingly challenged schools, we should all worry about the future of our children and public schools.
So, for those who were unaware and those who've been misleading the public about Madison Prep and the Urban League, I hope you at least read this account all the way through and give all of the candidates in this school board election the opportunity to win or lose on their merits. Falsehoods and red herrings are not needed. They don't make our city or our school district look good to the observing eye. Let's be honest and accurate in our descriptions going forward.
Thank you for reading.
We continue to move forward for our children and are more determined than ever to serve them well.
Onward.
Strengthening the Bridge Between Education and Work
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Main: 608.729.1200
Assistant: 608.729.1249
Fax: 608.729.1205
www.ulgm.org
www.madison-prep.org
Invest in the Urban League
Urban League 2012 Third Quarter Progress Report
MEMORANDUM336K PDF Version
Date: August 23, 2011To: Mr. John Matthews, Executive Director, Madison Teachers, Inc.
From: Kaleem Caire, President & CEO, Urban League of Greater Madison
cc: Mr. Steve Goldberg, President, CUNA Foundation; Mr. David Cagigal, Vice Chair, Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM); Ms Laura DeRoche-Perez, Charter School Development Consultant, ULGM; Mr. David Hase, Attorney, Cooke & Frank SCRe: Discussion about potential MTl-Madison Prep Relationship
Greetings John.
I sincerely appreciate your openness to engaging in conversation about a possible relationship between MTI and Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men. We, ULGM and Madison Prep, look forward to determining very soon what the possibilities could be.
Please accept his memo as a means to frame the issues.
I look forward to discussing this with you and members of our teams, and hearing what ideas you have for the
- The Urban League of Greater Madison initially pursued a non-instrumentality public charter school
focused on young men to, first and foremost, eliminate the academic and graduate gaps between young people of color and their white peers, to successfully prepare greater percentages of young men of color and those at-risk for higher education, to significantly reduce the incarceration rate among young adult males of color and to provide an example of success that could become a learning laboratory for
educators, parents and the Greater Madison community with regard to successful ly educating young men, regardless of th eir race or socio-economic status.- We are very interested in determining how we can work with MTI while maintaining independence with regard to work rules, operations, management and leadership so that we can hire and retain the best team possible for Madison Prep, and make organizational and program decisions and modifications as necessary to meet the needs of our students, faculty, staff and parents.
- MTl's collective bargaining agreement with the Madison Metropolitan School District covers many positions within the school system. We are interested in having MTI represent our teachers and guidance counselors. All other staff would not be represented by MTI.
- The collective bargaining agreement between MTI and Madison Prep would be limited to employee wages and benefits. Madison Prep teachers would select a representative among them, independent of Madison Prep's leadership, to serve as their union representative to MTI.
relationship as well.Respectfully,
Kaleem Caire,
President & CEOCONFIDENTIAL
Related Links:
Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School (Rejected by a majority of the Madison School Board).
Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman on "the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment.".
John Matthews, Madison Teachers, Inc.
Kaleem Caire, Madison Urban League
The rejected Studio Charter School.
2013 Madison School Board Elections.
Update: Matthew DeFour's article on Caire's message:
Lucy Mathiak, who was on the board in 2011, also didn't dispute Caire's account of the board action, but couldn't recall exactly what happened in the board's closed sessions."Did (the Urban League) jump through many hoops, provide multiple copies of revised proposals upon request, meet ongoing demands for new and more detailed information? Yes," Mathiak said. "It speaks volumes that Madison Prep is being used to smear and discredit candidates for the School Board and used as a litmus test of political worthiness."
Matthews said the problems with Madison Prep resulted from Caire's proposal to hire nonunion staff.
"What Kaleem seems to have forgotten, conveniently or otherwise, is that MTI representatives engaged in several discussions with him and several of his Board members, in attempt to reach an amicable resolution," Matthews said. "What that now has to do with the current campaign for Board of Education, I fail to see. I know of no animosity among the candidates or their campaign workers."
Passman and other board members who served at the time did not return a call seeking comment.
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If you've got a kid in third through eighth grade--or tenth--they took the WKCE exam this fall. "The Wisconsin content and knowledge exam and it's been the statewide test for Wisconsin for quite a few years now," said Dr. Jane Belmore, the superintendent of Madison schools.Much more on the oft-criticized WKCE, here.Your student could score at one of these assessment levels: minimal, basic, proficient or advanced."This year our WKCE test has been alligned with a nationally-normed test," said Dr. Belmore.
Your student's scores should be showing up soon and it's possible he or she won't be scoing as highly as in the past. "The results of this reallignment is that we're holding ourselves and our students to a higher bar," she said. "So students may be performing at the same level or even better than they were and yet still not get the kind of report that parents might be expecting."
Dr. Belmore said it doesn't necessarily mean your child is doing less well, everyone's just being held to a higher standard. "If our students are being proficient and we're expecting to see proficient we might see basic," she said.
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"Vouchers, private charter schools, special education vouchers will fragment our community and weaken MMSD," says GRUMPS. Thank You!
— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) March 6, 2013
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Who else does Clayton pray for? Apple. Yup! Watch the 30-minute interview to hear why but summary notes below.Let me start by saying that Clayton is one of the most influential people on my thoughts about markets that led to both the concept behind my first startup and my main theses in investing. I have written about Deflationary Economics (one of my most read posts ever) & The Innovator's Dilemma before. In a discussion I had with Fred Wilson at the Invesco LP meeting Fred said the same about the influence of Clayton.
So it was a real pleasure to be asked by Derek Anderson of Startup Grind to be able to interview Clayton for an audience of thousands (many in person, others by live broadcast). Startup Grind was a truly awesome conference and Derek the consumate host. I hope to be asked back for next year's event.
Clayton Christensen certainly didn't disappoint. It was one of funnest discussions I've held with a senior leader and he was surprisingly open and frank. If you have some time I highly recommend watching it.
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Hunkered down in Illinois to block labor legislation back in Wisconsin, 14 Democratic senators gathered in Libertyville two years ago for a secret meeting at a teachers union office.Arriving at the Illinois Education Association branch on Feb. 26, 2011, some Democrats in the group were surprised to find that they would be strategizing not just among themselves but also with three labor officials. That trio included the incoming head of a national teachers association, the biggest union in the country, who had worked with the Wisconsin lawmakers in the past and had just registered to lobby them again.
One senator skipped the meeting out of concerns over appearance and propriety. The other lawmakers got a pitch from the union leaders on why they should stay in Illinois to prevent a vote on Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to repeal most collective bargaining for most public employees.
"The undercurrent message was, 'You're winning; stay out,' " recalled former Democratic Sen. Jim Holperin of Conover, one of those attending the meeting.
Behind the scenes, there was more to the Republican governor's fight with public employee unions than just Walker's speeches and the massive protests of union supporters. An in-depth review reveals a rich backstory, including the undisclosed visit to Wisconsin by President Barack Obama's campaign manager just before the effort to recall Walker; the role played by a conservative Milwaukee foundation in pushing labor legislation in Wisconsin and elsewhere; and the tension between Walker's office and law enforcement over handling the demonstrations that greeted the governor's proposal.
Walker emerged from the legislative fight and the subsequent recall election with a majority of support among Wisconsin voters, deep opposition from Democrats, and a hero's status among conservatives nationally. Public worker unions lost fundamental powers and in some cases their official status altogether.
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US universities have responded to China's exploding demand for American higher education with branch campuses and aggressive recruiting. Now, some are trying to boost their brands by casting photos and other snippets of campus life out into the confounding sea of Chinese social media.How confounding? Consider the mystery of the Chinese Yale zombies.
That's "zombies" as in "zombie followers" on Sina Weibo -- the hugely popular "weibo," or microblogging, site that's roughly akin to Twitter and has attracted more than 500 million followers since debuting in 2009. A common feature on Chinese social media, these zombie accounts could represent actual users who lurk inactively online. But often they're fake, mass-produced accounts that mindlessly follow (hence the name "zombie") and artificially boost another account's follower numbers -- and thus prestige.
Since its debut in December, Yale's new Sina Weibo account -- sharing photos and other assorted items from its Ivy-covered Connecticut campus -- has exploded in popularity, apparently far faster than any other US institution's.
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Shalosh B. Ekhad, the co-author of several papers in respected mathematics journals, has been known to prove with a single, succinct utterance theorems and identities that previously required pages of mathematical reasoning. Last year, when asked to evaluate a formula for the number of integer triangles with a given perimeter, Ekhad performed 37 calculations in less than a second and delivered the verdict: "True."Shalosh B. Ekhad is a computer. Or, rather, it is any of a rotating cast of computers used by the mathematician Doron Zeilberger, from the Dell in his New Jersey office to a supercomputer whose services he occasionally enlists in Austria. The name -- Hebrew for "three B one" -- refers to the AT&T 3B1, Ekhad's earliest incarnation.
"The soul is the software," said Zeilberger, who writes his own code using a popular math programming tool called Maple.
A mustachioed, 62-year-old professor at Rutgers University, Zeilberger anchors one end of a spectrum of opinions about the role of computers in mathematics. He has been listing Ekhad as a co-author on papers since the late 1980s "to make a statement that computers should get credit where credit is due." For decades, he has railed against "human-centric bigotry" by mathematicians: a preference for pencil-and-paper proofs that Zeilberger claims has stymied progress in the field. "For good reason," he said. "People feel they will be out of business."
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In 2011, IBM achieved a quantum leap in artificial intelligence technology when its Watson computer program trounced human champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a three-day Jeopardy! tourney, taking home the million-dollar prize by outscoring the second place competitor by a three-to-one margin.Since then, Watson has shown its computing prowess in the world of medicine and in other business settings. However, as was recently announced, IBM decided Watson could use a college education and so will join here us at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. With its help, we hope to further advance artificial intelligence in a number of key areas.
The Watson program is already a breakthrough technology in AI. For many years it had been largely assumed that for a computer to go beyond search and really be able to perform complex human language tasks it needed to do one of two things: either it would "understand" the texts using some kind of deep "knowledge representation," or it would have a complex statistical model based on millions of texts.
Watson used very little of either of these. Rather, it uses a lot of memory and clever ways of pulling texts from that memory. Thus, Watson demonstrated what some in AI had conjectured, but to date been unable to prove: that intelligence is tied to an ability to appropriately find relevant information in a very large memory. (Watson also used a lot of specialized techniques designed for the peculiarities of the Jeopardy! game, such as producing questions from answers, but from a purely academic viewpoint that's less important.)
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As results in the Los Angeles school board election continued to be tabulated early Wednesday, two-term incumbent Monica Garcia held a strong lead in District 2, one-term incumbent Steve Zimmer maintained his slim lead in District 4 and Antonio Sanchez captured the most votes in the race for District 6 -- but he could be headed for a runoff.The school board race attracted national money and attention, becoming a battle over the reform policies of Supt. John Deasy.
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A survey of Harvard students by the Harvard University Employees Credit Union found that only 10 percent had any formal financial education.To bring students up to speed, the credit union and alumni helped designed a three-day crash course on financial management, investments, credit scores, and taxes. As part of the workshop, students collaborated on real-world exercises, such as budgeting to make the rent, and developed personal financial plans. Some students said they were just hoping to find out how credit cards worked.
"College students as a whole just aren't financially sophisticated," said Shahar Ziv, a Harvard Business School graduate who helped organize the workshop. "Harvard students are no different than other students. Succeeding academically does not necessarily translate into being financially literate."
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Five candidates are competing for three seats on the Madison school board, with the general election on April 2, 2013.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.The political context for the races is explosive, given Gov. Scott Walker's revolutionary proposals for education in Wisconsin: cuts to public school funding, an expansion of the voucher program, and a revamping of teachers' evaluations and bargaining rights.
In Madison, the issues are particularly complex, with the intense disagreements over the district's achievement gap between white and minority students.
In the race for Seat 3, former La Follette High School teacher and low-income housing provider Dean Loumos is running against retired Madison police lieutenant Wayne Strong. The winner will replace retiring school board member Beth Moss.
In this competitive series of elections, there are numerous candidate forums and listening sessions under way, and we thought we'd pose our own questions to candidates. We start by asking the candidates about their experience, and how they would address the achievement gap in the district.
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Robin Lake & Betheny Gross, via a kind Deb Britt email:
The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) has received a $500,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to study the financial and resource allocation implications of blended learning models.Led by Director Robin Lake and Research Director Dr. Betheny Gross, CRPE will analyze the financials of 30 K-12 blended learning schools, including schools funded through the Next Generation Learning Challenges, a Gates-funded competition to promote college readiness and completion and education technology.
Blended learning combines online and face-to-face instruction, allowing students to master content at their own pace and teachers to track progress and tailor lessons accordingly. There is tremendous interest nationally in its promise to dramatically customize and improve student learning by deploying technology and instructional resources in new ways. Understanding how schools can use technology, dollars, and teacher time in innovative ways will be key to the continued expansion and success of blended learning models.
CRPE will answer questions critical to the field, including:
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Third- and fourth-graders at Our Redeemer Lutheran School created the look of a wax museum by dressing up and remaining still in poses for about six minutes at a time.Visitors to the exhibit Feb. 21 at the West Side school could push a button pinned to the students' costumes to have them recite one of three facts they memorized about their characters. Tri-fold boards set on tables behind the students offered full biographies of the people they chose to portray from Henry Ford to Harry Houdini to Pocahontas.
"Some poses are harder than others," said fourth-grader Anika Stone, 9, who wore a gold coat and a diamond tiara to portray Queen Elizabeth.
"When you're standing, it's a little harder," said fourth-grader Erin Zenk, 10, who also portrayed royalty by wearing a white strapless gown as Princess Diana.
Anika as Queen Elizabeth interacted with another student, third-grader Will Popp, 8, who was dressed as Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, to depict when she made him an honorary knight.
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Madison middle school students could soon have an extra class period and smaller class sizes without adding minutes to the school day under a plan being developed by the Madison School District.eJoe Gothard, assistant superintendent for secondary education, said an eight-period day with 45-minute classes instead of seven 47- to 51-minute classes would give students opportunities to take more electives and help the district implement interventions for students struggling in reading and math. It also would be in line with some of the other area middle school schedules.
"We're looking for ways we can increase success for all students," Gothard said. "This is one way we're looking at."
Gothard said Cherokee and Black Hawk middle schools are closer than the district's other middle schools in possibly using an eight-period day next school year. The change wouldn't cost additional money and doesn't require School Board approval, he added.
The district planned to send a letter to parents over the weekend alerting them to the possible change.
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America's K-12 public education system has experienced tremendous historical growth in employment, according to the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. Between fiscal year (FY) 1950 and FY 2009, the number of K-12 public school students in the United States increased by 96 percent, while the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) school employees grew 386 percent. Public schools grew staffing at a rate four times faster than the increase in students over that time period. Of those personnel, teachers' numbers increased 252 percent, while administrators and other non-teaching staff experienced growth of 702 percent, more than seven times the increase in students.That hiring pattern has persisted in more recent years as well. Between FY 1992 and FY 2009, the number of K-12 public school students nationwide grew 17 percent, while the number of FTE school employees increased 39 percent. Among school personnel, teachers' staffing numbers rose 32 percent, while administrators and other non-teaching staff experienced growth of 46 percent, 2.3 times greater than the increase in students over that 18-year period; the growth in the number of teachers was almost twice that of students.
The two aforementioned figures come from "The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America's Public Schools." This companion report contains more state-specific information about public school staffing. Specifically, this report contains:
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The notes of the lecturer are passed to the notes of the listener - without going through the minds of either. - Mortimer AdlerMortimer Adler succinctly describes the mindless learning that follows mindless teaching.
Visualize a continuum with that form of teaching and learning at one end. At the other end place the kind of teaching that produces high levels of engagement, meaningful involvement with the subject matter, and the acquisition and exercise of complex cognitive skills. (A good share of the teaching students experience each day falls between those two extremes.)
The professional learning of teachers and administrators can be placed along a similar continuum.
To update Adler's description, at one end of the continuum the PowerPoint slides of the presenter are passed to the tweets of the students without going through the minds of either. At the other end is professional learning with qualities that closely resemble those described above for students--high levels of engagement, meaningful involvement with the subject matter, and the acquisition and exercise of complex cognitive skills
In my experience, the kinds of teaching/learning processes used in professional development have a profound effect on the teaching/learning processes used in the vast majority of' classrooms. Put another way, mindless professional learning produces mindless teaching. And vice versa.
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The Wisconsin Catholic Conference backed Gov. Scott Walker's proposed voucher expansion Tuesday.
In a letter to the Legislature, Archbishop Jerome Listecki of Milwaukee, Bishop Robert Morlino of Madison and the bishops of Green Bay, LaCrosse and Superior said their support for the expansion was not based on it potentially benefiting Catholic schools."We back this effort out of a conviction that parents, as the primary educators of their children, must have the community's support in selecting a form of education that best meets their child's needs -- academic, psychological, emotional, spiritual and physical," they wrote.
The bishops also rejected the argument from voucher opponents that the proposal undermines public schools.
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Can you have a public discussion on closing the achievement gap in Madison without inviting Kaleem Caire, the architect of a would-be charter school plan that pushed the issue of the Madison School District's persistent race-based gap to the front burner of local civic debate?Related Does the School Board Matter? Ed Hughes argues that experience does, but what about "Governance" and "Student Achievement"?Caire, CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, is not on the roster for the March 13 installment of Ed Talks Wisconsin, a UW-Madison-sponsored series on current education topics, when a Madison panel will discuss "Closing the Achievement Gap: Toward a Community-Wide K12 Agenda."
Joel Rogers, director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, the equity advocacy group that organized the achievement gap panel discussion, said Monday that the presentation was conceived as a response to Caire's education forum featuring such lights of the "school reform" movement as Geoffrey Canada, John Legend and Howard Fuller. At that two-day event last December, people heard a lot of talk promoting charter schools and greater teacher accountability as the answer to lagging performance by students of color.
"We wanted voices of people who think that, whatever its defects, public education is important in the 21st century," Rogers said, adding that Madison Mayor Paul Soglin urged him to organize a program.
For his part, Soglin said that Caire has organized a number of discussions, like December's "Educate to Elevate," and "he did not invite anyone with different opinions on charter schools to participate."
.......
The achievement gap presentation in Ed Talks was in response to the Urban League's education summit, but other programs in the eight-day series were suggested by a variety of other groups as early as last fall, organizer Sara Goldrick-Rab [SIS], an associate professor in the School of Education, told me.
The final event on March 21 is part of a two-day educational policy conference that the university has hosted for years, she said.
Ed Talks is funded by some $5,000 in donations from a variety of university entities, but some $8,000 in funding for the educational policy conference includes $300 from the local branch of the American Federation of Teachers and $500 from WEAC, Goldrick-Rab said.
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As American parents, students, educators, and concerned citizens, we are united in opposition to the agenda of those corporate, foundation, and government interests that seek to influence local district boards of education, state boards of education, state governments, governors, and the Office of the Secretary of Education. This agenda calls for standardization of national curricula in the form of the Common Core Standards mandated in the Federal initiative "Race to the Top," data-driven assessments of students and teachers, and the creation and implementation of standardized discrete item testing to measure compliance to the Common Core Standards. The president of the College Board's recent announcement that a new SAT will be created to measure Common Core Standards skills proficiency also alarms us. In addition, the Secretary of Education's former press secretary has recently used the "revolving door" of public office to acquire a job with a company that is related to Pearson LLC.
We demand transparency and public accountability for decisions that are being made on the above issues without open hearings or public debate on the influence of corporate lobbying and marketing at local, state, and federal levels. We strongly suspect the existence of quid pro quo understandings between the current Secretary of Education and Bill Gates, The Bill and Melina Gates Foundation, The College Board and David Coleman, The Educational Testing Service (ETS), and Pearson Education LLC that amount to collusion between a Federal Public servant(s) and corporate interests that appear to be working together to limit competition in an open marketplace.
We therefore resolve:
1) That State Attorneys General investigate possible quid pro quo agreements between the above parties and members of state boards of education and commissioners,
2) That State Attorneys General investigate lobbying of the above parties to determine whether bribery laws have been violated,
3) That all state governments conduct investigations of the contributions of Pearson LLC, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Students First Foundation to local school board elections and the elections or appointments of state education commissioners and state boards of education,
4) And that each state file a complaint with the Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice in Washington preliminary to discovery of evidence of possible collusion of the above parties.
5) We call for a Joint House-Senate Committee to be formed to investigate possible collusion and influence peddling between the above parties.
6) We call for the Attorney General of the United States to select an independent prosecutor to investigate the possibility of quid pro quo dealings and collusion between the parties above.
7) We understand that the Tunney Act does not apply to this case and we argue that is precisely why collusion is involved, to avoid merger or the appearance of merger that would trigger a court hearing.
8) We strongly recommend that the Special Prosecutor (6) investigate all contracts let by the Department of Education to Pearson Education LLC.
9) We strongly recommend that all State Attorneys General investigate all state contracts let by Pearson LLC.
Paul Horton
State Liaison
Illinois Council for History Education
History Instructor
University High School
The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools
773-702-0588
phorton@ucls.uchicago.edu
www.ucls.uchicago.edu
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While Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) may allow free education on an enormous scale, one of the biggest criticisms raised about MOOCs is that although thousands enrol for courses, a very small proportion actually complete the course. The release of information about enrollment and completion rates from MOOCs appears to be ad hoc at the moment - that is, official statistics are not published for every course. This data visualisation draws together information about enrollment numbers and completion rates from across online news stories and blogs.
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In a bold effort to improve the educational fortunes of students who perform at academic levels significantly below the average of their peers, Congress has mandated a minimum grade to be assigned to each student in each course taught at any school in the country. Starting in September, it shall be unlawful for any teacher, professor, or instructor charged with assigning course grades to assign to any student a grade lower than C-.Sponsors of the Fair Academic Standards Act decry the injustice that occurs each time a student earns a low grade, such as a D or an F. "It's impossible for students with 'D's and 'F's on their transcripts to succeed as they deserve in life," remarked Sen. Bernie Franken, an Independent from Elitia. "This law ensures that no American will ever again suffer that hardship."
Opponents of the Act worry that the requirement of a minimum grade will prompt schools to refuse to enroll students whose academic preparation or skills aren't yet sufficient to enable them actually to earn good grades.
Sen. Paul Rand, an outspoken opponent of the bill, admits that 'D's and 'F's are poor grades that are not likely to win good jobs for students that have many such grades on their transcripts. Sen. Rand argues, however, that the Act will steer schools away from enrolling less-prepared students and, as a consequence, deny these very students the opportunity to acquire the education that will enable them in the future to perform better in the classroom. "It's an unintended bad consequence of Sen. Franken's good intentions," suggests Sen. Rand.
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Sixty years ago this weekend the race to pin down the structure of DNA, the molecule of inheritance, was at a critical stage. In Cambridge Francis Crick and Jim Watson were realising how well a double helix would fit the available data. Meanwhile at King's College London the dysfunctional team of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, who had provided Crick and Watson with their most important evidence, were still unaware of the breakthrough in Cambridge.At this point Wilkins sent Crick a letter looking forward to the imminent departure of "our dark lady" - Franklin - to a new job at Birkbeck College. This would leave him free to take part in a final push to discover how genes are encoded. "I have started up a general offensive on nature's secret strongholds on all fronts," he wrote. "At last the decks are clear and we can put all hands to the pumps! It won't be long now."
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PJ O'Rourke, the US journalist and humourist wrote a book of essays entitled 'Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut'. Tempting as it is for a man in his fifties to make this point it is not my purpose in writing.We have a cult of youth in academia, certainly in the sciences. This widespread cult pays its obeisances to the dynamism of the 'early career' researcher and 'junior research fellow'. The cult shows sufficient awareness of the strictures of age discrimination legislation not to actually say 'young' though we are clearly to understand that is what is meant. The basis of the cult is that, supposedly, the young are particularly gifted with energy, creativity and the willingness to break the bonds of convention. These judged as the sole prerequisites of scientific achievement.
Evidence for this contention is drawn from the observation that in some areas of work, mathematics being a case in point, younger researchers are more frequently associated with ground breaking developments. It is propped up by examples of youthful genius culled from the history of science. It owes most however to the introspection of men (and yes, I mean this) in their fifties and sixties who either feel their creative powers waning or reflect, who knows how accurately, on their own careers.
None of this, I would humbly submit, is a sound basis for policy. The fact that younger scientists perform well in an age-diverse scientific community does not necessarily suggest that concentrating on (or worse concentrating) younger scientists is the way to achieve the desired outcomes. It is also unclear whether it is the career imperatives and personal situation of younger researchers that drives productivity rather than youthful creativity. Thus, the harsh 'up or out' US tenure system achieves its results by very direct economic and job incentives and not by any fairy dust sprinkled on younger researchers.
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NPR:
The hallways at Westlake High School in Maryland are just like thousands of other school hallways around the country: kids milling around, laughing and chatting on their way to class.On a recent morning, about 30 kids took their seats in a classroom that initially seems like any other. The major difference here is that instead of a chalkboard and a lectern at the head of the class, there are two enormous flat-panel screens and thin, white microphones hanging in four rows across the ceiling.
Greeting the students via Skype this morning is a dapper, bearded man in a brown vest. But it's not their history teacher, it's Kenneth C. Davis, author of Don't Know Much About History, who was invited to talk to the students about America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
This type of teaching is a novel approach, but it can be an expensive one. That has some asking whether the billions being spent on educational technology is worth the cost.
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Have you ever sensed in your own life that "the handwriting was on the wall"? Or encouraged a loved one to walk "the straight and narrow"?Have you ever laughed at something that came "out of the mouths of babes"? Or gone "the extra mile" for an opportunity that might vanish "in the twinkling of an eye"?
If you have, then you've been thinking of the Bible.
These phrases are just "a drop in the bucket" (another biblical phrase) of the many things we say and do every day that have their origins in the most read, most influential book of all time. The Bible has affected the world for centuries in innumerable ways, including art, literature, philosophy, government, philanthropy, education, social justice and humanitarianism. One would think that a text of such significance would be taught regularly in schools. Not so. That is because of the "stumbling block" (the Bible again) that is posed by the powers that be in America.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Bettner email(PDF):
During the next few weeks, many teachers will be advised by their principals that they have been declared "surplus" for the 2013-14 school year. While being declared surplus from one's position can be stressful, the stress is heightened by one confusing "surplus" with "layoff". These two provisions of the MTI/MMSD Collective Bargaining Agreement are separate and distinct with far different implications for the individual. Both are defined in Section IV-O of MTI's Teacher Contract (surplus procedures for MTI-represented EA, SEE and SSA employees differ and will be explained in future articles).A teacher who has been declared "surplus" is defined in the MTI/MMSD Collective Bargaining Agreement as any teacher presently teaching under a regular full-time or regular part-time contract who has been declared by their principal to be above staff requirements at their school for the ensuing school year or semester. Simply stated, a "surplus teacher" is a staff member who is no longer needed, in the school in which they currently teach, but is needed to teach elsewhere in the District.
A teacher who is issued notice of layoff is a staff member no longer needed to teach anywhere in the District, because they are above staff requirements for the District. Surplus declarations typically occur in March, while layoff decisions are made by the end of May.This year, the District's Human Resources Department provided staff allocations to principals/supervisors on March 1, giving them until March 11 to respond to HR with surplus declarations. Therefore, while the Contract deadline to declare surplus remains July 1, most surplus declarations are expected to occur by March 11 of this school year.
Issuing declarations of surplus is a two-step process
which, in accordance with the terms and conditions of the Contract, must begin with the principal first requesting volunteers. The purpose of requesting volunteers is to give teachers, who would otherwise not be declared surplus, an opportunity to change their assignment using the surplus/reassignment procedure. The principal does not have to accept the volunteer as surplus if the teacher volunteering to be surplus would result in the remaining teachers at the building not being certified to teach the remaining assignments at the school. If there are no volunteers, or if there are an insufficient number of volunteers, then the principal must declare the teacher(s) surplus using the procedure set forth in Sections IV-O-2 & 3 of the Collective Bargaining Agreement as follows:
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ACT Inc. has a standard characterization for how many students across the country earn a perfect 36 composite score on its flagship college admissions exam: less than 0.1% of more than 1 million test takers annually.Nicolet high school's annual report (2012) PDF. Nicolet high schools 2012 budget was $19,016,495 for 1310 students, or $14,516/student. Madison spends $14,242/student, including pre-k.This year, Nicolet High School is hosting an unusually large number of them.
Superintendent Rick Monroe reported Monday that two juniors, twin sisters Alexandra and Rachel Heuer, earned scores of 36 on the exam.
Junior Ben Lawton learned earlier this year that he earned a perfect ACT score.
So did seniors Nancy Gao and Annie Jen, who is 15.
Jen's twin brother, William Jen, who has similarly fast-tracked high school to become a senior before he can drive, just missed membership in the elite club. He scored a 35 on the ACT, according to Monroe.
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Not every Ph.D. student aspires to a career as a tenured college professor. But in plenty of fields, particularly the humanities, spending your life buried up to your elbow patches in books and papers is the gold standard of success. So while breaking down the National Science Foundation's data for my last two pieces on the job market for doctorate holders, I took a bit of time to look at just what fraction of new graduates were landing jobs in the academy.The good news? The numbers have only dropped a few percentage points in 20 years. The bad news? They were pretty low to begin with.
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Elizabeth Auritt & Delohibe Rodrik:
On a Thursday night in the spring of 2012, students huddled in study groups in Lamont Café, racing against the clock to finish an assignment due the next day. Notes and textbooks were shared, suggestions passed back and forth. There were dozens of students there, or at least enough that voices echoed to amplify the buzz of discussion.The task's guidelines for completion were hazy, and the fact that the course had many section leaders with varying expectations heightened the confusion. It was easy for members in the crowd to help each other out. For those who didn't understand, didn't have time, or just didn't care, group work turned into copying.
That summer, after Lamont had emptied out for the semester, the accusations came. The cheating was "unprecedented in anyone's living memory," according to Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris.
But the students who had collaborated in Lamont that spring evening faced no accusations. They had not been enrolled in Government 1310.
***
The students in Lamont, who were described by a fellow classmate, had been working on a problem set for Economics 10. It was Government 1310, though, that received national attention after Harris announced in August that the Administrative Board was investigating approximately 125 students for inappropriate collaboration on a take-home final in a spring course.
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Harvard Business School Professor Clay Christensen is the father of the idea of disruptive innovation, and one of a select few business thinkers who can claim that their theories influence the behavior of top companies.Right now, he thinks that his own employer is ripe for disruption. He's argued previously that higher education as a whole "is on the edge of the crevasse," and will be disrupted by online competitors. In a discussion at Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab (full video available here) Christensen focused specifically on the disruption of the MBA.
"You guys need to stay tuned because it's happening to the Harvard Business School," Christensen said. "It truly is and nobody at Harvard even thinks about it."
There are two things that make MBA programs like Harvard's ripe for disruption, Christensen argues. The first is the cost.
"To get a Harvard MBA, you gotta to be the best of the best of the best to get yourself admitted, and then we empty your pockets to the tune of $120,000," Christensen said. "Then you have two years of foregone salary. So this is a very intensive investment."
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More than 10,000 students across Idaho will be getting Khan Academy videos for homework, as the tutorial website launches its first state-wide pilot aimed at integrating online education with the regular classroom experience.Khan Academy is best known as a place where elementary, high school and college students go for help learning a concept they did not quite grasp when their instructor explained it. Particularly strong in mathematics and science, Khan Academy has been broadening its curriculum to encompass all subjects.
Khan's JavaScript-based tutorials on computer science were also cited in this week's Code.org marketing campaign arguing that all students should learn basic programming skills.
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If you have not seen GapMinder yet, it is a must from every math and history teacher!I was introduced to this amazing graphing software about a year ago at a conference, and I was so excited to play with it and use it in my classroom. But the how was a bit vague... Unfortunately the craziness of getting back to my classroom after three days out distracted me from the goal of figuring it out.
Well, the Common Core placing statistics back into Algebra 1 pushed me forward. I am so grateful. I want my students to understand numbers in the context of the larger world around them. And this is the perfect tool!
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Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Post-Secondary Education (2.6MB PDF):
To answer the guiding research questions, we developed a comparison group of academically and demographically similar non-participants to compare outcomes with AVID/TOPS students based on 8th grade pre-participation data. Using a statistical matching method called propensity score matching, we matched every AVID/TOPS student with a similar non-AVID/TOPS student at the same high school to create the comparison group.Using these groups, we test for statistically and practically significant differences on key measures of academic preparation (cumulative GPA, enrollment and GPA in core courses, enrollment and GPA in AP/Honors courses, and credit attainment), college knowledge (test-taking rates and performance on the EXPLORE, PLAN, and ACT tests), and student engagement (attendance rates and behavioral referrals).
Statistically significant differences are differences that are unlikely to have occurred through random chance and are large enough to reflect meaningful differences in practice. In this report, we highlight statistically significant differences with a red symbol: .To focus attention on underrepresented students' achievement, we disaggregated the measures by income and race. Though we report disaggregated findings, many of these groups are not mutually exclusive; for example, low-income students may also be African-American and therefore also represented in that data disaggregation. We do not report data from disaggregated groups that have fewer than five students in them. We then analyze this data at the program, grade cohort, and high school levels.
This assessment does not make causal claims about AVID/TOPS, nor does it present a longitudinal analysis of AVID/TOPS student achievement. Rather, the findings represent a single snapshot for achievement during the 2011-12 school year of the program's 9th, 10th, and 11th graders.
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The youth was on his way to class at the start of the day at Milwaukee South Division High School. But first he stopped to leave his headphones with Paola Felix Encarnacion.That was one small victory for the education of this young man who is in ninth grade for the second year - and one small accomplishment for Paola and the organization she works for, City Year.
I spent much of the spring of 2006 visiting large Milwaukee Public Schools high schools for a series of stories in this newspaper. At most of the schools, I spent a day following a specific student. Not surprisingly, schools generally matched me with one of their stars.
At South, I was paired with Paola. She was a junior then, the kind of kid you hope goes on to do good things for herself and others. Every time I passed near South Division in the last few years, I wondered what she was up to.
Last fall, I was invited to meet with the 50 or so young adults who are City Year "corps members" in Milwaukee this year. A nationwide program, City Year members work in eight MPS schools. The red jackets make them highly visible. They don't teach, but do lots of things to help students get engaged constructively in school. They run programs and clubs, mentor and tutor "at-risk" students, promote attendance and good behavior. A key to the work is just staying in touch daily with specific students. City Year is funded by AmeriCorps and by private money, including support from some of the most prominent donors in Milwaukee.
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Academic publishing is changing fast. In this post, I'll describe not only the exciting recent policy developments, but also several new models for the publication of scientific research.Undoubtedly open access in set to truly break through this year, mainly thanks to strong funder mandates (e.g. RCUK and Horizon 2020). The debate has started to shift to the relative merits of author-pays-gold (or rather, funder-pays; see below) and institutional-repositories-green models. (Please see Peter Suber's widely accepted definitions for the terminology). Richard Poynder continues his important coverage of the developments, describing in detail the controversy over the UK's gold-first policy in the international context:
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Since Sarah Manski dropped out of the Madison School Board race two days after winning her primary, she's been pilloried not only by the school district's smattering of conservatives but by the same liberal, pro-democracy folks she once epitomized.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.Leaving the race effectively left voters with little choice in who will get the seat she briefly coveted. It will either be second-place primary finisher T.J. Mertz or whomever the board appoints should Manski -- whose name will remain on the April general election ballot -- get the most votes.
Sure, Manski deserves the criticism.
But in creating the current mess, she had quite a bit of help from people pulling the district's strings back when she was just a kid.
Until 1985, if one candidate dropped out of a school board race it mattered less because candidates weren't required to run for particular, numbered seats.
Instead, they filed as candidates, primaries were held if the number of candidates was more than twice the number of seats up for election and, in the general election, voters voted for their top two or three choices, depending on whether there were two or three seats on the ballot.
Under that system, the people who actually got the most votes were assured of winning seats. And if one person dropped out of a six-person race -- say, after a primary -- you still had five to choose from.
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The hiring process for Madison School District superintendent had its strange twists, but it appears all are euphoric with first impressions of Jennifer Cheatham. Our new superintendent received the School Board's blessing, commendations from the mayor and community support for her pedigree and ability to relate to others.Much more on Jennifer Cheatham, here.However, one question that jumped out and either was never asked or not reported is why she never held a job longer than two years since she advanced to administration from a teacher position in 2003.
It's not as if she was upwardly mobile within one school district, but rather she switched cities and districts at every stop except the first. Madison is her fifth change of city in 10 years, according to a Friday article.
Generally candidates with this type of resume are either opportunists jumping at the next ladder rung, or they move on before their performance catches up with them.
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A kind reader forwarded a number of notes and links on the recent Wisconsin "open records" hearing:
Wisconsin eye video archive.The footnote 10 matter related to this SIS open records request.....This bill (8 R + 1 D sponsors) is making some strange, strange bedfellows: Bill Lueders speaking approvingly of Gov. Walker's open records release policy (unredacted emails) and criticizing (without calling out by name) Erpenbach for fighting MacIver Institute's open records lawsuit.
Former Madison Schools' counsel Dan Mallin is presently counsel to WASB, who is supporting the bill...perhaps an element of "Mallin's revenge" for the State AG/MMSD "spam" smackdown forever memorialized in footnote 10 of the supreme court opinion that this bill is seeking to overturn?
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recap:
http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/state-panel-raises-concerns-about-bill-allowing-charges-for-public-records-redactions-k38v0pq-193626741.html
Isthmus recap:
http://www.isthmus.com/daily/article.php?article=39271
this should have been titled "Journalists and citizen testify against".
WSJ editorial:
http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/opinion/editorial/don-t-charge-to-delete-information/article_3a8d4bac-819e-11e2-8ffc-0019bb2963f4.html
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Imagine that you have been accepted to Harvard Business School. The ivy-covered buildings and high-powered faculty whisper that all you need to do is listen to your teachers, get good grades and work well with your peers. After two years, you'll emerge ready to take the business world by storm. Once you have that degree, you'll have it made.But don't kid yourself. What matters exponentially more than that M.B.A. is the set of skills and accomplishments that got you into business school in the first place. What if those same students, instead of spending two years and $174,400 at Harvard Business School, took the same amount of money and invested it in themselves? How would they compare after two years?
If you want a business education, the odds aren't with you, unfortunately, in business school. Professors are rewarded for publishing journal articles, not for being good teachers. The other students are trying to get ahead of you. The development office is already assessing you for future donations. Administrators care about the metrics that will improve your school's national ranking. None of these things actually helps you learn about business.
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My daughter recently broke her finger playing basketball. When we went to the clinic, the waiting room was packed with dozens of patients, and there were only a couple of medical doctors on duty. We spent 20 minutes with a nurse, ten minutes with the X-ray technician, seven minutes with the orthopedic resident, and just two to three minutes with a doctor. Against apparent odds, our visit turned out very well. Thanks to the combination of talents, expertise and communication styles provided by several professionals, my daughter experienced a remarkably effective - and efficient - healing experience.In the school day of the future, imagine a similar scenario playing out in classrooms and schools here in California and across the country. The role of the teacher would evolve from that of a soloist to a choreographer, bringing together people and resources in different combinations to create a vibrant learning environment that efficiently serves a growing, evolving population and provides enrichment through a combination of caring relationships.
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The Star-Ledger thinks it's unveiled a conspiracy among retired NJ school superintendents. In "an investigation by the New Jersey Watchdog," the paper reports that these retired school administrators, while collecting generous pensions, proceed to "double-dip" by taking jobs as interim superintendents for up to two years. This sleazy practice is costing state taxpayers "millions of dollars" every year. Here's an example in the Watchdog report:Madison has had some if this as well."There are a lot of superintendents who are retiring and coming back to the work force," said longtime South Jersey school chief Ralph E. Ross Sr.When Ross hit the two-year mark at Deptford, the 72-year-old retiree didn't have to go far for his next post-retirement job. Ten miles away, the Monroe Township school district quickly hired him as its $136,500 interim assistant superintendent.Ross collected $292,272 last year - $149,256 in salary as interim superintendent of Deptford Township schools in Gloucester County, plus $143,016 from pension as retired superintendent of Black Horse Pike Regional schools in Camden County.
"Of course, people are going to call it double-dipping because you get paid twice," said Ross. "I don't apologize for any money I get. My services are worthwhile and appreciated."
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How much voting power does a New Yorker really wield? How can statistics presented by the media manipulate readers? How do you raise sweatshop wages without sacrificing profit?These are a few of the questions that math teachers in New York City are asking their students as they try to bring complex and abstract concepts to life. To answer them, students must supplement the equations and formulas found in textbooks by grappling with real-world applications.
The lessons cover a mathematical practice known as modeling that has been around for decades but is now getting a closer look in schools around the city as teachers try to align their math lessons to Common Core standards that require real-world applicability.
Using modeling to present lessons is one of two instructional focuses that the Department of Education has laid out this year for math teachers.
"It's the practice of solving real-world problems," said Brooklyn Technical High School's Patrick Honner, a teacher at Brooklyn Technical High School who in December won a $10,000 award for an innovative math lesson he developed.
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From yesterday's NJ Spotlight article on NJ's progress towards updating our charter school laws:"This is exciting," said Carlos Perez, executive director of the New Jersey Charter Schools Association. "We've talked about the need for a charter reform bill for some time now. The administration is absolutely correct that a strong charter law is the pathway to high quality charter schools."This excerpt is a useful window into some of the rhetoric surrounding the issue of local control and school choice. First, a reality check. There's no evidence that the "overwhelming majority" of NJ residents prefer local referenda on charter school expansion. Certainly there's terrible segregation among NJ's public schools, but that has nothing to do with charter schools. SOS's contention that school choice proponents are jockeying for "failed for-profit charter schools" is just silly.Others with a different vision for revising the charter-school law continued to oppose Christie's approach and policies.
"What the overwhelming majority of New Jersey residents want added to the charter law is local approval of new charter schools and of charter expansions, more transparency and accountability, and an end to the terrible segregation between charters and traditional public schools," said Julia Sass Rubin, a founder of Save Our Schools-New Jersey.
"Instead, the Governor is proposing failed for-profit charter schools and an increase in charter schools being forced on unwilling communities," she said. [Assemblyman Patrick] Diegnan, who has sided more with the positions of SOS and other critics of the Christie administration's policies, said he would continue to press for tighter controls.
For instance, Diegnan said his bill would include a controversial provision requiring a vote by local residents before any new charter school is approved to open.
"I remain a big advocate for that," he said.
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Just over half--or 54.1 percent, to be exact--of first-time college students starting school in 2006 graduated within six years. That's according to new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The full report, which breaks down completion rates by state, age, type of school, and enrollment status (part-time or full-time), shows some notable gaps in completion rates for those categories.For four-year public colleges, 81 percent of students enrolled full-time for the duration of their college experience graduated within six years--70 percent from the same institution they started with. But just 19 percent of those who attended school part-time graduated within six years. You'd think that's because it may be taking students longer than six years to complete a four-year degree part-time, right? Not really. Almost 70 percent of exclusively part-time students hadn't graduated and were no longer enrolled at any institution after six years. Meanwhile, mixed-enrollment students had an overall graduation rate of just under 47 percent. Four-year private nonprofit schools had a similar breakdown in graduation rates by enrollment status.
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A wave of recent research has pointed to the risks of overpraising a child. But for parents, drawing the line between too little praise and too much has become a high-pressure balancing act.Cara Greene, a mother of three children ages 1 to 8, is wary of deliberately pumping up her kids' egos, for fear of instilling the sense of entitlement she sees in young adults "who have been told they're wonderful and they can do anything." But she also wants them to have healthy self-esteem.
THE SITUATION: Your child is getting straight As inavery advanced math class.
DO: Say, 'I love seeing how hard you are working in this class. Life is going to bring some tough challenges, and putting in that kind of effort is going to help you.'
DON'T: Say, 'Look at your grades--all As! You're so smart you're off the charts.' (Lets child's self-esteem get out of line with reality, setting her up for a shock later.)
"We wouldn't be doing our children any favors by overinflating their egos. At the same time, I want them to have the confidence to tackle any challenge that is placed before them," says Ms. Greene, of New York City.
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There's one lovely aspect to the deep, dark winter in New Hampshire: It is a reprieve from The Season of Dress Code Enforcement.I teach middle school. And for as long as I have been a teacher, I have worried that my female students are so concerned with their newfound sex appeal that they forget to appreciate all the other gifts they offer to the world. I know it sounds petty, this interest in whether or not the girls in my classes show their legs, or shoulders, or breasts, to the world. My concerns sound like something a repressed, puritanical schoolmarm would worry about over her evening Earl Grey tea.
But when I worry about students, it tends to be the girls. They are the ones I lose sleep over. I am not just worried about inches of exposed anatomy: I am concerned for their souls, their being, and their sense of self.
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If first-grade creative writing were a language, it would be an obscure one. And Gini Shoulberg would be fluent.The nekes stashun.
My fimliy luv miu.
The wepuns.
Under Shoulberg's direction, hand-penciled passages like these are carefully translated into comprehensible nuggets and, eventually, strung together into stories.
The next station.
My family loves me.
The weapons...
For more than a decade, the first-grade language arts teacher at St. John Catholic School has led weekly writing workshops for all the school's first-graders. While spelling and punctuation are important, she says, children don't need to wait to master those skills before they start writing.
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THE decision by Grinnell College to continue -- for now -- to admit students regardless of their ability to pay raises a question that more and more parents are asking: how much does your financial situation matter in getting your children into college?Parents have long used their wealth to try to sway admissions officers, of course. But that doesn't always work. And it isn't necessarily true that a needier student is passed up.
"The misperception is schools first look at all the kids who can pay full freight and then look at the kids who are left over," said Kalman A. Chany, a financial aid consultant in New York and author of "Paying for College Without Going Broke." "Parents like to use this as an excuse. They'll say that if my kid didn't have to apply for aid, he'd get in. It's overblown. It's a rationalization."
Still, the vote by the board of trustees at Grinnell, a liberal arts college in Iowa, reflects a broader trend in financial aid. The college counselors I spoke to this week said the majority of colleges had already downgraded their policies to "need aware" -- meaning that the colleges accept most of their students without looking at their need for aid but will consider financial need for some percentage of the applicants. Others are already considering a parent's ability to pay in many of their admissions decisions.
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Building a digital legacy is an issue I believe doesn't garner enough attention in our personal and professional lives. In fact, some of the heaviest users of online tools and social media are our young students, who are growing up as a generation of visual learners and visual attention seekers. This is in fact the Facebook and YouTube generation, and the reality is that many teens are unconcerned about the dangers of sharing personal information online.mA highly respected education advocate, Kevin Honeycutt, once asked me if any of us from our generation (GenX and before), had ever made a mistake in puberty. He then asked if our mistakes are "Googleable."
The reality is that our mistakes from puberty are not "Googleable". But our students' mistakes are. "They're on the record you see, " Kevin continued, "so if they're gonna do it (live online) anyway, I think it behooves us a educators to help our students shape and build a positive legacy."
With that in mind, I have developed some important facts and opinions that our students should be completely aware of as they live in their digital world, creating digital footprints along the way.
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An annual event for Monroe Elementary School in Janesville will be a fundraiser for the school's principal. Principal Lori Burns remains on medical leave battling stage four breast cancer. She surprised her students by returning to school Thursday for their pep rally to kick off "Monroe Madness," the school's annual students verses staff basketball game. After three weeks, Burns returned to Monroe Elementary School to cheers, high fives and applause. "I have lesions on my brain, on my liver, my lungs and my vertebrae.
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A bachelor's degree is now required for jobs that used to be held by high school grads. Could this actually hurt your business?There's an idea that the person with a degree is "better" than a person without one. Indeed, The New York Times recently reported on the relatively new phenomenon of companies hiring people with college degrees for jobs that historically didn't require college degrees. Are you doing this in your business?
If so, I have to ask, better for what? Yes, having a four year degree does show a degree of dedication. You have to pick a major, take class after class, write paper after paper and work on dreaded group projects. (Which, in my humble opinion, should be banished off the face of the educational earth unless the professor is willing to act as a proper manager, which most are not.) But, anyway, in theory you learn some things and you demonstrate that you have stick-to-itiveness. This is worth something.
But what? You also have to assume that no one enrolled in college, shelled out fantastic amounts of tuition and studied for hours to memorize the philosophies of 40 different dead people with ambitions of becoming an administrative assistant. No, they had other goals.
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Ruth Simon & Rachel Louis Ensign:
The number of young borrowers who have fallen behind on their student loan payments has soared over the past four years, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said in a report released Thursday.According to the report, 35% of people under 30 who have student loans were at least 90 days late on their payments at the end of last year, up from 26% in 2008 and 21% at the end of 2004.
The new figures, which exclude borrowers who are still in school or aren't yet required to make payments, show that young Americans are having a tougher time repaying college loans as debt loads increase and job prospects remain shaky.
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The Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies has launched Smithsonian Quests, a digital badge program designed to foster project-based learning and inspire students to explore their own ideas and interests.To earn digital badges, students complete a series of online activities and submit their work for review by Smithsonian education experts. All quests engage students in exploring a topic of interest, either as part of a formal standards-aligned school curriculum or as a student-driven after school activity.
Activities offered include subjects such as creative writing, photography, oral histories, and graph-making. The cross-curricular, standards-aligned programs are intended to prepare students for college and future careers by incorporating knowledge and skill-building into the quests, according to a Smithsonian release.
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On a typical school night, while most chemistry students are solving homework problems, Verona High School junior Alison Ford is watching her teacher lecture on her iPod Touch.The next day in class she huddles with two classmates to work on equilibrium equations based on the recorded lecture while her teacher moves between groups of students to answer questions about the assignment.
"It's a lot nicer because instead of tying up class time trying to explain everything, it really allows you to learn at your own pace," Ford said.
Welcome to the "flipped classroom," a learning model that is going viral across Wisconsin and the nation. It's being employed not only in local elementary and high schools, but also at Madison Area Technical College, UW-Madison and even the Madison Fire Department.
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February 21, 2013 hour 1 mp3, hour 2 mp3
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Deborah Brauser
So-called "Internet addiction" is associated with increased depression and even druglike withdrawal symptoms, new research suggests.
A study of 60 adults in the United Kingdom showed that those who were classified as high Internet users had a significantly greater decrease in positive mood after logging off their computers than the participants classified as low Internet users.
"Internet addiction was [also] associated with long-standing depression, impulsive nonconformity, and autism traits," report the investigators, adding that the latter is "a novel finding."
"We were actually expecting that people who used the net a lot would display enhanced moods after use -- reflecting the positive reinforcing properties of the net," coinvestigator Phil Reed, DPhil, professor and chair in the Department of Psychology at Swansea University in the United Kingdom, told Medscape Medical News.
"So the key finding of an immediate increased negative mood, the withdrawal effect, was something of a surprise. But the more we looked into the literature, the more it seemed to fit the notion of an addictive disorder," added Dr. Reed.
He noted that the main takeaway message for clinicians is that some people may experience disruptions to their lives from excessive Internet use -- and that this can affect both their psychological and physical health.
In addition, patients "may need help exploring the reasons for this excessive use and what functions it serves in their lives."
The study was published online February 7 in PLoS One.
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Manski declined to name the other people who recruited her and has not returned calls since last Friday.Related: "We are not interested in the development of new charter schools" by Madison Mayor Paul Soglin.Soglin said when he spoke to Manski he did not know who the other candidates were or which seat she was going to run for.
"I thought she would be a good candidate committed to public education," Soglin said. "The only discussion I had with Sarah Manski was her candidacy for the School Board. There was nothing else to discuss."
Soglin said he was "disappointed for our community and disappointed for her" at the news of her withdrawal.
Matthews said in an email that Soglin referred Manski to him for a discussion about her candidacy, but that the grad school application never came up. He said he learned Manski would be moving to California when she called him at 6 p.m. on Feb. 20, the night before she announced her withdrawal from the race.
Madison's long time disastrous reading results and the school board.
2013 Madison School Election Intrigue (Public!)
Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board elections, here.
I'm glad DeFour continues to dig.
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When Sarah Manski pulled out of the school board race because her husband was accepted to graduate school in California, many asked, myself included, why would she wait until after the primary to do so?Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board Election, here. And, GRUMPS resurfaces.Now we know: It was all part of a plan to silence Ananda Mirilli, restorative justice manager at the YWCA in Madison, and also a person of color. Mirilli was unfairly and falsely targeted by Sarah Manski and her husband Ben as someone who was part of a movement to privatize public schools.
When I heard about this, I immediately assumed several members of Madison's white elite progressive community was behind this. I believe that there is a movement in this community to silence anyone that doesn't walk in lockstep with the status quo. They will trample over voices of color in order to preserve it.
I was accused by some of rushing to judgment. Yet I have not heard any of these people call for an investigation into who else knew about Manski's plan and when.
In my last column, I wrote that Madison's communities of color needed to become involved and engaged. They need to get off the sidelines and get in the game.
What I failed to add to that was it's also hard to become a part of the game when it's rigged against you.
If these had been two Republicans placing first and second in this primary with a Democrat finishing third under the same circumstances, progressives would be storming the Capitol right now. There would be hard-hitting editorials in progressive newspapers accusing conservatives of rigging elections, not the fluff pieces that we've been reading.
Madison's communities of color are constantly told by white progressives that people like Governor Scott Walker, radio talk show host Vicki McKenna and blogger Dave Blaska are the enemy. While some may agree, they haven't been the ones silencing, patronizing and marginalizing folks of color in Madison. That distinction belongs to the liberal establishment in this community.
You have consistently done the most harm to us, and it stinks. We're tired of it.
As a former Urban League board member and chair, I am also disgusted by the way this organization has been treated by some of Madison's political establishment. The Urban League has been at the forefront of many issues concerning the disenfranchised and people of color in this community, in particular, education. Yet over the past couple of years they have been treated like garbage.
Ever since CEO Kaleem Caire shined a bright light on an achievement gap and low graduation rates for students of color that has plagued the Madison Metropolitan School District for decades -- even offering an idea to help to address it -- Caire has been painted as a right-wing operative with the intent to privatize and destroy public schools. Almost anyone else who supported Madison Prep has been labeled the enemy because communities of color are asking for a better future for their children.
The smear campaign began with Nichele Nichols failed run for school board last year, and now Mirilli this year.
While I'm angry about what happened to Mirilli, I'm also happy she decided not to run as a write-in candidate. She had no chance of winning and running would have made white progressives in this city feel better about themselves.
They'd say, "At least she had a chance."
Make no mistake about it: She had no chance. Everyone knows it.
I understand that it's not fair to paint all white liberal progressives in Madison with a broad brush. Many are just as outraged by what's been happening to folks of color in this community as we are.
If you sit by and watch while it happens and fail to stand up for what's right, you become just as complicit as the ones who are doing it.
To the communities of color in Madison, I say this: Don't forget what happened here. If there was ever a time to organize and become engaged, it is now.
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Michael Horn & Clay Christensen:
Everyone's going MOOC-crazy these days. From frequent media coverage of online courses and platforms like Coursera, edX, Udacity, and Udemy to discussions about the complexities and business models of online education, the excitement around MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) has finally "bubbled" over.The question is not just whether MOOCs are going to disrupt traditional education, but how. Is it just about lower costs and access? Is it really going to be a Napster-like moment with entrenched "Teamsters in tweed" worried about the erosion of their research, publishing, and teaching?
This is where we can leave the realm of hype and commentary to draw on our own years of research into disruption theory. Because the curious thing about the MOOC wave of disruption is that the market leaders -- not just upstarts from the edges -- are the ones pioneering it. And that rarely happens.
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There's something deeply peculiar about the way we teach children to play the violin. It's a very difficult skill for them to master--getting their fingers under control, holding the bow properly, learning how to move it over the strings without scratching and slipping. But just as they are finally getting there, are beginning to feel confident, to hit the right notes, to sound a bit like the musicians they hear, we break the news to them: we've taught them to play left-handed, but now it's time to do it like grown-ups do, the other way around.Alright, I'm fibbing. Of course we don't teach violin that way. We wouldn't do anything so absurd for something as important as learning an instrument, would we? No--but that's how we teach children to write.
It's best not to examine the analogy too deeply, but you see the point. The odd thing is that, when most parents watch their child's hard-earned gains in forming letters like those printed in their storybooks crumble under the demand that they now relearn the art of writing "joined up" ("and don't forget the joining tail!"), leaving their calligraphy a confused scrawl of extraneous cusps and wiggles desperately seeking a home, they don't ask what on earth the school thinks it is doing. They smile, comforted that their child is starting to write like them.
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"Nothing is more determinative of our future than how we teach our children," California Gov. Jerry Brown said in his January State of the State address. "If we fail at this, we will sow growing social chaos and inequality that no law can rectify."Bad news, governor: California is already failing its children. And it wasn't always this way.
According to RAND Corp., as late as the 1970s California's public schools still had an "excellent" reputation. Then, in 1975, Brown (in his first stint as California's governor) signed the Rodda Act, giving government unions the power to take money directly out of government employees' paychecks.
The California Teachers Association quickly poured this new revenue stream into an organizing drive, more than doubling the union's ranks. The Golden State's politics have never been the same since -- nor has the quality of its public schools. Between 2000 and 2010, the CTA spent more than $211 million to influence California voters and elected officials. That is more money than the oil, tobacco and hospital industries combined.
The CTA's first big political victory came in 1988, when it helped pass Proposition 98, which amended the California Constitution to mandate that at least 39 percent of the state budget be spent on K-12 education spending. Since then, California teacher salaries have skyrocketed and are now among the highest in the nation (only Massachusetts and New York pay more).
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Because the horse is not dead, I feel I'm allowed to keep beating it. So: Another study of student attitudes toward paper and electronic textbooks has appeared, and like earlier ones -- see here, here, here, for example -- it reveals that our so-called digital natives prefer print. The new study, by four researchers at Ryerson University in Toronto, appears in the Journal for Advancement of Marketing Education. "Although advocates of digitized information believe that millennial students would embrace the paperless in-person or online classroom, this is not proving to be the case," they write, as studies to date find "most students reiterating their preference for paper textbooks."They point out that a lot of the research up to now has started "with the assumption that the innovation [in e-textbooks] is an improvement over previous technology":
Undergraduate students are generally assumed to be skilled in using digital resources for acquiring the knowledge necessary to achieve success in tests and exams. However, researchers often overlook students' personal beliefs about how they learn and study most effectively. Their resistance to replacing paper textbooks with e-textbooks together with an ongoing desire to be able to print electronic content suggests that paper-based information serves students' needs better in the educational context.
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One spring afternoon, O. Perry Walker High School Principal Mary Laurie made her way to the school's courtyard, where a lone student sat at a picnic table with a large stack of papers in front of him and a frustrated look on his face. Laurie recognized the student as a shy senior with one of the highest GPAs in his class.The documents, it turned out, were all from Tuskegee University. Tuskegee had accepted the 18-year-old, offering him a full scholarship. But they required a $500 deposit within the next few days if he wanted to secure his spot. The student had no idea what to do.
"If that's where you want to go, let me know," Laurie said. "I'll try to get the five hundred dollars."
The student said nothing.
"You want to go to college, baby?" Laurie asked gently.
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"Half of life is just showing up." I once loved repeating that to my students who were regularly absent from school. Like all good quotes, it owns a perfect blend of simplicity, adaptation, and sublimity. I used to love saying it, that is, until a young child curtly responded, "Sometimes I can't find a way to show up." I wasn't sure if he meant that, or if he was attempting to create his own unique axiom, but it certainly struck me. After all, if he cannot find a way to show up to school, how can we expect him to succeed?
Chronic absenteeism--missing more than 10 percent of school a year--occurs at rates three to four times higher in high-poverty areas, according to a study of six states conducted by Johns Hopkins University in May of last year. In these low-income communities, it is normal to find a quarter of the class missing every day, with some students missing 30 to 40 days a year--a fact that, as an inner-city English teacher, I regularly witness firsthand.The most alarming part is that multiple studies across various states show kindergartners to have the highest rate of absenteeism outside of high school students. Educators and policymakers have known for years that falling behind before 3rd grade has a high correlation not just with high school dropout rates, but with incarceration rates as well. Children this young are not playing hooky or uninterested in learning--five minutes alone with any 1st grader yields more questions than you can answer without jumping on Wikipedia. The reasons these children stay home can all be traced to poverty.
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Over the past week, I have been debating one Jeff Simpson over at Forward Lookout, the Progressive Dane-inspired blog site he shares with Madame Brenda and Lukas Diaz. Jeff is an appointed member of the Monona Grove School Board, a defender of teachers unions, an opponent of parental school choice, and a reliable messenger for ever-higher school spending. (Last spring Simpson testified during MG school budget hearings in favor of a $13 million hike in MG school district property taxes.)I highlight this discourse as an example of the "one-size-fits-all" mentality that controls the education establishment, which is resistant to educational reform. It is a command-control philosophy one would have thought discredited at the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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Why such fervor? Such anguish? In an era of budgetary belt tightening, and in the wake of the 2008 market crash, state and local policymakers are finally awakening to the impact of teacher-pension costs on their bottom lines. Recent reports demonstrate that such pension programs across the United States are burdened by almost $390 billion in unfunded liabilities. Yet most states and municipalities have been taking the road of least resistance, tinkering around the edges rather than tackling systemic (but painful) pension reform.Many have suggested that one solution to the pension crisis is to offer teachers the option of a 401(k)-style plan (also known as a "defined contribution" or DC plan) in lieu of a traditional pension (known as "defined benefit" or DB plans). We see much merit in that approach, but we also wondered whether this alternative would appeal to teachers. Would certain types of teachers--new, veteran, more educated, etc.--naturally gravitate to one type of retirement plan or the other? Might it be the case that more (or less) effective teachers or teachers in harder-to-staff subjects would prefer DC plans due to their portability or other advantages (real or perceived)? If so, this would suggest that offering alternatives to traditional DB pensions could be a useful tool for improving teacher quality and/or supply. If the opposite is true, this could raise concerns about moving away from traditional DB systems.
To investigate these possibilities, we turned to Professor Martin West of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who is also an executive editor of Education Next and deputy director of Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG). West tapped his colleague Matthew Chingos, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution's Brown Center on Education Policy. This dynamic duo advised us that Florida was uniquely positioned to address our questions, it being one of just two states that allow teachers to choose between DB and DC plans, and the only place, at least for now, that can link information about teachers' pension-plan decisions with administrative data on those same teachers and their students (including value-added achievement data).
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Milton Friedman must be dancing in his grave at the moment. In every economic crisis there's an opportunity to impose change, he professed, and no smart leader let such an opportunity pass by. Especially when it comes to undermining public goods.Leaders of MOOC movements across the nation, including here at home in UW-Madison, are telling us that this is simply the right time to take the leap into a transformed space in higher education, one enabled by technology. I have absolutely no doubt that they sincerely believe this. And I have equally little doubt that most are entirely unaware of their place in history, and the degree to which they are acting out a narrative written many decades earlier.
MOOCs are not primarily or even secondarily about bringing open, no-cost education to the masses. Instead, these efforts created by private elite institutions and for-profit businesses squarely aim to outsource traditional governmental functions in education, and divert taxpayer dollars from the building of public assets and institutions to create long-term revenue streams and profit for corporations. That's privatization, period.
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The idea that boys are better at math and in competitions has persisted for a long time, and now we know why: Nobody bothered to schedule the rematch.Most school math contests are one-shot events where girls underperform relative to their male classmates. But a new study by a Brigham Young University economist presents a different picture.
Twenty-four local elementary schools changed the format to go across five different rounds. Once the first round was over, girls performed as well or better than boys for the rest of the contest.
"It's really encouraging that seemingly large gaps disappear just by keeping them in the game longer," said BYU economics professor Joe Price.
Price co-authored the study with the University of Miami's Christopher Cotton and Rutgers' Frank McIntyre. Their report is published by the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
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