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Mona Lisa and Kip Harding from Montgomery, Alabama, home-school all ten of their kids - six of whom started college by the age of 12.The remaining four children are ten and under and also aim to go to college early.
A mother who home-schools her ten children in Montgomery, Alabama, has opened up about how six of them began their college degrees by the age of 12.
Those of the Harding siblings who have already graduated from college have gone on to become a doctor, an architect, a spacecraft designer and a master's student. Another two - 12 and 14-years-old - are still finishing up their degrees.
But despite the Hardings' incredible achievements at such young ages, their parents - Mona Lisa and Kip - insist they are a family of 'average folks' who simply find and cultivate their children's passions early on.
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Madison Teachers Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Bettner email (PDF):
MTI has filed notice with the Board of Education and the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission (WERC) to open bargaining for 2014-15 Collective Bargaining Agreements for all five (5) MTI bargaining units. Bargaining is enabled by Judge Colas' decision that Act 10, which sought to bar public sector bargaining, is unconstitutional. The City of Madison and the County of Dane have contracts with all City and County unions through 2015.Fascinating. It appears likely that Madison's "status quo" governance model will continue.Last week MTI filed an additional petition with Judge Colas because of the failure of the Governor and the WERC Commissioners to implement those parts of Act 10 which Colas found to violate the Wisconsin Constitution. The WERC Commissioners contend that, because Judge Colas did not issue an injunction, they may ignore his declaratory judgment when considering cases filed at the WERC. The WERC Commissioners and the Governor apparently believe that without a specific injunction directing them to abide by the Court's declaration of unconstitutionality, they are free to apply the law as they, not the Court, interprets it.
MTI Executive Director John Matthews said, "The above-described actions of the WERC Commissioners and the Governor, who are parties to the case, are unprecedented. They argued that the law was constitutional and they lost. They asked for a stay from the Circuit Court and the Court of Appeals and they lost. By implementing and enforcing a law determined to be unconstitutional, they are saying 'We are above the law.' That is intolerable. Consequently, MTI has returned to court to seek an injunction to force the WERC Commissioners, and the Governor who controls them, to respect the Courts and follow the law."
MTI expects to exchange bargaining proposals with the District within the next few weeks. MTI represents approximately 5,000 District employees in five different bargaining units. They are teachers (MTI), educational assistants (EA-MTI), clerical/technical employees (SEE-MTI), substitute teachers (USO-MTI) and school security assistants (SSA-MTI).
In addition to the usual topics, MTI bargaining will include District proposals to amend Contract terms about parent-teacher conferences and possible extension, in some schools, of the school day and school year.
Commentary on Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes' Teacher Salary Increase Colloquy.
Madison's long term disastrous reading results.
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Dazzled by the potential of free online college classes, educators are now turning to the gritty task of harnessing online materials to meet the toughest challenges in American higher education: giving more students access to college, and helping them graduate on time.Nearly half of all undergraduates in the United States arrive on campus needing remedial work before they can begin regular credit-bearing classes. That early detour can be costly, leading many to drop out, often in heavy debt and with diminished prospects of finding a job.
Meanwhile, shrinking state budgets have taken a heavy toll at public institutions, reducing the number of seats available in classes students must take to graduate. In California alone, higher education cuts have left hundreds of thousands of college students without access to classes they need.
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In 2002, educator Ryan Hill opened his dream school with all of 80 students, four teachers and one office manager. "I was there till midnight every single night," he said. "It was really hard."Like many startups, the Newark middle school started with a single grade level and grew by adding a grade each fall. Eleven years later, TEAM Academy belongs to what is essentially a four-campus mini-district: two elementary schools, another middle school and a 525-student high school, each of which grew the same way. The TEAM charter school network, part of the national KIPP schools movement, enrolls 1,800 students, with plans to double over the next few years to 10 schools. Its waiting list, almost 9,000 names long, covers nearly one in four Newark students.
The secret to Hill's success: starting from scratch. "Learning how to manage four people is not easy," he said, "but (it's) way easier than learning how to manage 40. It allows you as a principal to grow into the role and makes it possible for more people to pull it off."
The Obama administration has long supported charter school startups like TEAM Academy, but it now invests much more -- $3 billion in all -- into a very different strategy. Instead of starting from scratch, Obama wants to "turn around" the USA's worst public schools, improving the schools we've got.
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Kim Wright took a few college courses after graduating high school but never earned a degree.Though she thought about going back to school for years, financial constraints always held her back.
So when her employer told her about a self-paced online program that would help her earn her associate degree in less than two years, she jumped at the chance.
"I always want to challenge myself, to get more knowledge and prove that I can do it," Wright said Wednesday. "I'm just excited to see how far I can go."
Wright, facilities manager at The Moore Center in Manchester, which provides care to individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities and brain injuries, is one of about 500 employees from companies and organizations around the country participating in an eight-month pilot program of Southern New Hampshire University's College for America online, competency-based degree program.
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The New York Times, Slate and Al Jazeera have recently drawn attention to the adjunctification of the professoriate in the US. Only 24 per cent of university and college faculty are now tenured or tenure-track.Much of the coverage has focused on the sub-poverty wages of adjunct faculty, their lack of job security and the growing legions of unemployed and under-employed PhDs. Elsewhere, the focus has been on web-based learning and the massive open online courses ( MOOCs), with some commentators celebrating and others lamenting their arrival.
The two developments are not unrelated. Harvard recently asked its alumni to volunteer their time as "online mentors" and "discussion group managers" for an online course. Fewer professors and fewer qualified - or even paid - teaching assistants will be required in higher education's New Order.
Lost amid the fetishisation of information technology and the pathos of the struggle over proper working conditions for adjunct faculty is the deeper crisis of the academic profession occasioned by neoliberalism. This crisis is connected to the economics of higher education but it is not primarily about that.
The neoliberal sacking of the universities runs much deeper than tuition fee hikes and budget cuts.
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That represents a grievous failure to manage. That's a simple fact. The absence of any assessment of the quality and efficacy of these programs constitutes an indisputable failure to manage the programs. How can the District make decisions based on data if there is no data?The Board has a duty to oversee the district's management - not to meddle or micromanage, but to confirm that the management work is getting done. Given the poor documentation, rapid turnover at the executive level, and history of non-management, this duty carries more than ordinary weight.
Towards that end, the Board conducted a work session to review the management of two of these efforts - Advanced Learning and Native Education. The Board not only noticed the absence of reports on the quality or effectiveness of these programs, but throughout the department. Director Carr decried the absence of any meaningful metrics or benchmarks for the entire C & I operation. She noted the absence of Key Performance Indicators. Others noted the mismatch between objectives, measures, and targets for the department. It wasn't lost on them.
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For the Netherlands, and its capital Amsterdam in particular, 2013 is promised to be a momentous year. On April 13th the city celebrated the re-opening of its famous Rijksmuseum with the centre of attention pointed at the Rembrandt's Nightwatch. Jubilees in the city in 2013 include the Artis zoo, the Royal Concert Gebouw, its Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and 400 years of constructing the iconic canals of Amsterdam. Adding to the festivities is the inauguration of the new king Willem Alexander who is succeeding his abdicated mother queen Beatrix on April 30th. As if these weren't enough reasons to plan a visit to the Venice of Northern Europe, the city government is hosting a competition to start a new research university with the alluring title Amsterdam Metropolitan Solutions.The establishment of a new university in Amsterdam should first and foremost be seen in the light of supra-national policy goals set by the European Union.
It all starts in 2000 in Lisbon with the European Commission determined to transform Europe into the top-region in the world for research, innovation and educational excellence through the Lisbon Strategy. When it comes to EU policy strategies, the Dutch have a strong tendency to act accordingly to their proclaimed status of being the bravest and smartest young child in the classroom. Together with their 'big brother' Germany, the Netherlands holds a comparable approach when it comes to the national deficit not exceeding 3% of the gross national income on which EU member states agreed upon in 1997. The European Union pours billions of euros - 50,5 to be precise - in fundamental research through their 7th Framework Programme up till 2013, followed by another subsidy programme Horizon 2020 with an estimated 80 billion Euros being invested in the European knowledge economy between 2014 and 2020. From a European perspective the Dutch feel they have a knowledge-intensive responsibility to live up to.
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It has been 30 years since the landmark report "A Nation At Risk" documented the failings of America's public-school system, and the past three decades have seen much promising reform on the local, state and federal levels, in legislatures, on school boards and in classrooms. Yet today the trend lines again are moving in the wrong direction, with federal policy inviting states to back away from their duty to ensure that students receive the education they deserve.Since 2011, the U.S. Department of Education has granted waivers to 34 states and the District of Columbia exempting them from some of the core accountability measures in the bipartisan 2001 No Child Left Behind law. Ten more states have waiver applications pending. Meanwhile, the Texas legislature is considering loosening public-school testing standards, and nine districts in California have independently moved to submit NCLB waiver requests.
No Child Left Behind was based on the idea that schools should establish measurable educational goals and be held accountable for meeting them. This is the only proven formula for improving education in this country--and NCLB has generated some amazing results, particularly in low-income minority communities. Unfortunately, opponents of the law have relied on disingenuous claims in pushing for waivers.
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Here's a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion.Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer.
What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.
One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.
To make this trend concrete, consider two children, one from a family with income of $165,000 and one from a family with income of $15,000. These incomes are at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the income distribution nationally, meaning that 10 percent of children today grow up in families with incomes below $15,000 and 10 percent grow up in families with incomes above $165,000.
In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children's success in school than race.
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In San Francisco this week, more than 14,000 educators and education scholars have gathered for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. The theme this year is familiar: Can schools provide children a way out of poverty?
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If not the usual suspects, what's going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.
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But we need to do much more than expand and improve preschool and child care. There is a lot of discussion these days about investing in teachers and "improving teacher quality," but improving the quality of our parenting and of our children's earliest environments may be even more important. Let's invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.
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On Tuesday, the commission released a list of recommendations that would significantly change the management of Columbus City Schools. Those included:Reimagine Columbus Education.The mayor, city council president, school board president, city auditor and county probate judge would appoint an independent auditor to monitor the school board.
A fund overseen by a panel from the private sector, schools and city government would oversee a fund of $35 million to $50 million to help replicate high-performing city schools and successful charter schools. A portion of that money would come from property taxes paid by district residents.
The mayor would re-start a department of education in his administration. The director would sit on the school board as a non-voting, advisory member.
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My frustrations are with the rigidity of my actual degree requirements - the credits I have to take in order to graduate. The credits for which I've wasted hours of email back and forth, running around getting signatures, and filling out petition forms in order to get them to line up with my little degree chart so I can check off the appropriate boxes and graduate on time.Great points.My frustrations are with the lack of an applicable concentration that reflects the state of the news industry in 2013.
How is it okay that journalism students are able to graduate without ever taking a real statistics or mathematics class, given the crazy demand for data journalists? Or without ever taking a programming class?
The field of journalism has always been interdisciplinary, though traditionally this has been with the non-technical disciplines - the humanities, economics, political science.
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These are serious marks against both our athletic program and our university as a whole -- marks that, other than a decision made by Coach Kevin Ollie to suspend Wolf indefinitely, have gone unaddressed, unmentioned, and unacknowledged by UConn authorities. What does this timeline say when juxtaposed with your justification? It beckons the question, what does UConn do with marks like these? The answer appears to be: we turn them blue and shape them into something new.Instead of giving these problematic aspects of male athletic peer culture at UConn a second look or a giving the real face of athletics a true makeover, it appears that the focus of your administration is prioritizing the remodeling of the fictional face of the Husky Logo. Instead of communicating a zero tolerance atmosphere for this kind of behavior, increasing or vocalizing support to violence against women prevention efforts on campus in the face of such events, or increasing support to student run programs that seek to work with athletes on issues of violence as well as academic issues, it would appear that your administration is more interested in fostering consumerism and corporatization than education and community. Another example of this shift in priorities can be seen in the current administrations selection of the new logo -- a selection made with no involvement from or consultation with the normal, everyday, non-Olympian student body:
Contrary to speculation, the Husky will not appear to be mean, snarling, or capable of frightening small children! Instead he will be rendered as the sleek, beautiful animal a real Husky truly is.
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May 1 is fast approaching, and with it the deadline for high-school seniors to commit to a college. At kitchen tables across the country, anxious students and their parents are asking: Does it really matter where I go to school?When it comes to lifetime earnings, we've been told, a bachelor's degree pays off six times more than a high-school diploma. The credential is all that matters, not where it's from--a view now widely accepted. That's one reason why college enrollment jumped by a third last decade and why for-profit schools that make getting a diploma ultraconvenient now enroll 1 in 10 college students. But is it true that all colleges sprinkle their graduates with the same magic dust?
With unemployment among college graduates at historic highs and outstanding student-loan debt at $1 trillion, the question families should be asking is whether it's worth borrowing tens of thousands of dollars for a degree from Podunk U. if it's just a ticket to a barista's job at Starbucks. When it comes to calculating the return on your investment, where you go to school does matter to your bank account later in life.
Not surprisingly, research has found that a degree from a name-brand elite college, whether it's Harvard, Stanford or Amherst, carries a premium for earnings. But the 50 wealthiest and most selective colleges and universities in the U.S. enroll less than 4% of students. For everyone else, the statistics show that choosing just any college, at any cost for a credential, may no longer be worth it.
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A legislative move to expand a planned audit of the University of Wisconsin System is entirely appropriate given the recent revelation that the system has $648 million in reserves spread across hundreds and possibly thousands of accounts.Students and families who faced 5.5% tuition increases in recent years deserve to know why those increases were necessary when university officials were setting aside money in those accounts for various purposes. Couldn't the university have set aside fewer funds, still have a (albeit smaller) contingency and not raised tuition?
The public also deserves to know more about the reserves, including where the money came from, how the university determined the level of reserves and how the funds are allocated across the system. Are those funds in interest-bearing accounts?
And university officials need to address issues of transparency and accountability. Legislators are rightly angry that they were unaware of the size of the reserve funds, which came to light in a report by the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau. That should not have been the case.
University officials have acknowledged that they should have been more forthcoming about the numbers and should have done a better job of explaining them. Absolutely: System officials have mishandled this from the moment the report came to light, and they haven't been getting much better. It's a public relations disaster for the UW System.
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Let's take a trip to the basement of Wisconsin educational success.The spotlight on student success is almost always on the top levels - "advanced" and "proficient," as they are labeled. I've done it that way for years myself, focusing on what percentage of kids were doing well.
How many were at what I would call the ground level of success (labeled "basic") or basement level ("minimal") got little attention.
But as I strolled through some of the scores for schools across the state that were released last week by the state Department of Public Instruction, I found my focus shifting to the "minimal" totals.
Why? The results differ so dramatically from previous years. The bar for putting a student in the higher categories for reading and math has been raised sharply, which means the number of students in those categories has fallen sharply. There are a lot more kids in the basement now - 24% of all test-takers in the state were rated "minimal" in reading, compared to 5% a year ago.
We've never given a school respect for keeping down the number of kids who show minimal proficiency. In the new approach, maybe it's time to do that. That's especially true in Milwaukee, where students at high-risk of not doing well are so plentiful.
There is a wide variation from school to school in how many students are rated "minimal," as compared to "basic," even in schools dealing with similarly challenging kids. There are schools with extraordinary concentrations of "minimal" kids, which I take as not a good sign about the school.
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Kids have been trying to sneak portable electronic devices into classrooms for decades. From the old Coleco handheld football game to today's smart phones, anything that glowed, made obnoxious noises, and could fit neatly inside a knapsack was enough to satisfy kids' appetite for distraction.Well, here's some bad news for students: Your ongoing rebellion will now have to take another form. For fun, try sneaking a slide rule onto campus. But bring your iPad. You're going to need it for class.
"The way that technology has provided mass customization to many other industries, it's starting to do the same thing for education." - Jon Tanner, Oregon School DistrictThe technological revolution that's overtaking the business world, our social lives, and nearly every other nook and cranny of society is quickly reshaping education, and locally, the Oregon School District is among the leaders in the movement.
At the December School Leaders Advancing Technology in Education (SLATE) conference, participants identified preparing for advances in technology as the number one issue facing Wisconsin schools.
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500K PDF, via a kind reader's email.
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ABOVE the entrance to America's Supreme Court four words are carved: "Equal justice under law". The court is pondering whether affirmative action breaks that promise. The justices recently accepted a case concerning a vote in Michigan that banned it, and will soon rule on whether the University of Texas's race-conscious admissions policies are lawful. The question in both cases is as simple as it is divisive: should government be colour-blind?America is one of many countries where the state gives a leg-up to members of certain racial, ethnic, or other groups by holding them to different standards. The details vary. In some countries, the policy applies only to areas under direct state control, such as public-works contracts or admission to public universities. In others, private firms are also obliged to take account of the race of their employees, contractors and even owners. But the effects are strikingly similar around the world (see article).
The burden of history
Many of these policies were put in place with the best of intentions: to atone for past injustices and ameliorate their legacy. No one can deny that, for example, blacks in America or dalits in India (members of the caste once branded "untouchable") have suffered grievous wrongs, and continue to suffer discrimination. Favouring members of these groups seems like a quick and effective way of making society fairer.
Most of these groups have made great progress. But establishing how much credit affirmative action can take is hard, when growth also brings progress and some of the good--for example the confidence-boosting effect of creating prominent role models for a benighted group--is intangible. And it is impossible to know how a targeted group would have got on without this special treatment. Malays are three times richer in Singapore, where they do not get preferences, than in next-door Malaysia, where they do. At the same time, the downside of affirmative action has become all too apparent.
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WILLIAM POWERS is the president of the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin). Lino Graglia holds an endowed chair at its law school. Both have kindly demeanours, impressive records and that crucial perk of academic success, offices with great views: Mr Powers looks out over the heart of the university's campus, Mr Graglia at its football stadium.They also hold strong and opposing opinions on whether admissions to their state-run university ought to take account of race. Mr Powers believes that using "race as one factor in an overall holistic view of the candidate" helps the university build a diverse campus, an achievement which has "an educational value for all of our students". Mr Graglia thinks "lower[ing] standards to admit members of preferred groups" is "a bad idea".
America has a number of policies and practices designed to increase the presence of minorities in various areas of life from which they have historically been excluded. But the role of such affirmative action in university admissions has garnered the most attention. Schools and universities provided many of America's desegregation battlegrounds. And gaining entry to America's elite universities is difficult; the perception, right or wrong, that race can in some circumstances trump merit strikes many as unjust, not least because universities play a large role in social mobility.
The Supreme Court is about to weigh in on the matter. In March it agreed to hear a case that could determine whether a state may ban affirmative action in university admissions on the basis of a referendum. In 2006 a majority of Michigan's voters approved such a measure, but last November a federal appellate court ruled that the measure violates the equal-protection clause of the constitution, which requires states to treat all citizens equally, by preventing affirmative-action supporters from pressing their case to individual universities. And the court will soon rule on a suit brought against UT-Austin by Abigail Fisher, a white woman who was not admitted to the university
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Many observers have called Gov.Scott Walker's proposal to expand private school vouchers bad education policy. I agree. Today I would like to address voucher expansion from the perspective of fiscal policy.If voucher advocates are successful in expanding private school vouchers in this budget, vouchers will eventually become one of the largest taxpayer-funded entitlements in Wisconsin.
I realize this is a strong statement. I also understand that voucher proponents argue the Governor's proposal increases voucher eligibility to just nine new school districts in 2013-14. If you let the nose of the camel inside the tent, however, it won't be long before the rest of the camel is inside the tent as well.
The ultimate objective of private school voucher advocates is a statewide system of private school vouchers for all Wisconsin school children. Voucher advocates, including Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, have repeatedly voiced their support for statewide vouchers. This objective became crystal-clear in a recent news interview when School Choice Wisconsin Vice-President Terry Brown identified the goal of voucher proponents as "a voucher in every backpack."
So, how much could this entitlement end up costing Wisconsin taxpayers?
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In his cover story for the April 29 issue of The New Republic, "The Hell of American Day Care," Jonathan Cohn writes that "trusting your child with someone else is one of the hardest things a parent has to do -- and in the U.S., it's harder still, because American day care is a mess. And about 40 percent of children under 5 spend at least part of their week in the care of somebody other than a parent."Cohn's article examines how we ended up with a day care system that is barely regulated and sometimes unsafe. It's a system that is difficult for many working parents to afford, yet offers many of its workers a barely livable income.
"One of the tragedies of the situation," Cohn tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross, "is that parents need these day cares to work, to make a living. You're talking about single parents a lot of the time. You're talking about families that aren't making a lot of money. They desperately need someone to watch the kids or they're not going to be able to make it, and there are just not a lot of options out there."
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I had my first chance to read through the new Milwaukee Public School (MPS) budget proposal yesterday, and I must say, I was pleasantly surprised. Compared to trends of the last decade or so, things are definitely looking better for the district.Milwaukee's $1,170,867,945 budget will spend $15,011 for each of its 78,000 students during the 2013-2014 school year. Madison spends a similar amount per student.Most important, MPS is increasing their staffing in key areas next year. Despite all the talk about governance structure the most important place in education is the school itself. MPS is increasing its school level staffing by 120.8 full-time-equivalent employees in FY14. A good number of those positions, 51, are teachers and educational assistants (though on the negative side the federal sequestration is responsible for the loss of 24 title 1 teachers). The district is also adding assistant principals, safety assistants, social workers, and nurse associates in schools. All of this is particularly impressive when overall enrollment is projected to decline 1%.
So how did they do this? A big part is the aggressive action the district has taken to reduce its benefit costs. MPS notes in their budget that their average teacher salary is increasing but their "school operations and categorical benefit" rate will drop to 58.4% from almost 70% just two years ago. Part of this is due to Act 10, and part of this is due to the willingness of MPS to take needed action.
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In January 2011, just as one of the most tumultuous sessions of the Wisconsin Legislature was getting underway, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett wrote an urgent letter to state Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills.Barrett begged the lawmaker to push forward legislation that would transfer control of vacant and underutilized Milwaukee Public Schools real estate to the city of Milwaukee.
The mayor described the sad state of affairs in some Milwaukee neighborhoods, where "once thriving parts of their communities now sit barren and quiet."
What the city needed, Barrett wrote, was a law that would allow the city to "take a more holistic approach to the management of these assets by addressing the needs and concerns of neighborhoods where buildings stand vacant as well as better meeting the educational needs of our community."
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The governor also touched on statewide proficiency data released by the state Department of Public Instruction earlier this week.DPI on Tuesday released test scores comparing Milwaukee Parental Choice Program students to Milwaukee Public Schools students, failing to account for disparate income levels between the students.
"The vast majority of families in that program are low income," Walker said. "If you compare the same income categories of students who come from families in Milwaukee Public Schools with Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, you'll find that in almost every category the kids in the choice schools outperform those in the public schools."
He added he wanted all schools to perform better.
DPI's release showed that 19.4 percent of MPS students were proficient or advanced in mathematics compared to 13.2 percent MPCP students participating in the Wisconsin Student Assessment System.
It also showed 14.2 percent of MPS students were proficient or advanced in reading, compared to 11.1 percent of MPCP students.
Data released by the voucher advocacy organization School Choice Wisconsin, however, showed that MPCP students outperformed MPS students everywhere except math, including reading, language arts, science and social studies when comparing only students in low income families.
Free and reduced lunch is available for students whose parents earn less than 185 percent of the federal poverty line, about $41,000 for a family of four. Until last school year, the income eligibility for the school choice program was 175 percent of the federal poverty line.
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High school dropouts adversely impact the state of Wisconsin each year--financially and socially. Dropouts' lower incomes, high unemployment rates, increased need for medical care, and higher propensity for incarceration create a virtual vortex that consumes Wisconsinites' tax dollars at a vicious rate. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on these high school dropouts every year.Not only does the state spend hundreds of millions of dollars on high school dropouts, the Wisconsin economy missed out on $3.7 billion in 2011 due to a lower average income for residents without a diploma.
This study examines the state's costs across three major state funding mechanisms: state tax collections, Medicaid expenses, and the costs of incarceration. All three aspects compose substantial parts of Wisconsin's operating budget. In 2010 alone, prison expenses cost the state more than $874 million (1).
However, these costs could be reduced if the state had a smaller population of these under-educated adults. By eliminating a group of residents that typically relies more on state-based aid and is more likely to end up in prison, Wisconsin could save hundreds of millions of dollars each year. These funds could have instead been invested in other efforts to improve the lives of Wisconsinites across the Badger State.
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"Our teachers haven't had a raise for the last three years." -- Ed Hughes, clerk and candidate for president of the Madison School BoardRelated: MTI & The Madison School Board, written by Ed Hughes in 2005:There are a lot of employees who haven't seen their pay go up in three years, but the vast majority of Madison public school teachers aren't among them.
And yet, that doesn't necessarily mean they're taking home more money.
Confused? Welcome to the world of public school teacher compensation, post-Act 10.
Hughes isn't the first public school representative whose definition of "raise" doesn't jibe with the way the rest of the world defines "raise" -- i.e., an increase in salary for a job well done.
During teachers union contract negotiations, public school and union officials routinely refer to a "raise" as something that is distinct from and in addition to the automatic bumps in salary teachers are already getting for remaining on the job and accruing more college credit. Essentially, such raises are across-the-board increases in a district's salary range, known as a salary schedule.
But if a district refuses to increase that range, teachers continue to get longevity and degree-attainment pay raises under the old salary schedule.
It's such parsing that allows Hughes to say teachers haven't gotten raises -- and to be right, at least in one context.
The WSJ article also states that "This year's salary and benefits increase, including raises for seniority or advanced degrees, was projected at 4.9 percent, or $8.48 million." So the school board, with all the budgetary problems it confronts, is apparently willing to pay for salaries and benefits an increase that is about twice as much as state law will permit the overall budget to rise next year, and $1.9 million more than the amount necessary to avoid arbitration. (Using the same numbers, a 3.8% increase would be $6.57 million.)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.
What could be the justification for this? I understand that, as a practical matter, the increase has to be more than 3.8% in order for the district to obtain any sort of concessions. (Across the state for 2004-2005, the average total package increase per teacher was 4.28%.) Does anyone know if there are concessions on the table that might explain what seems to be an excessive increase in these difficult times? Or what other justification for this level of increase there might be?
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Much more on incoming Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, here.
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Earlier this year Capella University and the new College for America began enrolling hundreds of students in academic programs without courses, teaching professors, grades, deadlines or credit hour requirements, but with a path to genuine college credit.The two institutions are among a growing number that are giving competency-based education a try, including 25 or so nonprofit institutions. Notable examples include Western Governors University and the Kentucky Community and Technical College System.
These programs are typically online, and allow students to progress at their own pace without formal course material. They can earn credit by successfully completing assessments that prove their mastery in predetermined competencies or tasks -- maybe writing in a business setting or using a spreadsheet to perform calculations.
College for America and a small pilot program at Capella go a step further than the others, however, by severing any link to the credit hour standard. This approach is called "direct assessment." Other competency-based programs track learning back to seat time under the credit hour, which assumes one hour of instruction and three hours of coursework per week. (For more details from College for America, click here.)
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Online higher education is increasingly hailed as a chance for educators in the developed world to expand access and quality across the globe.Yet it may not be quite so easy. Not only does much of the world not have broadband or speak English, but American-made educational material may be unfit for and unwanted in developing countries, according to academics who have worked for years on online distance education and with open educational resources, or OER.
Their experience raises questions about a utopian vision. This vision foresees online courses bringing education to students of all longitudes and latitudes, while reducing the need for brick-and-mortar universities. This goal of "democratizing education" using technology is gaining popular appeal among investors, some professors, pundits, politicians and the public amid the recent craze for massive open online courses, or MOOCs. But some scholars question whether an American-based effort can do this. While MOOCs are new, scholars have wrestled with questions about cultural barriers for years in the OER community.Some educators worry a one-way transfer of educational materials from the rich north to the poor south will amount to a wave of "intellectual neo-colonialism."
Lani Gunawardena is the co-author of a forthcoming book on global culture and online education. She said some global distance education evangelists tend to assume everybody speaks English and has the same priorities as they do.
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It's always hard to tell for sure exactly when a revolution starts. Is it when a few discontented people gather in a room to discuss how the ruling regime might be opposed? Is it when first shots are fired? When a critical mass forms and the opposition acquires sufficient weight to have a chance of prevailing? I'm not an expert on revolutions, but even I can see that a new one is taking shape in American K-12 public education.
The dominant regime for the past decade or more has been what is sometimes called accountability-based reform or, by many of its critics, "corporate education reform." The reforms consist of various initiatives aimed at (among other things): improving schools and educational outcomes by using standardized tests to measure what students are learning; holding schools and teachers accountable (through school closures and teacher pay cuts) when their students are "lagging" on those standardized assessments; controlling classroom instruction and increasing the rigor of school curricula by pushing all states to adopt the same challenging standards via a "Common Core;" and using market-like competitive pressures (through the spread of charter schools and educational voucher programs) to provide public schools with incentives to improve.Critics of the contemporary reform regime argue that these initiatives, though seemingly sensible in their original framing, are motivated by interests other than educational improvement and are causing genuine harm to American students and public schools. Here are some of the criticisms: the reforms have self-interest and profit motives, not educational improvement, as their basis; corporate interests are reaping huge benefits from these reform initiatives and spending millions of dollars lobbying to keep those benefits flowing; three big foundations (Gates, Broad, and Walton Family) are funding much of the backing for the corporate reforms and are spending billions to market and sell reforms that don't work; ancillary goals of these reforms are to bust teacher unions, disempower educators, and reduce spending on public schools; standardized testing is enormously expensive in terms both of public expenditures and the diversion of instruction time to test prep; over a third of charter schools deliver "significantly worse" results for students than the traditional public schools from which they were diverted; and, finally, that these reforms have produced few benefits and have actually caused harm, especially to kids in disadvantaged areas and communities of color. (On that last overall point, see this scathing new report from the Economic Policy Institute.)
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Bob Dean, via a kind Laurie Rogers email:
The belief that high-stakes testing will bring any improvement to our public schools is built on an ounce of wishful thinking, a pound of good intentions and a ton of ignorance.Consider the recent history of high-stakes testing in the State of Washington. We spent more than a decade and a billion dollars on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) only to find that the test was deeply flawed. The WASL didn't align with college or career readiness, and it basically tried to measure student achievement of standards that were so poorly written they were impossible to measure by any kind of assessment.
Despite these major flaws, legislators, the public, business leaders and most of the media ignorantly assumed that something meaningful was happening by requiring students to pass this bogus exam. Unfortunately, the only meaningful thing that was happening was teachers throughout our state were forced to try and teach to this test despite the fact that it didn't align to anything that was important for students to know. The WASL was a test built around standards that de-emphasized student content knowledge and supposedly would teach students to think more deeply and become expert problem solvers. In the end, the main problem that many students now have to solve is how to go through life being mathematically illiterate.
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Susan Matt and Luke Fernandez:
In 1937, as she lay ill in bed, Annie Oakes Huntington, a writer living in Maine, thought of ways to spend her time. She confided in a letter: "The radio has been a source of unfailing diversion this winter. I expect to enter all the courses at Harvard to be broadcasted." Huntington was joining in an educational experiment sweeping the country in the 1920s and 30s: massive open on-air courses.As educators contemplate the MOOCs of our day--massive open online courses--they would do well to consider how earlier generations dealt with technology-enhanced education.
We are not the first generation to believe that technology can transcend distance and erode ignorance. Nearly a century ago, educators were convinced that radio held that same potential. The number of radios in the United States increased from six or seven thousand to 10 million between 1921 and 1928. Many universities explored the possibility of broadcasting courses across the country and allowing anyone to enroll. Some onlookers believed those courses would transform higher education and eliminate lecture halls and seminar rooms. One observer noted, "The nation has become the new campus," while another celebrated the "'University of the Air,' whose campus is the ether of the earth, whose audience waits for learning, learning, learning."
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Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham (PDF):
This report includes data from the Fall 2012 Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE). In this report, we focus on reading and math scores. Students in grades 4, 8, and 10 also take Science, Social Studies, and Language Arts tests, but these tests are not used for school accountability in the same manner as Reading and Math tests and are not aligned to the new rigorous standards, so they are not directly comparable.Much more on the oft-criticized WKCE, here.This year, WKCE results reflect the state's transition to the Common Core State Standards in that DPI has adjusted the cut scores for each performance level to reflect higher expectations for student proficiency. As a result, MMSD's scores (and scores for every district in the state) look very different from prior years.
1. The new cut scores can be applied to last year's scores to provide a more meaningful year-to-year comparison. Scores have remained roughly unchanged from last year when the same scale is used.
2. Achievement gaps between subgroups of students exist across grades and locations and show few signs of either increasing or decreasing.
3. Scores showed some changes from last year at the building level, but these changes were mostly small.
4. Schools with more students scoring "Advanced" in Fall 2011 faced smaller negative impacts from the new performance cut scores.
In addition, overall proficiency rates in MMSD are close to state averages. Asian and White students in MMSD significantly outperform the state averages for their racial groups in both Reading and Math. In addition, large achievement gaps exist statewide as well as within MMSD.
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If Gov. Scott Walker and the Legislature move forward with a vow to freeze tuition at the University of Wisconsin for the next two years, they have some numbers to stand on.Wisconsin has seen the largest percentage tuition increase of Midwestern state universities over the past five years, according to The College Board, with tuition and fees up 23 percent for in-state undergraduate students. UW tuition has risen 5.5 percent each year since 2007 but had jumped even more in previous years -- including an 18.7 percent hike in 2003 at some campuses.
But Wisconsin certainly isn't the only state where the cost of college continues to rise at public colleges. The College Board data show increases of 21 percent in Minnesota and Illinois and 20 percent in Michigan over the past five years, just under Wisconsin's 23 percent. Nationally, increases since 2007 have ranged from 78 percent in Arizona and 72 percent in California to 2 percent in Maryland and 3 percent in Ohio.
Despite the increases, tuition at the UW remains largely in the middle of the pack compared to other states, as reported by The College Board.
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BBC:
Within four years, a quarter of sixth formers at a leading UK independent school will be heading for universities in the United States.That's the prediction of Anthony Seldon, head of Wellington College in Berkshire.
Dr Seldon, one of the UK's most prominent head teachers, says that ambitious teenagers are looking further afield than ever before in their university choices.
The lure of well-funded US universities, with more broad-based course options, is proving increasingly attractive to youngsters in the UK, he says.
At a recent talk with pupils, he said that about 40% claimed to want to go to US universities, with the expectation that many of these will actually go on to enrol.
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Applying to colleges in the United States is a stressful, competitive process. In 1970, the acceptance rate at Stanford University was 22.4%. Today, only 5.7% of applicants are accepted into the school. Across the country, nearly every top school like Harvard, MIT and Yale are reporting record-low acceptance rates. The number of students applying to elite colleges is exploding, and those applicants have better test scores than ever. It's never been harder to get into a selective university.
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Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:
Here in Madison, our attention is primarily focused on our troubling achievement gaps, and those gaps are achingly apparent in the new WKCE scores. Under new superintendent Jen Cheatham's leadership, we'll continue to pursue the most promising steps to accelerate the learning of our African-American, Latino and Hmong students who have fallen behind.I took a quick look at property taxes in Middleton and Madison on a $230,000 home. A Middleton home paid $4,648.16 in 2012 while a Madison home paid 16% more, or $5,408.38. Local efforts to significantly increase property taxes may grow the gap with Middleton.At the same time, we also need to continue to meet the needs of our students who are doing well. I am going to focus on the latter groups of students in this post.
In particular, I want to take a look at how our Madison students stack up against those attending schools in other Dane County school districts under the new WKCE scoring scale. The demographics of our Madison schools are quite a bit different from those of our surrounding school districts. This can skew comparisons. To control for this a bit, I am going to compare the performance of Dane County students who do not fall into the "economically disadvantaged" category. I'll refer to these students as "non-low income."
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Easy question. Administrators do. Odd as it may sound today, faculties have long assumed the right and duty to set the campus agenda--to establish admission standards, control research and curriculum, run visiting speaker programs, and set the academic and professional criteria on which promotions, prizes and appointments are based.Historically, the faculty actually did control these things, in part because it was viewed as the natural way to run a university, and partly because there were no countervailing forces to prevent it. The administrative layers that accompanied and facilitated faculty control of campuses were fairly thin. That is, the percentage of professional, full-time campus administrators was small compared to that of the faculty. Furthermore, many of them were drawn from the ranks of the faculty (to which they returned after relatively brief stints in campus administration) and so although these faculty functioned as administrators, they still thought of themselves as faculty and comported themselves accordingly.
The Army of Deans
All of this has changed dramatically over the last fifty years. The number of campus administrators has exploded. Instead of a single dean of an all-encompassing college of arts and sciences, we see a host of deans spearheading numerous units into which the large college has been split. These deans enjoy the support of a gaggle of assistant and associate deans, dragging in tow scores more chairs, heads and directors. This is accompanied by a proliferation of new academic units on campus - e.g., Urban Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies and countless other "Studies" departments representing "compelling" fields of academic study that we didn't know existed in mid-twentieth century.
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A group of veteran Neenah teachers has sued to restore early retirement benefits that could amount to $170,000 each.The suit was expected since February, when the School Board denied a group of teachers' demand to restore them to the original early retirement deal eliminated last year after Act 10.
The named plaintiffs are six "distinguished teachers," but the suit, filed Monday in Winnebago County Circuit Court, seeks to represent a class including more than 250 teachers who had been eligible to participate in the former early retirement plan.
Their attorney, Charles Hertel, said Neenah Joint School District administrators used the plan for years to recruit teachers, and to induce them to accept lower-than-market salaries. Many teachers' retirement planning was based on the expectations of the later payouts, he said.
The lawsuit asserts four claims: that the district must be held to promises on which teachers relied, that cutting the plan amounts to unjust enrichment for the district and negligent misrepresentation and strict responsibility.
The suit seeks compensatory damages, costs and enforcement of the retirement plan.
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St. Marcus Superintendent Henry Tyson, via a kind reader's email:
Dear supporters of St. Marcus School,Listen to a 2012 interview with Henry Tyson, here.I need your help in setting the story straight. Perhaps you read the bold headline in the local section of the Journal Sentinel yesterday -- "Wisconsin voucher students lag in latest state test." That claim is not accurate. You need to understand that this is misinformation about the Choice program. I want you to know the truth -- and be our voices in sharing this with others.
The state released the 2012 WKCE test scores this week, conveniently comparing the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) to all of Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and showing that MPS "beat" MPCP in every subject area.
Unfortunately, this is a gross misrepresentation of reality and is not an "apples to apples" comparison. The information that was released FAILED to do the appropriate comparison of MPS low-income students to MPCP, whose students are almost ENTIRELY from low-income families. When doing an accurate comparison of MPCP to MPS's low-income population, choice schools beat MPS in all subjects except math. (Remember MPS has many students who are not in poverty and are high-achieving. By nature, almost allMPCP students are low-income.)
Beyond the program averages, our St. Marcus students are doing tremendously well, outpacing both the MPS and MPCP numbers by wide margins:
This may seem unimportant, since people are often negative about the choice program. However, it is actually very important at this time to set the record straight. Legislators are reading this misinformation, our supporters are reading this misinformation and so is the general public. At a time when there is much debate about the amount of the choice voucher funding and the expansion of the program, it is essential that we set the record straight. We need to get correct information to our supporters and legislators immediately!
At St. Marcus, it has been demonstrated that it is possible to educate the urban poor, even very poor children, in a highly effective manner. To protect the well-being of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and to enable St. Marcus to continue to grow and deliver excellent education to more students please take ACTION:
Forward this e-mail to your friends and certainly any legislators you know.
Contact your legislator directly and encourage them to support an increase in the voucher amount for MPCP schools. (Unbelievably, the current voucher amount of $6,451 is lower than the voucher amount back in 2006!)
Thanks for acting in support of your friends at St. Marcus and the awesome students achieving great things in schools like ours.
If you have any other questions or concerns, you can contact me.
Blessings,
Henry Tyson, Superintendent
414-303-2133
henry.tyson@stmarcus.org
The lower scores do not reflect falling performance. Students just need to know more to rank as high as they used to.Phil Hands cartoon.Most states are doing the same thing and will benchmark their exams to international standards.
Just as importantly, the computerized assessments of the near future will adjust to the ability of students. That will give parents and educators much better, more detailed and timely information about what students know and what they still need to learn.
Some critics will disparage any and all testing, pretending it will be the only measure Wisconsin will use for success. Others have lamented the increasing role of the federal government in the process.
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A reporter recently asked me how often I planned to meet with Madisons' new school Superintendent, Jennifer Cheatham.Much more on Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, here.I do not know and frankly, I am wondering why it matters.
How often we meet will be driven by a number of yet to be determined factors. And more important than how often we meet, is the matter of improved performance for Madison school children.
It is the difference between outputs and outcomes. The number of miles of street we plow is an output, the measurement of the quality of the job is an outcome. The number of teenagers who attend a class on abstinence or receive condoms is an output, the number of teenage pregnancies is an outcome.
We need to focus on outcomes. We need to measure performance and ensure that educational attainment improves.
How often Superintendent Cheatham and I meet will be determined by the agenda, the role of our respective staffs, and other factors.
It is possible that we may find regular quarterly meetings too frequent, we may find that monthly meetings are not frequent enough. We don't know yet. But I do not plan to measure the success of the district's students by the number of meetings.
Refreshing.
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John Kirtley smiled. It was March in Tallahassee, and the morning sun was already warming the immense crowd before him. Some 5,600 people had gathered in front of the Leon County Civic Center--more than 1,000 of whom were arriving after a 14-hour overnight bus ride from Miami. Still, the energy in the air was palpable. Excited schoolchildren clutched hand-lettered signs: "Don't Take Away My Dreams," "Education Through Choice." Parents chatted with teachers as clergymen greeted newcomers. It was a diverse crowd, predominantly black and Hispanic. Kirtley knew it had gathered for a single purpose: to convince the 2010 Florida legislature to strengthen the state's school choice program.
A little after 10 a.m., the crowd began heading east along Madison Street. Kirtley walked at the head of the procession, alongside the Rev. H. K. Matthews, an 82-year-old African-American minister who had marched in Selma. Together they proceeded by the sprawling headquarters of the Florida Department of Education. They marched past the state's tidy Supreme Court. When the crowd ultimately reached the capitol, it was the largest political rally in the state's history.
Charlie Crist, then the Governor of Florida, welcomed the crowd. Dignitaries lined up to address them: Al Lawson, the Democratic leader of the Florida state Senate; Julio Fuentes, president of the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options; Anitere Flores, Florida state Representative. Representing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, James Bush III proclaimed the support of the civil rights organization founded by Martin Luther King Jr. The crowd roared.
Kirtley had helped organize the march to put the legislators on notice. Since 2001, Florida had offered dollar-for-dollar tax credits to corporations that contributed to state-approved scholarship organizations. (Those organizations in turn offered partial scholarships to low-income families, giving parents the resources to pay tuition at a private school of their choice.) Funding for the program, however, had always been capped. Offering more scholarships meant passing a new cap. The school choice program was forever in jeopardy, an election away from a hostile governor or legislature.
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Mount Royal University says it simply can't afford to teach theatre anymore. Facing a 10% cut in its spending, the program is on the chopping block, along with music performance, disability studies and certificate programs in forensics, aging studies, perinatal care and journalism.The school, which is in Alberta premier Alison Redford's own riding, has lamented the prospect of losing the disciplines.
"I was sick by the time I talked to people," the school's provost Manuel Mertin told the Calgary Herald.
"I never imagined I would have to do this."
Mr. Mertin is likely not going to be the last provost in Canada to cut offerings in the face of fiscal reality. As government coffers are squeezed by a slow economy, demographics, and increasing healthcare costs, there are signs that bean counters and reformers across the country are ready to take the red pen to post-secondary education programs.
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This chart ranks each of Wisconsin's 424 public school districts based on four criteria: report card score, enrollment, average teacher salary and district administrator salary. The report card score is an average of the district schools' individual scores from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction report cards issues in October. The average is not official, as DPI does not generate a district-wide score. It does not factor in schools that were not able to be scored -- a group that includes many charter schools -- and could downgrade some districts because schools fell short on certain criteria individually that the district would not have lost points on if scored as a whole. The district administrator salary is as reported to DPI and does not account for administrators who served partial years or hold other jobs in addition to district administrator. Districts with no data for a given field are denoted with a ranking of 999.
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By now it's evident that leaders of the national education "reform" movement like to compare outcomes and hand out grades, whether looking at teacher pay, school test results or just trying to show how Florida is doing in comparison to Illinois.Florida education commissioner (and former basketball coach) Tony Bennett likes the concept so much he keeps an actual scoreboard in his office. As he said his first day in office, "Today, I brought out the infamous student achievement scoreboard that I kept outside my office as Indiana's State Superintendent of Public Instruction. In my new position as Florida's Commissioner of Education, I will keep the scoreboard up as a constant reminder to me and my colleagues of the importance of accountability in measuring teacher and student success."
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Sal Khan has a simple mission: a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. Naturally, people think he's crazy. The craziest part is not the "world-class education" part, because plenty of people want that. And it's not even the "for anyone, anywhere" part. It's the "free" part.Crazy or not, it's an idea that has attracted attention from Downing Street to Washington DC. And like a lot of crazy ideas, it started by accident.
Khan - working as a financial analyst in 2004 after earning degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard - started remotely tutoring his cousin, Nadia, in Louisiana, who was struggling with maths. "Then the rest of the family heard there was free tutoring," he says, and more relatives started taking part. The demands got too much - until a friend suggested he could film the tutorials, post them on YouTube and let the family members view them whenever they chose.
"YouTube? YouTube was for cats playing the piano, not serious mathematics," Khan recalls thinking. "I got over the idea that it wasn't my idea and decided to give it a shot."
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The education world spends a lot of time talking about 'next generation learning', but what does it really mean? I have been reading Michael Fullan's excellent book, Stratosphere*, and I think he can help us nail both what we mean by the concept and what we need to do to ensure that it delivers for learners.Pearson is a large education publisher.I've been struck by the clarity with which Fullan sets out how the ultimate goal - doubling learning at half the cost - can be achieved if we can combine pedagogy (especially how to learn and the opportunities to learn differently) with technology (and the huge, ever-expanding series of data it opens up), and engage the whole education system (in terms of how to change, and knowing what to do with all that data and information).
But what is most striking, perhaps, is Fullan's four criteria for successfully integrating technology and pedagogy to make sure it works - it needs to be irresistibly engaging; elegantly efficient and easy to use; technologically ubiquitous 24/7; and steeped in real-life problems and problem-solving skills.
It's a compelling vision for online learning, but also a vital one if we all want to use technology to scale and really solve some of the biggest problems in global education.
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The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) is encouraging Art/Design to be included with the K-20 STEM curriculum.
What is STEAM
In this climate of economic uncertainty, America is once again turning to innovation as the way to ensure a prosperous future. Yet innovation remains tightly coupled with Science, Technology, Engineering and Math - the STEM subjects. Art + Design are poised to transform our economy in the 21st century just as science and technology did in the last century.
We need to add Art + Design to the equation -- to transform STEM into STEAM.
STEM + Art = STEAM
STEAM is a movement championed by Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and widely adopted by institutions, corporations and individuals.
The objectives of the STEAM movement are to:
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FEW school subjects are so divisive. When Michael Gove, Britain's education secretary, released draft changes to the country's national curriculum in February it was his plan for history that created headlines. Mr Gove's proposal called for history to be studied "as a coherent, chronological narrative", beginning with the early Britons and ending with the cold war. Opponents said the syllabus overstressed the deeds of "posh white blokes" and underplayed those of minorities. "Unteachable, unlearnable and un-British" blasted a campaign group on April 10th. Rival camps of historians have published petitions and rowed on television. That shoot-out will last beyond the official consultation period, which closes next week.Politicians with an axe to grind have often twisted history books, lionising characters they admire and tainting ones they do not. In March Dmitry Livanov, Russia's education minister, promised a new textbook to replace the 80 or so in use. That looks like an effort by Vladimir Putin's government to commandeer Russian history and partially sanitise Stalin (though Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" is also taught in schools). But the rumpus in Britain reflects a deeper and more subtle argument dividing school staff rooms around the world--one with broader consequences. As well as tussling over the content of courses, parents, teachers and politicians are now discussing the techniques by which history is taught, and debating what the discipline is for.
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Since new test cut scores designed to raise standards in reading and math was adopted last year, many school systems have to adjust to having less students rated "proficient" or "advanced" than in recent years.In a statement Tuesday, MPS Superintendent Gregory Thornton noted that MPS students continued to outperform their counterparts who used publicly funded vouchers. According to the results, MPS students scored 3.4 higher than voucher students in reading and 6.5 points higher in math.
But nobody could deny the overall results of the standardized testing revealed daunting problems still remain with under-performing students in Milwaukee Public Schools.
In his remarks, Thornton praised the results but noted there was more to do.
"We have seen some promising increases in achievement among students who have historically underperformed," Thornton said. "We are working hard to make sure that the significant reforms we have put in place ... will yield stronger results in the coming years."
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My Facebook feed today has lots of links to this article. The upshot: a new Pew study showing that Americans think that US 15 year olds rank "near the bottom" on international science tests, whereas the truth is that they "rank in the middle among developed countries."Related: www.wisconsin2.org.I guess "the middle" covers a lot of terrain, but the way I look at the data, this assertion doesn't hold.
The international comparison in question is the 2009 PISA. Here are the rankings. (Click for larger image)
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Tomorrow evening the School Board will conduct an oversight work session to review the operation of the District's Teaching and Learning. Finally. This will be the Board's first review of Teaching and Learning EVER.This is one of the final direct consequences of the mismanagement of the District under the Sundquist Board and Dr. Maria Goodloe-Johnson. It has been a long time coming.
After the State Auditor's Office took the District leadership to task for their horrendous performance. In particular, the SAO called out the Board for their total failure to fulfill their statutory duties to oversee management and to enforce policy. The Board members had, until then, specifically denied that they had these duties.
In response, the Board stepped up their effort to revise policy and, in particular, the Board's duties. This led to the development of Board Policy 1005 Responsibilities & Authority of the Board, and Board Policy 1010, Board Oversight of Management.
The latter of these policies calls for Board review of district operations with a review of each department at least every three years (originally every two years). This policy was originally adopted on June 1, 2011, but was amended in February of this year to change the review frequency from every two years to every three years.
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I was in the midst of writing this for posting on Income Tax Day when last Monday's tragedy occurred.For many years we have expressed education expenditures as "per-pupil spending." This is a reasonably good way to frame the numbers, though controversy sometimes arises over what is included and what isn't. The following is a list of different angles on the same spending. All the figures cited are for 2010, courtesy of the National Center of Education Statistics, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the U.S. Census Bureau.
1) Revenues collected by governments for public education in the United States totaled $593.7 billion. About $261.4 billion came from local sources, $258.2 billion from state sources, and $74 billion from federal sources.
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A big part of successful policy making is unyielding attention to detail (an argument that regular readers of this blog hear often). Choices about design and implementation that may seem unimportant can play a substantial role in determining how policies play out in practice.A new paper, co-authored by Elizabeth Davidson, Randall Reback, Jonah Rockoff and Heather Schwartz, and presented at last month's annual conference of The Association for Education Finance and Policy, illustrates this principle vividly, and on a grand scale: With an analysis of outcomes in all 50 states during the early years of NCLB.
After a terrific summary of the law's rules and implementation challenges, as well as some quick descriptive statistics, the paper's main analysis is a straightforward examination of why the proportion of schools meeting AYP varied quite a bit between states. For instance, in 2003, the first year of results, 32 percent of U.S. schools failed to make AYP, but the proportion ranged from one percent in Iowa to over 80 percent in Florida.
Surprisingly, the results suggest that the primary reasons for this variation seem to have had little to do with differences in student performance. Rather, the big factors are subtle differences in rather arcane rules that each state chose during the implementation process. These decisions received little attention, yet they had a dramatic impact on the outcomes of NCLB during this time period.
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The rising cost of college has rekindled the debate about the value of a liberal-arts education, with governors in three states pooh-poohing such degrees as history, literature and philosophy.But several central Ohio college officials say a liberal-arts education has never been more important as employers complain that graduates lack communication, critical-thinking and problem-solving skills.
"The problems of the 21st century -- 9/11, the global economic meltdown, terrorism in Boston are complex and don't come in neat little boxes," said Victoria McGillin, the provost of Otterbein University, a private liberal-arts college in Westerville.
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Cranston teacher's union officials filed a lawsuit against the Cranston School Committee in Superior Court today, alleging the committee could violate the terms of the union contract by voting in changes to the Basic Education Plan.The changes include a measure that would put an end to the annual job fair, during which teachers pick assignments based on seniority and certification. State Education Commissioner Deborah Gist ordered the changes. Gist, in correspondence with the school district, threatened Cranston with the loss of state aid and stripping the superintendent's certification, among other penalties, if the changes are not adopted.
In an interview, Cranston Teachers Alliance President Lizbeth Larkin said if the School Committee votes for the changes tonight, its members will have "abrogated" the contract. That's what prompted the union to file the anticipatory breach of contract suit today.
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The Madison School Board's two newest members are voicing the strongest support for a potential 7.4 percent property tax increase, but others worry the amount may be too high.Related: 2010: Madison School District 2010-2011 Budget Update: $5,100,000 Fund Balance Increase since June, 2009; Property Taxes to Increase 9+%.The property tax increase was included in a preliminary $393 million budget proposal put together by school district administrators.
The amount reflects the maximum amount the district could raise property taxes under Gov. Scott Walker's state budget proposal.
T.J. Mertz and Dean Loumos, who were sworn in Monday, said they don't oppose taxing the maximum amount allowed under state revenue limits, which as proposed would add about $182 to the average $230,831 Madison home's property tax bill.
Mertz plans to advocate for taxing the maximum amount, though he questioned some of the proposed new spending, such as whether a community partnership coordinator needed to be an administrative position costing $128,000.
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The Madison Urban League, via a kind Kaleem Caire email:
Related: The rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 23, 2013
Media contact: Kaleem Caire
kcaire@ulgm.org
608.729.1249
Click Here for Urban League's 2013-14 Agenda
State Test Scores Confirm Urban League's Concerns and Call to Action
Madison, WI - Today, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction released students' results on the annual statewide achievement test, Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam (WKCE). The results confirm concerns raised by the Urban League of Greater Madison, that disadvantaged students and students of color are severely underperforming in many of Wisconsin's public schools, particularly in the Madison Metropolitan School District.
All Wisconsin public school students completed the test in November 2012. This revised test raised the standards of performance for all students, thereby providing a more accurate picture of students who are on track to graduate from high school academically ready to succeed in college or a career. Test results show that all students, regardless of their race, socioeconomic status or disability, are struggling to achieve to high standards in Madison-area public schools.
This afternoon, the Urban League of Greater Madison joined Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, and leaders of other community organizations, at a press conference where Cheatham shared MMSD's results. Cheatham presented data showing that an astounding 92% of African American and 85% of Latino students are reading below their grade level, and 90% of African American and 77% of Latino children are failing in mathematics. The data further showed that a large percentage of white students have fallen behind as well, with 42% are reading below grade level and 33% failing in math.In reflecting on the scores, Darrell Bazzell, the Chair of Urban League's Board of Directors said, "These numbers are a stark message that Madison's public schools are at a tipping point and that our community must embrace change. The implications for our region are profound. For the sake of our community and our children, Madison can, and must, do better for all students and families."
Bazzell further stated that, "Every citizen in our community must say that 'we will no longer harbor these gaps; that we accept responsibility for addressing these challenges; and that we will commit to doing all that we can to ensure all of our children succeed. We must also acknowledge where we are not succeeding and commit to change in smart, innovative and effective ways that lead to real progress for our kids'."
In response to these troubling statistics, Urban League President and CEO, Kaleem Caire, shared that, "When 90% of Black children cannot read at their grade level, we are significantly reducing the possibility of success for an entire generation. This issue negatively affects not only this generation of children, but also the vitality of our entire region. If not addressed quickly, it will affect the quality of the lives of all citizens who call Madison home." To address these challenges, Caire said "The Urban League is working to build a pipeline of high quality cradle to career educational and employment services that positively impact the entire family, move all children towards high performance, and prepare youth and adults for career success." He further highlighted, "We have already begun working with the Madison Schools, other area school districts, employers and community partners to ensure that we attack the persistence of underachievement and other contributing factors, such as poverty, at its core. "
The Urban League's 2013-14 Strategic Plan creates opportunities that will help the community overcome these challenges. Caire enthusiastically shared that, "We are a community of great people, great teachers and great families who are passionate about helping others transform their lives. But our passion now must become our reality."
About the Urban League of Greater Madison
The Urban League of Greater Madison's mission is to ensure that African Americans and other community members are educated, employed and empowered to live well, advance professionally and contribute to the common good in the 21st Century. We are committed to transforming Greater Madison into the Best [place] in the Midwest for everyone to live, learn, and work. We are working to make this vision a reality through a comprehensive strategic empowerment agenda that includes programs & services, advocacy, and partnerships & coalition building. www.ulgm.org
Urban League of Greater Madison | 2222 S. Park Street | Suite 200 | Madison | WI | 53713
Madison's long term disastrous reading results.
The recently released WKCE results.
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Tap or click to view a larger version.
Higher bar for WKCE results paints different picture of student achievementSuperintendent Cheatham is to be commended for her informed, intelligent and honest reaction to the MMSD's results when compared to those of neighboring districts.Wisconsin student test scores released Tuesday look very different than they did a year ago, though not because of any major shift in student performance.
Similar to recent years, the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam results show gains in math and reading over the past five years, a persistent and growing performance gap between black and white students, and Milwaukee and Racine public school students outperforming their peers in the private school voucher program.
But the biggest difference is the scores reflect a higher bar for what students in each grade level should know and be able to do.
Only 36.2 percent of students who took the reading test last October met the new proficiency bar. Fewer than half, 48.1 percent, of students were proficient in math. When 2011-12 results were released last spring, those figures were both closer to 80 percent.
The change doesn't reflect a precipitous drop in student test scores. The average scores in reading and math are about the same as last year for each grade level.
Instead, the change reflects a more rigorous standard for proficiency similar to what is used for the National Assessment of Educational Progress. NAEP is administered to a sample of students in each state every other year and is referred to as "the nation's report card."
The state agreed to raise the proficiency benchmark in math and reading last year in order to qualify for a waiver from requirements under the federal No Child Left Behind law. The benchmark did not rise for the language arts, science and social studies tests.
"Adjusting to higher expectations will take time and effort," State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers said. "But these are necessary changes that will ultimately help our schools better prepare all students to be college and career ready and link with work being done throughout the state to implement new standards."
Evers also called on the Legislature to include private voucher schools in the state's new accountability system.
He highlighted that test scores for all Milwaukee and Racine students need to improve. Among Milwaukee voucher students, 10.8 percent in reading and 11.9 percent in math scored proficient or better. Among Milwaukee public school students, it was 14.2 percent in reading and 19.7 percent in math.
Gov. Scott Walker has proposed expanding the state's voucher program, including to such districts as Madison.
Changes in Dane County
The state previously announced how the changing bar would affect scores statewide and parents have seen their own students' results in recent weeks, but the new figures for the first time show the impact on entire schools and districts.
In Dane County school districts, the percentage of students scoring proficient or better on the test dropped on average by 42 percentage points in reading and 25 percentage points in math.
Madison schools had one of the smallest drops compared to its neighboring districts.
Madison superintendent Jennifer Cheatham noted schools with a higher number of students scoring in the "advanced" category experienced less of a drop. Madison's smaller drop could reflect a higher proportion of students scoring in the top tier.
At the same time, Madison didn't narrow the gap between minority and white student test results. Only 9 percent of black sixth-graders and only 2 percent of sixth-grade English language learners scored proficient in reading.
"It reinforces the importance of our work in the years ahead," Cheatham said. "We're going to work on accelerating student outcomes."
Middleton-Cross Plains School Board president Ellen Lindgren said she hasn't heard many complaints from parents whose students suddenly dropped a tier on the test. Like Madison and other districts across the state, Middleton-Cross Plains sent home letters bracing parents for the change.
But Lindgren fears the changing standards come at the worst time for public schools, which have faced tougher scrutiny and reduced state support.
"I'm glad that the standards have been raised by the state, because they were low, but this interim year, hopefully people won't panic too much," Lindgren said. "The public has been sold on the idea that we're failing in our education system, and I just don't believe that's true."
Next fall will be the last year students in grades 3-8 and 10 take the paper-and-pencil WKCE math and reading tests. Wisconsin is part of a coalition of states planning to administer a new computer-based test in the 2014-15 school year.
The proposed state budget also provides for students in grades 9-11 to take the EXPLORE, PLAN and ACT college and career readiness tests in future years.
View a WKCE summary here (PDF).
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By 2020, a dozen states or more will increase by at least 100 percent the number of children from low-income families reading proficiently at the end of third grade.Related: Madison's disastrous reading results.The Campaign is building a network of national and local civic leaders, policymakers, advocates, community organizations, and everyday people to assure:
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Scientists raised on "The Jetsons" and "Astro Boy" have theorized for decades that robots would make the perfect helper and companion. Now a handful of public schools in the U.S. are putting that idea to the test.This year, robots will be teaching everything from math to vocabulary to nutrition inside classrooms in California and New York, a move the researchers call a first in American education.
The Los Angeles experiment, scheduled to start later this spring, will use a robotic "dragon" to teach first-graders about healthy lifestyle habits. Students will help show the robot how to prepare for a race; the hope is that by sharing tips with the dragon, they take their own lessons to heart.
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My various blog posts about moving from academia to industry have prompted a number of conversations with PhD students who are considering academic careers. The most oft-cited reason for wanting a faculty job is "academic freedom," which is typically described as "being able to work on anything you want." This is a nice theory, but I think it's important to understand the realities, especially for pre-tenure, junior faculty.I don't believe that most professors (even tenured ones) can genuinely work on "anything they want." In practice, as a professor you are constrained by at least four things:
What you can get funding to do;
What you can publish (good) papers about;
What you can get students to help you with;
What you can do better than anyone else in the field.These are important limitations to consider, and I want to take them one by one.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. Newsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeannie Bettner email:
Pursuant to the Memorandum of Understanding negotiated by MTI, on behalf of elementary teachers, those who have completed Ready, Set, Goal (RSG) Conferences, and whose request for compensatory time cannot be accommodated due to the unavailability of a substitute teacher, may, upon written notice to their principal by May 1, choose among the following options: (1) request to be compensated for RSG conferences, travel time, and up to 15 minutes per conference for any reasonable administrative time associated with each conference; or(2) have said day(s) added to the teacher's Personal Sick Leave Account (PSLA) or, if the teacher has the maximum amount in that account, the day(s) may be added to the teacher's Retirement Insurance Account (RIA) [ Any such days accumulated to one's RIA from RSG services are not subject to the PSLA or RIA maximum]; or
(3) carryover one (1) paid RSG leave day into the following school year; or
(4) a combination of items 1-3 above.Contact MTI Assistant Director Eve Degen (degene@madisonteachers.org) with questions regarding RSG compensation.
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The private-equity tycoon Stephen A. Schwarzman, backed by an array of mostly Western blue-chip companies with interests in China, is creating a $300 million scholarship for study in China that he hopes will rival the Rhodes scholarship in prestige and influence.The program, whose endowment represents one of the largest single gifts to education in the world and one of the largest philanthropic gifts ever in China, was announced by Mr. Schwarzman in Beijing on Sunday.
The Schwarzman Scholarsprogram will pay all expenses for 200 students each year from around the world for a one-year master's program at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The program's creation underlines the tremendous importance of China and its market to Wall Street financiers and corporate leaders, who have become increasingly anxious as security and economic frictions grow between China and the West.
Mr. Schwarzman said his goal was to reduce such tensions by educating the world's future leaders, but his role in the project will also raise his political profile in China, potentially giving him and his private equity firm, the Blackstone Group, increased access to Chinese leaders. Many of them, including Xi Jinping, who became president of China last month, attended Tsinghua, one of the country's top universities.
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Genuine puzzlement, right up there with "swear to God", usually precedes a lie. It's the verbal equivalent of clammy sweat and rapid blinking, and even on the rare occasion that it doesn't presage a whopper, it makes everything subsequent seem dishonest. Yglesias goes on to set fire to a hiring hall full of unionized straw men who want teacher pay to be tied to tenure of service and nothing else, but what the hell, I'll see if I can raise my voice above the crackling fire.The cheating scandals prove that education reform is a wholly fraudulent endeavor. It isn't the equivalent of a doping scandal in sports; it's the equivalent of Enron, Madoff, the financial crisis. You think testing has something to do with compensation, hiring, and firing? It doesn't. Testing is the accounting of the reform movement, and the executives are cooking the books. They're manipulating the statements so it looks like the venture is turning a profit. Well, actually, it's got negative cash flow. The gains are phantoms. The enterprise is insolvent. Even by its own standards, reform fails.
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College Affordability & Transparency Center
College Scorecards in the U.S. Department of Education's College Affordability and Transparency Center make it easier for you to search for a college that is a good fit for you. You can use the College Scorecard to find out more about a college's affordability and value so you can make more informed decisions about which college to attend.To start, enter the name of a college of interest to you or select factors that are important in your college search. You can find scorecards for colleges based on factors such as programs or majors offered, location, and enrollment size.
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Looking dapper in a blue shirt and striped tie, 11-year-old Quinn Krueger leaned over his desk and peered at plans for his company's next project -- a park bench.Krueger was CEO of the only construction firm in BizTown, a simulated city at Junior Achievement in Maplewood, Minn., where fourth- and fifth-graders spend a day learning to run a business, work for a boss, write a check, pay taxes and do payroll.
"We're selling the bench for $75," Krueger said. "We're doing good."
With kids zipping back and forth and bemused parents and teachers looking on, the program is among the more elaborate attempts to teach children to become financially literate.
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Madison School District property taxes for 2013 could increase 7.4 percent under budget recommendations being presented Monday to the Madison School Board.David BlaskaThat would be the biggest percent increase in the district's property tax levy in a decade. Taxes on an average Madison home valued at $230,831 would total $2,855, a $182 increase from last year.
However, district officials cautioned the numbers likely will change once the state budget is finalized and new superintendent Jennifer Cheatham conducts a review of the district.
"Before I can feel comfortable recommending a tax increase I would want to make sure that every dollar is spent effectively and I can feel confident that the funds that we're investing are going to pay off for students," Cheatham said.
Did you get a 7.4% pay raise this year? State employees have forgone a pay raise the last couple years. They had to reach in their pockets to pay new health insurance and pension co-pays. Annuitants covered by the Wisconsin Retirement System have been treading water since 2009. Those who retired nine or more years ago are facing a 9.6% reduction in their pensions. Many of those, ironically, are retired teachers.Related: Status Quo Costs More: Madison Schools' Administration Floats a 7.38% Property Tax Increase; Dane County Incomes down 4.1%.... District Received $11.8M Redistributed State Tax Dollar Increase last year. Spending up 6.3% over the past 16 months.Yet the Madison School Board proposes a 1.5% across-the-board pay increase. Actually, reporter DeFour underreported the proposed pay increase. Add another 1% for the "step" increases to account for longevity to equal a 2.5% increase. Almost uniquely among taxpayer-supported employees these days, the district's teachers still would pay nothing toward their generous health insurance benefits. Job security is nearly guaranteed. Meanwhile, the district acts as bagman for union boss John Matthews, deducting dues from teacher paychecks.
Can we expect the district to end that statutorily forbidden practice when the current contract expires after this June? Let's hope so, unless the district hides behind Dane County Judge Juan Colas' Act 10 ruling.
What would get the axe? Parent-teacher conferences. So much for addressing the achievement gap.
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Grit and optimism. And hugs for the kids in your life.The events of last week, national, local and personal, have reduced me to sentence fragments. These words and phrases are at the top of my mind.
How can you show grit at a time when the news can drain all your energy? How can you be optimistic in a week when an 8-year-old boy, Martin Richard, is killed by a bomb while waiting to cheer for his father? Or when so many other horrible things occur?
Because you have to, for yourself and for your children.
Paul Tough, formerly of The New York Times, wrote a great book last year about the character traits of successful children. Tough wrote that research shows that children who turn out well are, in significant numbers, children who are strong in key character traits.
That applies both to those growing up in comfortable circumstances and those who are not.
Among the traits he singled out: curiosity, self-control, conscientiousness, optimism and one he labeled grit - in fact, it's in the subtitle of his book, "How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character."
Grit includes the determination to keep working on something when it gets frustrating or tough and to persevere until there are better outcomes. (President Barack Obama used the word grit in praising Boston's first responders when he spoke to a group of them Thursday in Boston.)
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There are plenty of reasons why it is time to ditch defined-benefit pensions (as well as the rest of traditional teacher compensation) -- and not just because of the at least $1.1 trillion in long-term deficits (including unfunded retired healthcare benefits often handled by state pension systems) that are being borne by taxpayers and the nation as a whole. One of them lies with the fact that the political power inherent in pension systems (including the ability to sway boards of publicly-held companies, as well as the role they play in picking money managers) allow for those who sit on their boards to engage in mischief that hurts markets and taxpayers alike; this includes requiring pensions to invest funds in alternative energy schemes that won't ever pan out. This is especially true when board seats are held by leaders of National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates looking for any way to defend their ever-declining influence in education policy.So your editor wasn't surprised when the national AFT released what it called a "Retirement Security Report" earlier this week targeting money managers who happen to also be among key players in the school reform movement. Among the targets: Index fund investing pioneer Dimensional Fund Advisers (because one of its cofounders -- who no longer runs the organization's day-to-day operations -- heads up Missouri's Show-Me State Institute, a key player in advancing systemic reform in the Midwest); the investment firm Gilder, Gagnon, whose cofounder is chairman emeritus of the Manhattan Institute, a longstanding critic of the AFT and education traditionalists in general; and SLX Capital, whose foundation also donated to the conservative think tank. And, of course, Eagle Capital Management, whose boss, Ravenel Boykin Curry, is on the board of Manhattan Institute as well; his son, R. Boykin Curry Jr., cofounded (with Kevin Chavous and Whitney Tilson) Democrats for Education Reform, which has helped reduce the AFT's and NEA's influence over Democratic Party politics at the national level.
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I've fielded questions recently from undergraduate students interested in, but unsure about, pursuing a PhD. I distilled some thoughts into an email, but actually these thoughts are better spent in public. I have previously written on the process of a PhD elsewhere, from a different perspective.The following was written retrospectively, after I had submitted my own PhD dissertation, and long after I completed my undergraduate career. It's also written from a UK perspective: other countries may have teaching requirements for PhD students, or may have taught classes that students must attend. UK PhD programmes also have a time limit within which you must submit your work for examination, and that time limit may be different or non-existent in other countries.
The Focus
Here's a universal truth: studying for a PhD is vastly different to studying for your undergrad. Here's how:
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It started as a transitional program, a way to teach special education students with developmental disabilities how to handle personal finances, find a job and live independently once they left school.Laura Waters has more.But in the last several years, the Trenton school district's Life Skills program has gone tragically off the rails, one teacher's aide is alleging.
Students mindlessly copy answers teachers have written in textbooks. No curriculum exists. The students, all high school age, sometimes color sheets of Disney characters in lieu of classwork. There's no rhyme or reason as to who graduates or who stays on for another year.
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There's nothing quite like the feeling of defeating a worthy opponent in a game of chess: the ultimate battle of the wits. Of course, it's not a feeling I have very often, since I'm not very good at chess. On the other hand, my father is officially an "expert" and my friend is a "master." In other words, they are both very, very good. To give an idea of how good, if I was to play 100 games with each of them, I would win precisely zero.Worldwide, chess is still a popular game, but it is treated with particular seriousness in Eastern Europe. For instance, the Bulgarian National Olympic Committee has been lobbying for chess to be recognized as an Olympic sport, as has Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the Russian president of the World Chess Federation. In September 2011, Armenia made chess a required subject for all children over the age of six. (In the DW-TV news clip below, the children are in 2nd grade.)
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It seems every educational app promises the most engaging and effective way to teach children, and cash-strapped school districts have embraced iPads, iPods, and Smart Boards as solutions to the challenges they face. But with all the time and resources invested in educational technology, how much do we really know about learning from these popular new devices?The good news is the field of research is growing, but it's got a long way to go. Presenting on Tuesday at Future Tense's portion of the Education Innovation Summit 2013 in Scottsdale, Ariz., Lisa Guernsey cautioned that we can't simply expect young children to learn from an iPad app on their own. Guernsey, who directs the New America Foundation's Early Education Initiative, said that in many cases, children don't understand the nature of the technology they're using. (Disclosure: Arizona State University, a co-host of the Education Innovation Summit, is a partner in Future Tense along with Slate and the New America Foundation.)
Guernsey highlighted research from the University of Virginia suggesting babies can't often distinguish between images and objects. When shown pictures on a piece of paper, babies in the study tried to pick up the objects on the page. In one case, a baby held a picture of a shoe up to its own foot, as if trying to wear it. This misunderstanding of screens and images continues as children age, and is perhaps most evident when kids ask how people got inside their TVs. For that reason, Guernsey, author of Screen Time, says parents and teachers should become media mentors to children, guiding them toward age-appropriate apps and TV shows and teaching them how the technology works.
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The recession convinced many young American high-school graduates to take refuge in college instead of try their luck in a lousy job market. New research indicates that trend may be unwinding.The college enrollment rate -- the share of recent U.S. high-school graduates enrolling in college or a university in the same year -- dropped in 2012 to 66.2%, the lowest level since 2006, the Labor Department said in a report on Wednesday. For 2012 graduates, the rate dropped for both men and women, to 61.3% from 64.6% in 2011, and 71.3% from 72.3%, respectively.
The findings suggest some high-school graduates are becoming more confident about their job prospects after years of hiding out by going to college. When the economy sank into recession between 2007 and 2009, the college enrollment rate rose steadily to a record high of 70.1%. The implosion of America's construction industry, for example, meant fewer jobs for young men looking for work right out of high school. Now it appears some of these young graduates are going on the job market again.
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It began as a stunt intended to prove that hardship and poverty still existed in this small, wealthy country, but it backfired badly. Visit a single mother of two on welfare, a liberal member of Parliament goaded a skeptical political opponent, see for yourself how hard it is.It turned out, however, that life on welfare was not so hard. The 36-year-old single mother, given the pseudonym "Carina" in the news media, had more money to spend than many of the country's full-time workers. All told, she was getting about $2,700 a month, and she had been on welfare since she was 16.
In past years, Danes might have shrugged off the case, finding Carina more pitiable than anything else. But even before her story was in the headlines 16 months ago, they were deeply engaged in a debate about whether their beloved welfare state, perhaps Europe's most generous, had become too rich, undermining the country's work ethic. Carina helped tip the scales.
With little fuss or political protest -- or notice abroad -- Denmark has been at work overhauling entitlements, trying to prod Danes into working more or longer or both. While much of southern Europe has been racked by strikes and protests as its creditors force austerity measures, Denmark still has a coveted AAA bond rating.
But Denmark's long-term outlook is troubling. The population is aging, and in many regions of the country people without jobs now outnumber those with them.
Some of that is a result of a depressed economy. But many experts say a more basic problem is the proportion of Danes who are not participating in the work force at all -- be they dawdling university students, young pensioners or welfare recipients like Carina who lean on hefty government support.
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Most New York City public school parents don't know that their child's personal information will be available to third-party companies through a new data-sharing initiative.Much more on the "Shared Learning Collaborative", here.
Parents and advocates opposed to the new initiative believe it will put sensitive student information at risk and allow companies to capitalize on data that parents never consented to release.
The New York State Education Department says that districts have been sharing this kind of information for nearly a decade, and that the new initiative simply enables that data to be shared in a safer, more efficient fashion.
If it really is that simple, parents and advocates wonder, why hasn't the state been more forthcoming with details about the project?"The real outrage of it is that the whole spin of this is that it's being done to help kids. And, yet they refuse to tell their parents about it." Leonie Haimson, of Class Size Matters, tells the Voice. "The idea that they wouldn't tell parents about it and allow them the right to consent, shows me that either it's not being done for kids at all, or that they don't trust parents to make the right choices for their child."
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FOR the nearly 50 million students enrolled in America's public schools, tests are everywhere, whether prepared by classroom teachers or by the ubiquitous testing industry. Central to school accountability, they assume familiar shapes and forms. Multiple choice. Essay. Aptitude. Achievement. NAEP, ACT, SAT.To teachers everywhere, the message is clear: Raise test scores. No excuses. The stakes are very high, as the many cheating scandals unfolding nationally reveal, including most spectacularly the recent indictment of 35 educators in Atlanta.
But we should also be wondering, where did all this begin? It turns out that the race to the top has a lot of history behind it.
Members of the Boston School Committee fired the first shots in the testing wars in the summer of 1845. Traditionally, an examination committee periodically inspected the local English grammar schools, questioned some pupils orally, then wrote brief, perfunctory reports that were filed and forgotten.
Many Bostonians smugly assumed that their well-funded public schools were the nation's best. They, along with many visitors, had long praised the local system, which included a famous Latin school and the nation's first public high school, founded in 1821.
Citizens were in for a shock. For the first time, examiners gave the highest grammar school classes a common written test, conceived by a few political activists who wanted precise measurements of school achievement. The examiners tested 530 pupils -- the cream of the crop below high school. Most flunked. Critics immediately accused the examiners of injecting politics into the schools and demeaning both teachers and pupils.
The testing groundwork was laid in 1837, when a lawyer and legislator in Massachusetts named Horace Mann became secretary of the newly created State Board of Education, part of the Whig Party's effort to centralize authority and make schools modern and accountable. After a fact-finding trip abroad, Mann claimed in 1844 in a nationally publicized report that Prussia's schools were more child-friendly and superior to America's. Boston's grammar masters, insulted, attacked Mann in print, and he returned the favor. In December, some Whig reformers, including Mann's close friend Samuel Gridley Howe, were elected to the School Committee and soon landed on the examining committee.
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Today, I gave a brief presentation - based on our previous stories - on the performance of London schools to the excellent Centre for London. Some slides are a little mysterious without my burbling over the top, but I hope it's understandable enough.View the complete PDF presentation, here.Three quick concepts:
1. The "FT score" - we allocate each child a score. Kids get 8 points for an A* down to one for a G. We add up the score for English, maths and their three best other subjects.2. IDACI - an index of poverty which measures how poor the neighbourhood in which a child lives is.
3. "Regression" - we are dealing with moving populations, changing intakes etc. Think of a regression as a technique that allows us to discern the impact of any one of those things
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Gov. Scott Walker and his fellow Republicans in the Legislature called for freezing tuition for two years Friday after a state review revealed that the University of Wisconsin System had cash reserves of nearly $650 million at the end of the last fiscal year.Many links:While the UW System said the amount of uncommitted cash was much less than that, the disclosure infuriated Republican lawmakers just as they begin deliberations on the next two-year budget.
Republicans questioned whether Kevin Reilly should remain as president of the UW System, and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) said he was unsure the system should get any of the $181 million increase in taxpayer funds Walker had previously recommended, including $20 million for new initiatives.
Reilly could not be reached for comment, nor could UW System Regents President Brent Smith.
Vos said it was too early to say whether Reilly should remain as the head of the UW System, but said he saw a pattern of financial mismanagement during Reilly's tenure.
"I have serious concerns about whether the credibility of the UW System can recover with the current leadership in place," Vos said.
In the past, Vos has supported giving UW-Madison more flexibility, but that has changed because of Friday's disclosure, he said.
"They have now pushed me entirely in the opposite direction," Voss said of UW System leaders.
Many state legislators reacted with outrage to Friday morning's announcement the University of Wisconsin System currently holds over $1 billion in surplus in its reserves, prompting some to advocate for a tuition freeze over the next two years.According to a document from Legislative Fiscal Bureau Director Bob Lang sent to members of the Joint Committee on Finance, the UW System has accrued $1,045,200,572 in its program revenue reserves from the 2011-'13 funding cycle.
The Legislative Fiscal Bureau and Legislative Audit Bureau discovered the surplus through an audit that began after information regarding $33 million in Human Resources overpayments surfaced in February.
The System has always maintained a cash balance, Giroux added, and its finances have always been public as the Legislative Audit Bureau audits it yearly. The cash balances have grown in recent years because of rapid enrollment growth and the System's increased reliance on non-state revenues, he said, calling them "an essential safety net."System leaders told the fiscal bureau that about $441 million of the reserve was allocated for future projects and expenses. With that spending included, it left a $207 million balance from the end of 2012. Vos said lawmakers should have been notified of the surplus in recent times of tight state budgets and maximum tuition increases for System students.
Gov. Scott Walker and Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, chairman of the Assembly's committee on higher education, also criticized the System over the reported surplus.
"At a minimum, on behalf of students and their families, I am asking legislative leaders to freeze tuition increases for two years for the entire UW System during their deliberations on the budget," Walker said in a statement.
The news about the surplus broke shortly after System President Kevin Reilly released details of his budget proposals, which include tuition increases of 2 percent each of the next two years and a $30 million boost in financial aid awards.
United Council of UW Students has been pushing legislators to include a tuition cap of 3 or 4 percent. Dylan Jambrek, the group's government relations director, said he was pleased students can now "have the comfort of a tuition freeze" but expressed concerns over the memo's findings."Whatever the money was going towards, it's concerning that they were raising tuition to stick it in the bank account," Jambrek said.
Jambrek said he does not want legislators to overreact and do something that ends up harming students, such as cutting Walker's proposed investments.
Rep. Cory Mason, D-Racine, is the ranking Democrat on the Legislature's budget committee, which has 12 Republicans and 4 Democrats.
Mason called for a potential tuition reduction because he said UW System students are already graduating with $27,000 in student debt on average.
"Not only should we be freezing tuition given the news of the UW's surplus, but the state budget deliberations should include a serious conversation about reducing student debt by lowering the cost of tuition, increasing student financial aid or both," Mason said in a statement.
The University of Wisconsin System just ceded to the demands of students across the State and agreed to cap a tuition increase at no more than 2% for the coming year and eliminate the waiting list for the Wisconsin Higher Education Grant. This is a stunning reversal, as President Kevin Reilly had been lobbying against students, insisting that no cap was necessary.What happened? Well, as I have long insisted, the issue is not entirely about a lack of state funding being provided to higher education but how administrators are spending it. When the incentives for administrators cause they to advance the interests of institutions over the needs of students, accountability measures are required to prevent that. UW System just got called out, as an audit just revealed that a $404 million balance from tuition payments in 2011-2012 was leftover, unspent, while tuition was hiked by 5.5%. SERIOUSLY??? Those cash reserves were being held for "specific planned future activities," according to the System. Sorry Charlie, no way. That is something you do with appropriations, not tuition. If you aim to help future students and promote stability, that's a public good, and should be on the public dime. This is an outgrowth of the same mindset that's diminished tuition and pushed students into debt-- the same old public / private benefits nonsense. Honestly, the students should demand NO increase and hold firm on doing it for 2 or more years!
So, here we are-- they said it couldn't be done-- the net price of attending UW System schools will likely stay flat or decline over the next year. HURRAH!
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Public pension funds are frantically chasing higher yields to reduce their roughly $3 trillion in unfunded liabilities. But don't tell that to Randi Weingarten, the teachers union el supremo, who is trying to strong-arm pension trustees not to invest in hedge funds or private-equity funds that support education reform.That's the remarkable story that emerged this week as the American Federation of Teachers president tried to sandbag hedge fund investor Dan Loeb at a conference sponsored by the Council of Institutional Investors. CII had invited Mr. Loeb, who runs Third Point LLC, to talk about investment opportunities and corporate governance. Ms. Weingarten is an officer and board member of CII.
But Ms. Weingarten's real concern is that Mr. Loeb puts his own money behind school reform and charter schools. In particular, Mr. Loeb is on the board of the New York chapter of StudentsFirst. That's the education outfit founded by former Washington, D.C., schools chief Michelle Rhee that is pushing for more charters and teacher accountability, among other desperately needed reforms.
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By 20 votes to 18 the Senate, which the Concertación narrowly controls, impeached him, accusing him of turning a blind eye to illegal profiteering at Chile's universities. The vote followed a similar defeat in the Chamber of Deputies two weeks earlier, in which the Concertación relied on the votes of a few small, left-wing parties. As a result of his impeachment, Mr Beyer is barred from public office for five years.It's true that Mr Beyer presided over an imperfect education system, plagued by financial irregularities. Maybe he could have done more to regulate it. But the same could be said of his two predecessors under Mr Piñera, or indeed of any education minister of the previous 20 years, when the Concertación was in power.
The vote smacks of revenge.
Five years ago the centre-right impeached the Concertación's education minister, Yasna Provoste. Many on the centre-left remember that and have not forgiven it. The impeachment also has a strong whiff of electioneering. Chileans will choose a new president in November, and the campaign is already getting nasty.
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Cheatham said that she believed teachers and administrators needed to be evaluated regularly and that it shouldn't be based only on students' test scores. She said that when she was a teacher, she once had a principal tell her to fill out her own evaluation. "I didn't want that. I wanted someone to tell me how I was doing," she said. "Most teacher evaluations, generally they're using a vague checklist and they happen so sporadically that they're not meaningful."Barry Adam:"The frequency has to increase and they have to be collaborative conversations. The teacher needs to identify things he or she wants to improve on and identify goals."
One parent said he wanted something to be done to hold parents more accountable for student performance. While Cheatham said that parent involvement is invaluable, "Of all the things within our control, I'm not sure it's worth our time to work on parental accountability. Some parents are not going to be involved. It's not because they don't love their children, it's because they're working two jobs."
Julie Salt has a son in kindergarten at Mendota Elementary and is an educational assistant. She told Cheatham she is concerned about some of her son's classmates who are already noticeably behind."The students that are kind of prepared to do the alphabet and numbers and all that kind of stuff, obviously have had exposure (compared to) kids who have not had that experience. That makes a difference in the classroom," Salt said. "So already there's that gap."
Robert Bergeron works with pre-kindergarten students at Goodman Community Center and has a daughter at East High School. He believes more of an effort needs to be made by educators at all levels to get parents involved in their child's education.
"It can be any kind of involvement but the teachers also have a responsibility to try and get parents involved," Bergeron said. "Sometimes, it's communication."
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The way Principal Michael Hernandez tells it, something had to go.Related: Status Quo Costs More: Madison Schools' Administration Floats a 7.38% Property Tax Increase; Dane County Incomes down 4.1%.... District Received $11.8M Redistributed State Tax Dollar Increase last year. Spending up 6.3% over the past 16 months.Hernandez decided that at Sherman Middle School, it will be French class.
With a renewed emphasis on curriculum basics in the Madison School District, the need at Sherman to double-down on math skills, and a scheduled expansion there of the AVID program that prepares low-income minority kids for college, Hernandez figures the north-side middle school will need to drop its second "world language" offering next year.
French 2 will continue for seventh-graders who took French 1 this year. The school's Spanish-language program -- including three sections of dual-language instruction -- also will continue.
"Unfortunately, there are tough decisions we have to make," Hernandez told me. "With budget cuts, I can't have a class with only approximately seven students, when I could use that (staff) allocation for a math intervention class."
Principals will be developing these kinds of adjustments around the margins to prepare for the 2013-2014 school year as district officials begin work on the budget and schools get projections on how many staff members they will have.
School Board members on Monday will receive a "budget briefing" instead of fleshed-out budget proposal. Penciled in is $392,807,993 in district-wide spending next school year, down a fraction from this year.
The scaled-down budget proposal is due to the uncertain prospects of a controversial proposal in Gov. Scott Walker's budget to shift aid and expand vouchers to Madison and eight other school districts -- at a projected cost of more than $800,000 to the Madison public schools. In addition, new Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham just came on the job three weeks ago and is not prepared yet to present a detailed budget.
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Matthew Goldstein, chancellor of the City University of New York since 1999, has announced that he will retire in June. His is a tenure that shouldn't end quietly. It holds lessons not only for public colleges and universities but for every K-12 public school in America.Long ago, the CUNY colleges were seen as great academic institutions. With their low cost of tuition, they were the only meaningful postsecondary option for many of New York's poor and working-class families, including children from immigrant families. The list of remarkable alumni from the early and mid-20th century--Felix Frankfurter, Jonas Salk (one of 12 Nobel laureates), Colin Powell, Frank McCourt, Andy Grove and many more--compares favorably to that of virtually any other university, including the Ivy League schools.
That golden era came to a screeching halt after 1970, when the CUNY schools adopted an open-admission policy, allowing anyone who had graduated high school to attend. Anyone could now go to what were becoming increasingly inferior academic institutions.
In 1999, as the system continued to decay, Mayor Rudy Giuliani appointed a task force chaired by former Yale President Benno Schmidt. It called for a major overhaul. Soon after, CUNY selected Matthew Goldstein, a graduate of City College who was then president of Adelphi University, to lead the effort.
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HAVING a choice is generally a good thing, and being able to choose among several college acceptances should be a wonderful thing indeed.But let's face it: the cost of a college education these days ranges from expensive to obscenely expensive. So the decision is likely to be tougher and more emotional than most parents and children imagined as they weigh offers from colleges that have given real financial aid against others that are offering just loans.
While some students will be able to go to college only if they receive financial aid and others have the resources to go wherever they want, most fall into a middle group that has to answer this question: Do they try to pay for a college that gave them little financial aid, even if it requires borrowing money or using up their savings, because it is perceived to be better, or do they opt for a less prestigious college that offered a merit scholarship and would require little, if any borrowing? It's not an easy decision.
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Taking the SAT is a rite of passage and has been ever since the first exam was offered in 1926 as a way to eliminate the prep school bias of the college admissions process.The very first SAT, excerpted below, looks quite different from today's three-hour-45-minute version. Students who took the original SAT on June 23, 1926, tackled nine sub-tests totaling 315 questions in just 97 minutes.
I recently spoke with Brian O'Reilly, a 31-year veteran of the College Board, about the 1926 exam. How well would you fare? Quiz yourself, and as you do, click on the yellow tabs, within the document, to learn more about the various types of questions.
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For-profit education is the fastest-growing sector of the higher-education industry. However, politicians and journalists have highlighted trends that they say should make students think twice before attending for-profit colleges. These include:Poor graduation rates, as only 22 percent of students at for-profits completed college in six years, compared with 65 percent of students at nonprofit private schools and 55 percent of students at nonprofit public schools;
Higher loan-default rates, as 25 percent of students at for-profits default on their loans--the figures for their peers at nonprofit private and public schools are 7.6 and 10.8 percent, respectively;
Higher likelihood of unemployment for alumni of for-profit colleges.
However, policymakers should not overlook the many positive aspects of for-profit colleges. For-profits are notable for educating students who are underrepresented at traditional campuses. For instance:
African-Americans and Hispanics constitute 22 and 15 percent of students in the for-profit sector, respectively, though they make up only 13 and 11.5 percent of all students;
75 percent of students attending for-profits are financially independent;
54 percent of dependent students attending for-profits have incomes below $40,000;
65 percent of students attending for-profits are aged 25 and older, compared with much smaller percentages at four-year public colleges and two-year colleges.
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This past weekend, my husband and I drove to a conference center on the shores of Green Lake to watch our two younger children, ages 13 and 10, participate in the Wisconsin Future Problem Solving (FPS) State Bowl. For those of you unfamiliar with FPS (as I most certainly was before my oldest child got involved years ago as a fourth grader), the program's mission is to stimulate the critical and creative thinking skills of young people by challenging them, either in teams or individually, to come up with innovative solutions to complex global problems.Truth be told, the idea of my kids and their peers being "future problem solvers" has always made me giggle a bit, especially when it comes to international matters. How can a bunch of pre-teen and teenage kids like mine, who can't seem to remember to unpack the dishwasher or match socks correctly, be expected to generate meaningful solutions to heady and challenging issues like pitfalls of the culture of celebrity, the difficulties of managing megacities or, in the case of this past weekend, how to help offset the Garbage Patch in the north Pacific.
If contemporary sociologists, urban planners and scientists haven't been able to crack the code on alleviating these sorts of problems, I question if my kids will genuinely be able to provide much help.
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The Madison School District Administration (217 page 7.41MB PDF)
The Madison Metropolitan School District's proposed 2013-2014 balanced budget provides resources for a sound education for the district's children.A few useful links:
The proposed 2013-2014 balanced budget continues to put resources where they are most needed in the classrooms.Total spending under the balanced budget is $392,807,993 which is a decrease of $70,235 or (0.02%) less than the 2012-13 Revised Budget. The change to the revenue limit plus other fund increases or decreases comprises the entire proposed budget. The property tax levy would increase by $18,385,847 or 7.38% to $267,675,929.
The total MMSD 2013-14 balanced budget includes many funds. A fund is a separate set of accounting records, segregated for the purpose of carrying on specific activities. A fund is established for accountability purposes to demonstrate that financial resources are being used only for permitted purposes. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction specifies the various funds required to be used by Wisconsin school districts.
The January, 2012 budget document mentioned "District spending remains largely flat at $369,394,753" (2012-2013), yet the "baseline" for 2013-2014 mentions planned spending of $392,807,993 "a decrease of $70,235 or (0.02%) less than the 2012-13 Revised Budget" (around $15k/student). The District's budget generally increases throughout the school year, growing 6.3% from January, 2012 to April, 2013. Follow the District's budget changes for the past year, here.
Meanwhile, via a kind reader, Wages for Dane County and Wisconsin workers fell, latest federal figures say
The average weekly wage for workers in Dane County fell by 4.1 percent between September 2011 and September 2012, the first decrease for the third quarter in at least a decade and a touch greater than the state average, according to newly released data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.Finally, should Madison, Wisconsin and federal taxpayers spend more for ongoing disastrous reading results?Dane County workers made an average of $842 weekly in the third quarter of 2012, down $36 from the same time period a year earlier. It was the 12th-biggest drop in terms of percentage among Wisconsin's counties.
Statewide, wages fell 2.65 percent to an average of $770 per week. That was the fourth-biggest loss among states by percentage. Nationally, Wisconsin ranked 35th among the states for wages, down from 33rd for the third quarter in 2011.
The data also show that Wisconsin ranked 44th nationwide in job creation for the private sector, but while job creation has dominated news coverage here owing largely to Gov. Scott Walker's pledge to create 250,000 new jobs during his term, stagnant wages have been a longstanding concern.
The defunct "citizen's budget" was an effort to create an easily comparable annual two page document, rather than the present 217 pager.
"Censorship through complexity" - Assange
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I've often said that all NAIS schools are "college-prep," even the early childhood schools like The Children's School (Connecticut) [age 2 through eighth grade], and the learning differences (LD) schools like Lawrence School (Ohio) [grades K - 12], and scores of other independent schools like them across the country. They, like their more traditional cousins in our membership, are college-prep because parents choose them with college in mind, believing, rightfully, that an independent school with a mission that matches their child's needs and proclivities will be the surest path to success in secondary school and college. And all of our schools deliver on that expectation.I've also often said that the early childhood programs in NAIS schools and our LD schools (or the LD "schools within a school" in the traditional school model) are often the most innovative, often the first to adopt the new thinking, the new technologies, and the new research (especially on brain-based learning and differentiated instruction). That said, we are collectively, in the independent school world, on the cusp of significant re-engineering of schools, and what it means to be an outstanding place to learn. This is exemplified by Grant Lichtman's blogs on his journey across America to discover where innovation is sprouting up in independent schools. No better time, no better place for every independent school leader and teacher to think about where, and how, we will innovate at each of our schools.
While "Change is inevitable, growth optional" (John C. Maxwell), I'd like to note that a rapidly changing landscape does not mean that everything old should be subject to change. For me, character first is the defining quality that makes independent schools strong. The founders of the first independent schools in America knew that, as do the founders of our newest schools. For example, the constitutions of both Phillips Academy (Massachusetts) and Phillips Exeter Academy (New Hampshire) include a charge to the masters (teachers) exhorting them to attend to the character of their wards: "[T]hough goodness without knowledge (as it respects others) is weak and feeble; yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous; and that both united form the noblest character, and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind."1 Have truer words ever been spoken? Or clearer insight into what makes great schools and successful ("good and smart") graduates?
So, character first. And the adults are the moral mentors and models. But for college-prep schools, a second maxim should be "academics second," meaning what one might call "serious scholarship." While the means of conducting serious scholarship (video oral histories, crowd-sourcing, data mining via the Internet, etc.) are indeed changing, I like the case made by Will Fitzhugh, editor of The Concord Review, that serious scholarship in the form of a substantial publication-worthy research paper is the entry ticket for future academic success (and selective college admissions).
The Concord Review, launched by Fitzhugh in 1987, is an excellent periodical of secondary school research in the subject of history. As Fitzhugh is fond of pointing out, The Concord Review is more "selective" than Princeton: one out of 20 submissions to the Review published vs. one out of 19 applicants to Princeton admitted. And the requirements of the paper would be daunting to all but the most ambitious student (typically 4,000 - 6,000 words, but sometimes much longer, 10,000 words or more).2 A quick scan of the research paper titles from the most recent issue of the Review reveals both the most esoteric and fascinating of subjects chosen by these young scholars.
I recommend that all teachers read (and perhaps weep about) any student essay from past Concord Review papers archived on the magazine's website to find out what serious scholarship at the secondary school level looks, and sounds, like. (In fact, from what my college president colleagues tell me, much college student writing today wouldn't have a chance of publication in The Concord Review.)
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Approximately one month ago, I fell into a rabbit hole - the rabbit hole better known as Writing My Dissertation. I'd been working toward that point for five years and counting, through seminars and conferences, experiments and literature reviews, conversations and late-night therapy sessions with an open statistics textbook and eyes full of tears over yet another beta or epsilon that I couldn't for the life of me comprehend. But here it was: the home stretch. The final product of years of loving--and sometimes not-so-loving--labor. And partway through another all-nighter (I was working under some tight deadlines), I had an epiphany: thank god I've spent the last few years blogging, writing a book, and doing freelance journalism. Otherwise, I'd be lost. Truly.Alas, not what I looked like as I worked on my dissertation.
This may strike you as a strange realization to have in the middle of the most academic of academic pursuits, the doctoral dissertation. After all, the dissertation is Serious Writing about Serious Experiments and Serious Methods. It comes with its own language, its own conventions, its own academe-speak. On the surface, it has little in common with a blog post or magazine piece that's meant for popular consumption. And yet--it wasn't long into my introductory literature review (which I'd saved for last) that I realized just how lucky I am to have the popular writing background that I do.
My dissertation sits on the boundary of several disciplines. On the one hand, it's social and cognitive psychology, on the other, behavioral economics or behavioral finance. To set the background as thoroughly as possible, I would have to combine studies from well-established psych journals (Psychological Science, JPSP, PNAS, and the like) with experiments reported in journals that many psychologists don't even realize exist, or if they realize it, don't often consult: The Journal of Portfolio Management, The Journal of Behavioral Finance, American Economic Review, to name a few. What's more, because I was trying to build a case for the applied validity of my study designs, I would have to supplement those academic sources with commentaries on stock markets, analyses by actual investors, discussions of the causes of crashes and bubbles, market efficiencies and inefficiencies, financial climates and investment strategies--in short, by the types of analyses that are done by journalists and financial industry professionals.
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In 2011-12, GAB numbers show, Wisconsin contract lobbyists (hired guns) were reportedly paid $30.8 million. Meanwhile, in-house lobbyists (lobby group employees) reported their lobbying-related compensation at $24.3 million. Other lobby costs came to $7.8 million.A remarkable amount of money is spent on education lobbying. In 2010, WEAC spent $1,570,000 in an effort to re-elect four state senators. That is quite a statement and illustrates how things roll in the education world. Richard Zimman's 2009 Madison Rotary Club speech is well worth reading.The session's highest rollers, spending a total of $6.3 million, were public employee unions -- Wisconsin State AFL-CIO, Wisconsin Education Association Council and AFSCME Council 11. Tellingly, 94% of this flowed forth in 2011, when the unions were fighting changes that would weaken their power; just 6% came in 2012, after these changes were made.
Other big spenders in 2011-12 include Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, Wisconsin Hospital Association, AT&T Wisconsin, Wisconsin Medical Society, Wisconsin Property Taxpayers Inc. and Wisconsin Counties Association. All came in between $750,000 and $1 million. They were among more than 50 groups to top the $250,000 mark.
In terms of time spent, Wisconsin Property Taxpayers, a "property tax relief and reform" group, led the pack with 13,267 hours. A quarter of this, the largest share, went toward backing new state rules on metallic mining. Those efforts failed in 2011-12 but sailed through this year.
Other big players, time-wise, were the three aforementioned unions and AFSCME International, Wisconsin Independent Businesses, Wisconsin Association of School Boards, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, and the Wisconsin Hospital Association. All racked up more than 7,500 lobby hours.
In all, state groups reported 432,255 hours of lobbying -- the equivalent of 100 people working full time over these two years.
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One doesn't need to be a global-warming skeptic to be appalled by a new set of national K-12 science standards. Those standards, developed by educrats and science administrators, and likely to be adopted initially by up to two dozen states, put the study of global warming and other ways that humans are destroying life as we know it at the very core of science education. This is a political choice, not a scientific one. But the standards are equally troubling in their embrace of the nostrums of progressive pedagogy.-----------------------------Students educated under the Next Generation Science Standards will begin their lifelong attention to climate change as soon as they enter school. Kindergartners will be expected to "use tools and materials to design and build a structure that will reduce the warming effect of sunlight on an area" (perhaps this is what used to be known as "building a fort") and "develop understanding of patterns and variations in local weather and the purpose of weather forecasting to prepare for, and respond to, severe weather." Things get even scarier by the third grade, when students should be asking such questions as: "How can the impact of weather-related hazards be reduced?" The standards don't mention protesting the Keystone pipeline as a possible "real-world" answer to the question of how to reduce "weather-related hazards," but rest assured that the graduates of America's left-wing education schools will not hesitate to include such hands-on learning experiences in their global-warming-politics--oops, make that "science"--classes. By high school, students are squarely in the world of environmental policy-making, expected to "evaluate a solution to a complex real-world problem based on prioritized criteria and trade-offs that account for a range of constraints, including cost, safety, reliability, and aesthetics, as well as possible social, cultural, and environmental impacts."
Hard as it may be for the groups such the Alliance for Climate Education, a purveyor of climate-change school programs and--surprise!--an enthusiastic backer of the new standards, there really are other important areas of knowledge and concern. As long as we're picking and choosing among scientific problems, why not start kindergartners thinking about cell mutation or neural pathways so they can fight cancer and Alzheimer's disease when they grow up?
But even without their preening obsession with climate, biodiversity, and sustainability, the standards are a recipe for further American knowledge decline. The New York Times reports that the standards' authors anticipate the possible elimination of traditional classes such as biology and chemistry from high school in favor of a more "holistic" approach. This contempt for traditional disciplines has already polluted college education, but it could do far more damage in high school. The disciplines represent real bodies of knowledge that must be mastered before one can begin to be legitimately interdisciplinary.
The standards drearily mimic progressive education's enthusiasm for "critical-thinking skills." Fourth-graders sound like veritable geysers of high-level abstract reasoning, expected to "demonstrate grade-appropriate proficiency in asking questions, developing and using models, planning and carrying out investigations, analyzing and interpreting data, constructing explanations and designing solutions, engaging in argument from evidence, and obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information." I'd be happy if they knew all the planets, continents, major oceans and rivers, and a few galaxies. Such fancy-ancy cognitive talk gives teachers an excuse to gloss over the hard work of knocking concrete facts into their students' heads--and ignores the truth that mastering such facts can be a source of pleasure and pride.
Chinese students are not flooding into American Ph.D. programs because they have spent their high-school years pondering "a technological solution that reduces impacts of human activities on natural systems," as the standards propose. They are filling the slots that Americans are unqualified for because they have spent years memorizing the Krebs cycle, the process of meiosis and mitosis, the periodic table, and the laws of thermodynamics and motion. The new science standards guarantee that we will look back on the years when Americans made up a piddling 50 percent of graduate-level science students as the high-water mark of American scientific literacy.
"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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Motoko Rich in the New York Times describes the federal lawsuit, initiated by seven Florida teachers with support from local NEA affiliates, which contends that the Florida DOE's system of grading teachers based on student outcomes "violates teachers' rights of due process and equal protection."Much more on "value added assessment, here". Madison's value added assessment scheme relies on the oft-criticized WKCE.
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Michael Gove, the UK's Secretary of State for Education, has expressed a wish to see almost all school pupils studying mathematics in one form or another up to the age of 18. An obvious question follows. At the moment, there are large numbers of people who give up mathematics after GCSE (the exam that is usually taken at the age of 16) with great relief and go through the rest of their lives saying, without any obvious regret, how bad they were at it. What should such people study if mathematics becomes virtually compulsory for two more years?A couple of years ago there was an attempt to create a new mathematics A-level called Use of Mathematics. I criticized it heavily in a blog post, and stand by those criticisms, though interestingly it isn't so much the syllabus that bothers me as the awful exam questions. One might think that a course called Use of Mathematics would teach you how to come up with mathematical models for real-life situations, but these questions did the opposite, and still do. They describe a real-life situation, then tell you that it "may be modelled" by some formula, and proceed to ask you questions that are purely mathematical, and extremely easy compared with A-level maths.
One comment on that post particularly interested me, from someone called Joseph Malkevitch, who drew my attention to an article he had written in which he recommended a different kind of question both from the usual sort of symbolic manipulation that most people would think of as mathematics, and from the sterile questions on the Use of Mathematics papers that pretend to show that mathematics is relevant to real life but in fact do nothing of the kind. The main idea I took away from his article was that there is (or could be) a place for questions that start with the real world rather than starting with mathematics. In other words, when coming up with such a question, you would not ask yourself, "I wonder what real world problem I could ask that would require people to use this piece of mathematics," but rather, "Here's a situation that cries out to be analysed mathematically -- but how?"
Inspired by Malkevitch's article, I decided to write a second post, in which I was more positive about the idea of teaching people how to use mathematics. I gave an example, and encouraged others to come up with further examples. I had a few very nice ones in the comments on that post.
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As clashes continue between teachers' unions and local and state legislatures concerning evaluations of teachers to determine if they are to stay employed, I don't hear either side reacting to what students feel about how they are being taught. This includes the students themselves.Such evaluations could and should ask students what they think being in school is going to mean for their futures. Teachers have their missions. But what are these students' missions beyond college degrees?
Accordingly, to get teacher evaluations, students ought to reveal more about their own real-life, real-time selves in a preparatory dialogue with the people recording their judgments. These people should ask the students such questions as:
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Pro- and anti-voucher forces make their case via press release: Pro: ow.ly/kcEoe Anti: ow.ly/kcEqe
— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) April 18, 2013
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California will expand its experiment in blended online and real-world classes after a successful pilot between San Jose State University (SJSU) and edX, the Harvard/MIT-led consortium for online classes.Blended classes bring massive open online courses, or MOOCs, to physical classrooms. San Jose State piloted an introductory engineering class where students watched an edX class on circuits and electronics, MITx 6.002x, and came to physical classes to work on course-related activities such as quizzes and collaborative work. Students who passed received full credit and did not pay extra for the blended course. The course saw much higher pass rates than traditional courses at SJSU in the same subject.
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Jane Robbins - National Association of Scholars Academic Questions, Spring 2013, Volume 26, Number 1
The advent of the Common Core State Standards has prompted a new discussion=============
about how to produce students who are "college- and career-ready." But this question differs from the one that governed education throughout most of our history. We used to ask, what should a student know to become an educated citizen? Education would prepare one for college or career, certainly, but, more broadly, for life. What vision of education are we now advancing? As with parents and state legislators, academia has been largely excluded from this discussion......Should students read entire books? This is generally unnecessary, apparently, to get the flavor of the work and to have something to think critically about. Will Fitzhugh of The Concord Review notes this truncating feature of Common Core:
"Let us consider saving students more time from their fictional non-informational text readings (previously known as literature) by cutting back on the complete novels, plays and poems formerly offered in our high schools. For instance, instead of Pride and Prejudice (the whole novel), students could be asked to read Chapter Three. Instead of the complete Romeo and Juliet, they could read Act Two, Scene Two, and in poetry, instead of a whole sonnet, perhaps just alternate stanzas could be assigned. In this way, they could get the 'gist' of great works of literature, enough to be, as it were, 'grist' for their deeper analytic cognitive thinking skill mills."39A member of the "Implementing Common Core Standards" team at the Center for Teaching Quality argues that excerpts can be as educational as complete works:"Not every student needs to read every word of every work. We can pull essential excerpts and examine them in small chunks--words, phrases, sentences--asking students to wrestle meaning from the text."40
It is unclear how students can "wrestle meaning" from "words" or "phrases" wrenched cleanly from their context.
"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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Superintendent's Teaching and Learning Transition Team to Begin Work This WeekRelated:A group of national and local education experts will support Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham's entry plan work, the district announced today. The Superintendent's Teaching and Learning Transition Team will begin work this week.
"Instruction and leadership are critical components of systemic improvement," Superintendent Cheatham said. "This team of local and national practitioners will join district and school staff in assessing and analyzing strengths, areas of opportunities and priorities for improving teaching and learning in Madison schools."
The eight member team brings together education experts from Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as educational practitioners from other urban school districts.
"We are fortunate to have access to national experts with a wide range of expertise from standards based instruction and leadership development, to bilingual and special education, to family and community involvement," Cheatham said. "This team will help to deepen and strengthen my ongoing understanding of the strengths and challenges of our district. Their national perspective, coupled with the local perspective shared by principals, staff, parents and community members, will support us in narrowing our focus to only the most high leverage strategies for ensuring every student is college and career ready."
The team, which was selected by the superintendent and will be funded through community and private foundations, will be chaired by Dr. Robert Peterkin, Professor Emeritus of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and includes: Maree Sneed, partner at Hogan and Lovells US LLC; John Diamond, sociologist of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; Sheila Brown, Co-Director at the Aspen Institute's Education and Society Program; Allan Odden, Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; John Peterburs, Executive Director of Quarles & Brady; Wilma Valero, Coordinator for English Language Learner Programs in Elgin, Il; and Gloria Ladson-Billings, Professor of Urban Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As Superintendent Cheatham continues the listening and learning phase of her entry plan, the Teaching and Learning Transition Team will also meet with central office leaders, conduct focus groups with teachers, principals, and parents as needed, and review a variety of relevant data.
At the end of their work, the team will present the superintendent with a report of what they have learned and recommendations for moving forward systemically with best practices. That report will be used, along with data collected by the superintendent in school visits and other entry plan activities, to refine the district's goals and strategic priorities.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
THURSDAY, MARCH 1, 2001 (additional background here)
Updated Strategic Plan Results in Priority Action TeamsFive Strategic Priority Action Teams, centered around the most critical challenges facing the Madison Metropolitan School District, are among the outcomes of the recently-completed strategic plan.
"The immediate and emerging challenges facing the district are addressed in our revitalized strategic plan," said Superintendent Art Rainwater, "and the Action Teams are focused on five important priorities for us."
The five strategic priorities are:
Instructional Excellence - improving student achievement; offering challenging, diverse and contemporary curriculum and instruction
Student Support - assuring a safe, respectful and welcoming learning environment
Staff Effectiveness - recruiting, developing and retaining a highly competent workforce that reflects the diversity of our students
Home and Community Partnerships - strengthening community and family partnerships and communication
Fiscal Responsibility - using resources efficiently and strategicallyThe five Strategic Priority Action Teams, one for each of the five priorities, are taking on the responsibility for continuous improvement toward "their" priority.
The Action Teams, which will have both staff members and non-staff members, will be responsible for existing initiatives. In addition they will identify and recommend benchmarks to use in assessing school district performance.
"We have a huge number of initiatives," said Rainwater. "This strategic plan gives us a systemic approach to change, so that every initiative, everything we do, leads us to these established goals. I believe it is critical to our district's success that we follow this strategic plan and use it as a decision filter against which we measure our activities."
Two other outcomes from the updated strategic plan are:
a set of beliefs about children, families, enhanced learning, and the quality of life and learning, all of which are integrated with an identified District vision and mission.
improved cost efficiency and effectiveness of many central office functions, which are being addressed on an ongoing basis.Madison Schools' initial strategic plan came about in 1991, and provided direction until this update.
"As a result of this project," said Rainwater, "all of us who are stakeholders -- parents, students, teachers and staff, administrators and community members -- will share a renewed sense of clarity, while seeing an ever-more efficient deployment of resources."
You can see the complete strategic plan on the district's Web site: http://www.mmsd.org.
Amid the picket signs Madison teachers carried at a rally last month protesting slow-moving contract talks, some teachers also carried a bright purple flier.
On one side was written the heading ``standards and benchmarks.'' On the other, ``Dimensions of Learning.'' Beneath each, and filling the entire page, was one uninterrupted string of text: ``Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah. . . .''
While hardly erudite -- some would call it juvenile -- the flier expressed the sentiment many teachers have toward two of Superintendent Cheryl Wilhoyte's biggest initiatives: the effort to create districtwide academic standards, and the teacher-training program that goes along with it.
Neither issue is a subject of bargaining. But the programs have become a sort of catch-all target for teachers who blame Wilhoyte for everything from the poor state of labor-management relations to the current contract impasse.
Wilhoyte, who was hired in part to implement the district's 1991 strategic plan, including establishing rigorous standards, says carrying out that plan is central to the compact she has with the ...
Wilhoyte, on the other hand, has demonstrated that she is a tough, hands-on administrator in her role as assistant superintendent for instruction and school administration in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. And even those who have tangled with her praise her philosophy, which is to put kids first.She has been a leader in Maryland in shaking up the educational status quo, of moving it forward to meeat the needs of the children, even while juggling new programs with budget cuts. The big question remaining about her: She has never been a superintendent. How would she handle the top job?
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Graphical user interface? I think not, Mr. Jobs. Mainframe is where it's at. Big and honking, run by guys in white lab coats. Smart phones? iPads? You're dreaming. Take your new ideas somewhere else.Related:That is the Madison School Board. It has decided to batten the hatches against change. It is securing the perimeter against new thinking. It is the North Korea of education: insular, blighted, and paranoid.
Just try to start a charter school in Madison. I dare you. The Madison School Board on Monday took three measures to strangle new ideas in their crib:
1) Preserving the status quo: Any proposed charter school would have to have "a history of successful practice." That leaves out several existing Madison public schools - never mind new approaches.
2) Starvation: Cap per-pupil reimbursement at around $6,500 - less than half what Madison public schools consume.
3) Encrustation: Unionized teachers only need apply.
I spoke to Carrie Bonk, executive director of the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association.
Madison's disastrous reading results.
The rejected Studio charter school.
Minneapolis teacher's union approved to authorize charter schools.
"We are not interested in the development of new charter schools".
Notes and links on the rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School.
Madison School District Open Enrollment Leavers Report, 2012-13.
Madison's disastrous long term reading results..
Interview: Henry Tyson, Superintendent of Milwaukee's St. Marcus Elementary School.
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Oliver Rule says his four-day working week is the 'opposite of emasculating - it's empowering'A senior television executive is reading a bedtime story to his eight-year-old daughter. It is 10pm and he has just returned home from work. His phone rings - a work call - and he answers it, leaving the story unfinished.
His daughter shouts from her bed: "You're a terrible father!" He returns to his daughter and tries to explain, with little success, why the call was important.
This executive works late and sees his daughter for only about two hours during the working week. Although he feels guilty about this and fears he is missing the best moments of family life, he seems unable to switch off from work.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Bettner email (PDF):
Among the excellent benefits available to MTI members is the additional worker's compensation benefit provided by MTI's various Collective Bargaining Agreements.Wisconsin Statutes provide a worker's compensation benefit for absence caused by a work-related injury or illness, but such commences on the 4th day of absence and has a maximum weekly financial benefit.
MTI's Contracts provide one's full wage, beginning on day one of an absence caused by a work- related injury or illness, with no financial maximum. Also, MTI's Contract provides that one's earned sick leave is not consumed by absence caused by a work-related illness or injury.
Although MTI is working to preserve this benefit, it is at risk due to Governor Walker's Act 10.
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Gov. Bobby Jindal defended his school voucher program in a whirlwind interview Friday with NBC-TV newswoman Hoda Kotb, saying that whether a school is a charter, private or a traditional public school, government should "fund what works for a child." The interview took place during NBC's invitation-only Education Nation summit in New Orleans and was broadcast live on WDSU and the Internet.Jindal is waiting for a state Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of the 2012 law authorizing the voucher program. The state Department of Education will issue its first private/parochial school matches for new entrants in the program next week.
Vouchers help "low-income kids that are trapped in failing schools," Jindal said to a who's-who of New Orleans education figures, who grumbled at many of his remarks.
In Louisiana, he said, roughly 5,000 students are now "getting better academic results" at a savings to the taxpayer. The average voucher scholarship uses $5,300 of public money, compared with the $8,500 state and local per-pupil allotment for a child in public school.
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California Democrats on Sunday condemned efforts led by members of their own party to overhaul the nation's schools, arguing that groups such as StudentsFirst and Democrats for Education Reform are fronts for Republicans and corporate interests.Before delegates overwhelmingly passed a resolution excoriating the groups on the final day of the party's annual convention here, speakers urged them to focus on protecting students and teachers.
"People can call themselves Democrats for Education Reform -- it's a free country -- but if your agenda is to shut teachers and school employees out of the political process and not lift a finger to prevent cuts in education, in my book you're not a reformer, you're not helping education, and you're sure not much of a Democrat," said state Supt. of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, a registered Democrat whose office is nonpartisan.
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Tech visionary Steve Jobs understood better than anyone the impulse to believe that technology can solve our most complex societal problems. "Unfortunately it just ain't so," he said. "We need to attack these things at the root, which is people and how much freedom we give people. ... I wish it was as simple as giving it over to the computer."That's certainly true when it comes to education, particularly in impoverished communities.
As a founder of two organizations that recruit top college graduates to expand educational opportunity, I've spent a lot of time examining what's at work in successful classrooms and schools over the past two decades. In every classroom where students are excelling against the odds, there's a teacher who's empowered her students to work hard to realize their potential. Whenever I ask the leaders of successful schools their secret, the answer is almost always the same: people, people, people. They are obsessed with recruiting and developing the best teams.
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William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, Kelly A. Lack & Thomas I. Nygren:
Online learning is quickly gaining in importance in U.S. higher education, but little rigorous evidence exists as to its effect on student learning outcomes. In "Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities: Evidence from Randomized Trials," we measure the effect on learning outcomes of a prototypical interactive learning online (ILO) statistics course by randomly assigning students on six public university campuses to take the course in a hybrid format (with machine-guided instruction accompanied by one hour of face-to-face instruction each week) or a traditional format (as it is usually offered by their campus, typically with 3-4 hours of face-to-face instruction each week).Alex Tabarrok:
We find that learning outcomes are essentially the same--that students in the hybrid format "pay no price" for this mode of instruction in terms of pass rates, final exam scores, and performance on a standardized assessment of statistical literacy. These zero-difference coefficients are precisely estimated. We also conduct speculative cost simulations and find that adopting hybrid models of instruction in large introductory courses have the potential to significantly reduce instructor compensation costs in the long run.
A 25% time-savings is significant. Moreover, the 25% time-savings figure is in itself an underestimate of savings since it does not include the time savings from not having to drive to class, for example.Online education even in its earliest stages appears to be generating large improvements in educational productivity.
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Sidwell Friends, the elite private school known for educating the children of presidents and members of Congress, has lent its support to a group of former students and faculty who are seeking to open a public charter school in the District.The aspiring charter founders say they want One World Public Charter School to give middle-school students from across the city an opportunity to experience -- for free -- the caliber of education that costs $34,268 a year at the independent Quaker school.
Tom Farquhar, Sidwell's head of school, spoke in favor of One World last week at a D.C. Public Charter School Board hearing. "These are extraordinary people," Farquhar said, "and they have demonstrated in their lives prior to this an extraordinary commitment to the children of our community."
Charters have drawn leaders from high-flying college-prep schools before: A graduate of National Cathedral School started the high-performing D.C. Prep charter network, while a Sidwell alumnus co-founded the SEED School, a charter boarding school.
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At the start my public policy career I had the good fortune to work with someone who fully understood the power of the Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB) in influencing Wisconsin policy debates. To paraphrase my colleague, legislators want answers, and LFB is the respected authority that provides them. It follows that the content of LFB fiscal notes are often the catalyst, or death knell, for major potential policy changes.It will bear watching how yesterday's LFB memo on the fiscal impact of the Governor's proposed school voucher expansion to nine different communities plays out. The note, available here, is, like just about all LFB work, well done.
First the note points out the obvious. When a student switches from a public school to private school via the theoretical choice program the district loses revenue. Why? Each student attending a public school district generates somewhere around $10,000 in state aid and local revenue (this is an estimate for ease of understanding, the actual amount varies by district). When a student leaves for any reason, the district will eventually lose the $10,000 per-kid. If you look at Table 4 on page 5 the first column shows the eventual estimated impact on participating district revenue limits.
School districts will naturally get worked up about this; they want the market-share and the revenue that comes with it. However, it is hard to justify that districts should be receiving funds for students they are no longer educating.
The more problematic part of the note for school choice advocates is the next three columns. The first column shows the aid reduction to public school districts to pay for 38.4% of the new choice program. Districts don't lose this money, they offset it with the property tax levy. In most cases, the local per-pupil cost for a choice program is less than the local per-pupil cost for a public school student, so on the surface it appears taxpayers are getting a bargain. However, the next column is where things get more complicated.
That column, labeled "Aid Formula Reduction," reflects two things. First, the loss of state aid that would have been generated by each pupil that leaves the district. Second, the change in distribution of state and local aid caused by having fewer students in the per-member property value calculation. In English (or something closer to it), when a student leaves a district the district's per-member property value increases, which lowers the portion of their revenue that comes from state aid and increases the portion that comes from the local property tax.
That is why, against all logic, that last column shows a levy increase despite the lower cost of the choice program. To put in even simpler, when a student leaves for any reason it does impact the state aid/property tax split for students the district is still educating.
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As school districts across the country consider placing more police officers in schools, youth advocates and judges are raising alarm about what they have seen in the schools where officers are already stationed: a surge in criminal charges against children for misbehavior that many believe is better handled in the principal's office.Since the early 1990s, thousands of districts, often with federal subsidies, have paid local police agencies to provide armed "school resource officers" for high schools, middle schools and sometimes even elementary schools. Hundreds of additional districts, including those in Houston, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, have created police forces of their own, employing thousands of sworn officers.
Last week, in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shootings, a task force of the National Rifle Association recommended placing police officers or other armed guards in every school. The White House has proposed an increase in police officers based in schools.
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Many people paying attention to corporate-based school reform in recent years will not be surprised by this, but a new study on the effects of this movement in Washington, D.C., New York City and Chicago concludes that little has been accomplished and some harm has been done to students, especially the underprivileged.The report looks at the impact of reforms that have been championed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan and other well-known reformers, including Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of D.C. Public Schools, and, in New York City, Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City Public Schools and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It says:
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There are at least two sides to every debate, but it's becoming clearer by the day that the debate over the cost of higher education is being won by people like University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds.A frequent writer and lecturer, and even more frequent blogger, Reynolds visited the Atlanta Fed recently to share his views with local community leaders. He reported that total student loan debt now stands at over $1 trillion--more than total credit card debt and auto loan debt combined. As these charts from the New York Fed show, the increase in total student debt over the past eight years is a result of greater numbers of students and families taking on educational debt as well as higher debt balances per student.
One can argue that this trend is not necessarily a bad thing. Education is an investment in human capital, and if those newly acquired skills are valued highly by employers, then going to college can be a positive net present value project, even with debt financing.
And wage data reveal that these skills are indeed valuable. As this Cleveland Fed article and chart show, the median wage for a worker with a bachelor's degree was about 30 percent higher than that of a worker with only a high school diploma in the late 1970s and grew to more than 60 percent higher by the early 2000s. However, the data also show that over the last decade the value of a college degree measured by wages has stagnated.
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Months ago, the Green Bay Press-Gazette published salaries of public school teachers, but the management personnel weren't included in the disclosures.Here's what the public record has shown in recent years about the Green Bay School District and advantages. After veteran schools Superintendent Daniel Nerad took a promotion out of the area, the School Board hired a replacement at a 24 percent increase in salary. That unprecedented jump in pay created the incentive for Greg Maass to leave his old superintendent position in Fond du Lac during their flood damage crisis.
He stayed with Green Bay public schools long enough for his salary increase to raise his retirement payout and then left early to head a district on the East Coast.
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Cheatham suggested "there's a ton" of things the district potentially can do to help struggling students. But she's not jumping to conclusions. She wants to hear about what's working, along with what's not. Madison has a lot going for it, despite its significant challenges.Cheatham highlighted the national push for common and higher standards during her visit to the newspaper. She also listed as key issues teacher and principal evaluations, technology, and helping students whose native language isn't English.
Responding to a question, Cheatham said "absolutely yes" principals should know how well their individual teachers are performing. And Cheatham suggested the district has to own its gap, even though some factors are out of its control.
Cheatham said some Madison teachers have told her they feel overwhelmed by the demands of their jobs. In addition, she said one of the reasons some school districts don't innovate is because "people are living in fear," or because they are very "compliance oriented."
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Stephanie Banchero & Caroline Porter:
Charter schools have spread across the country while generally keeping organized labor out, with operators saying they can manage schools better when their staffs aren't unionized. But labor groups are now making a big push to get a stronger foothold in this educational realm.Here in Chicago, a branch of the American Federation of Teachers is looking to organize one of the nation's largest nonprofit charter-school groups. Under an agreement last month, the United Neighborhood Organization, which runs 13 charter schools in the city, agreed to provide the union with contact information for its 400 teachers and to let union organizers meet with them on school grounds, even as the charter-school group didn't take a position on whether the teachers should organize.
Backers of charters, which are public schools run by independent groups, say freedom from union contracts enables innovation in areas like staffing and school calendars. Opponents say charters siphon money and students from struggling traditional public schools.
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When I told the heads of my department about the happenings, they had no idea. We wound up having a meeting with the provost. She apologized, also said it wasn't her call, but that the college was concerned about "the message." What if prospective students, taking a campus tour, pick up the Touchstone and see a column about crappy food or bad policies? What then? I told her that journalism can't be taught as public relations; that students must be able to voice their displeasure--and pleasure--in a free forum. A college newspaper is not a promotional pamphlet. A college newspaper is a newspaper.To my great shock, I sat in front of her and my voice began to crack. Again, I told her, I made no money to do this; I certainly didn't need to do this for my career. It was, 100 percent, about love, passion, developing journalists, seeing them published and, ultimately, hired. She nodded and smiled and empathized.
The meeting ended.
I was later told, by multiple college officials, that this came down to one thing, and one thing only: Image control.
I felt like I got over it. I really did. My class started its own online newspaper, The Pub Wrap, and that was fulfilling. I was told only my students could contribute; that it couldn't compete with Touchstone. "Compete?" I said. "This isn't a contest ..."
I moved on; emotionally distanced myself from the college (I'm completing my final semester as we speak); tried to love my students without any of the lingering anger. I brought in some excellent guest speakers (Rick Jervis, a Pulitzer Prize winner; Amanda Sidman from the Today Show; Brian Mansfield of USA Today, Steve Cannella and Jon Wertheim of Sports Illustrated); had the students do a cool (well, I think it's cool) final project; pushed the kids toward internships. My class evaluations were excellent. I am, I think, a good teacher.
I was fine.
Then the Touchstone came out. And it was brutal. A pamphlet. A PR pamphlet. Awful layout, no rhyme or reason; mugshots alongside every story. It looks like a bad high school newspaper, or a mediocre junior high school newspaper. (For the record, I don't blame the students at all. At all. They're new to this). I actually asked the provost for her take. "I thought it was quite good," she said.
I was speechless.
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In 2012, education technology firms attracted $1.1 billion from venture capitalists, angel investors, corporations, and private equity--an order of magnitude more than the industry was pulling in 2002. Startups Coursera and Udacity, which offer high-quality online college courses to the masses, have each received more than $20 million from investors. Big corporations are buying their way into the industry, with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. leading the way in 2010 by dropping $360 million to acquire ed-tech firm Wireless Generation and luring education superstar Joel Klein away from his gig as the head of New York City schools.But will the rush of cash translate into a radically transformed education landscape? When this kind of money flowed into tech companies in other sectors of the economy, we saw radical improvements in everyday transactions, as well as some dramatic booms and busts. Think Amazon instead of the mall, iTunes instead of the record shop, Expedia instead of a travel agent. But also think Pets.com and Full Tilt Poker, where intense competition and bad politics squelched what looked like good bets. There has been a flowering of good ideas in online education, like hybrid learning, in which kids still head off to school every morning but receive the bulk of their instruction from an infinitely patient piece of software instead of a harried, overworked teacher. Yet education, particularly K-12, has remained mostly immune to the improving and empowering forces of the Internet, leaving millions of kids stuck in offline backwaters for six hours a day. Per-pupil spending on public education has more than doubled over the past three decades, while student performance has flatlined.
As the parent of a toddler, I'd love to start banking on my daughter's virtual elementary school matriculation. I want more choices than just the neighborhood public school or an exorbitantly priced private school offering pretty much the same curriculum in nicer facilities. Personalized learning and highly specific feedback appeal to me as a parent. But while Wall Street's interest in online education may bode well for entrepreneurs and students, bullish investors and parents would do well to listen to war stories from weary education policy wonks.
At the university level, MOOCs and other forms of virtual schooling are cheaper alternatives to a wildly overpriced product. But at the K-12 level, companies looking to break into that market have to make a choice: compete with the traditional educational system, which parents think of as free, or jump through the hoops required to get your product integrated into public schools--which will mean satisfying at least 50 different sets of standards, plus watering down, rejiggering, and generally accommodating your product to a system that wasn't designed for tech-driven plugins in the first place.
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April 15 marks the anniversary of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755), a work that's today universally recognized as an astonishing feat of solo lexicography. The publication, in 1755, rightly attracted great attention; David Garrick wrote a poetic eulogy to mark the achievement in the Public Advertiser, describing Johnson as 'like a hero of yore'. Reviews were plentiful, too, and, though mixed in their response, they were united in acknowledging an extraordinary effort.Yet, in spite of the enormity of Johnson's output, there was no grand celebration, no party to launch his work. In fact, when Johnson received a letter of praise from his friend Charles Burney, some two years after the Dictionary came out, his response was telling: "Yours is the only letter of goodwill that I have yet received, though indeed I am promised something of that sort from Sweden".
Had there been a party, there is one notable contemporary of Johnson's who is unlikely to have made the guest list, even though he too was a lexicographer, and his achievements equally extraordinary. The two men even shared the same ambition: to record faithfully the English of their day. Yet their focus couldn't have been more different.
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His players implored him to belly-flop into a California hotel pool, and he complied -- at age 75. He once took a running plunge into the mud during a soppy game in Oregon. He adored when players pulled pranks on him, insisted players use his first name -- Frosty! -- and corrected them if they used "Coach."He sometimes halted practice to have players spend five minutes gazing beyond the giant evergreens to Mount Rainier. He sometimes halted practice to have players go to other sporting fields and cheer on, say, the soccer team. He always halted two-a-day practices in August and instructed players to go help freshmen move into dormitories.
He believed deeply in singing. His players sang before games, after games. Sometimes they sang to the mock direction of the coach's cane. Always they learned to sing without embarrassment, for it had become uncool to refrain from the refrains. For his 300th win in September 2003, an offensive lineman led the team in James Taylor's "Steamroller." During warmups for the NCAA Division III national championship game in December 1999, right there on the field in Virginia, his players sang "The Twelve Days of Christmas," then proceeded to win 42-13.
Can you imagine warming up on the other side, then losing 42-13 to that?
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Since Teach for America has been so successful at solving the problems of education in our country, I'm proposing we take their model and apply it to other failing systems and issues at hand. If the biggest problem in education is a lack of quality teachers, and we can provide those teachers and thus solve the education crisis in just six weeks time, why not try this out in other professions?1. Heal for America -- The healthcare system in America is crumbling, and what we really need to solve it are quality doctors. Give aspiring doctors 6 weeks of training, then put them in the most overcrowded hospitals around the country. If successful, we can send them abroad!
2. Police for America -- Let's solve the problem of gun violence on our streets once and for all by getting rid of corrupt and inept police officers. We will give aspiring police officers 6 weeks of training and then put them in neighborhoods with the highest rates of violent crime.
3. Experiment for America -- If we want to cure cancer, we need fresh voices in the scientific community. Obviously, the scientists who've been working on a cure for the past decades aren't doing their job very well, as cancer rates are skyrocketing with no cure in sight. Aspiring chemists will get six weeks of training, and then be put in charge of experiments testing cancer-curing drugs.
4. Defend America -- The war in Afghanistan has been draining resources from the American people. We need better soldiers on the ground, or this conflict will never be resolved. What we need are bright young soldiers to shake things up a little bit. We will give aspiring army officers 6 weeks of training, and then put them in charge of units in the most complex arenas of war.
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Nicholas Pandos & Noah Pisner:Ten people carry 10 identical dossiers into Massachusetts Hall at 10 a.m. on select mornings throughout the academic year. The dossiers vary in size depending on the person under consideration for tenure--some are thick like a phone book, others are thinner. Each of the 10 dossiers opens to a special letter from the chair of the candidate's department outlining the tenure recommendation. Each contains a full-scale report on the candidate's academic history: published works, research summaries, peer reviews, course evaluations, a résumé. Each has been read in its entirety before the committee meeting begins.After a seven- to eight-year track, every tenure case at Harvard ends at an ad hoc committee meeting chaired by the President and Provost of the University. The meeting lasts around three hours. No notes are taken. No votes are taken. In addition to the President and Provost, the dean of the school, the divisional dean, and the Senior Vice Provost on Faculty Diversity and Development sit in ex officio. Five others join them: three area experts from co-divisional departments within the University and two from outside Harvard. Depending on the needs of the committee, Harvard will pay for experts from around the world to fly to Cambridge to participate in person.
"The ad hoc process is greatly shrouded in mystery; remarkably little is written about it," says current Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Diversity and Development Judith D. Singer. She smirks wryly as she swigs coffee from her mug, as if this is something she's explained a hundred times before.
"What the ad hoc process does is it takes a recommendation that has come up out of a department, been through a dean, and says, 'Let's look at this with a fresh set of eyes. Let's look at the totality of the evidence and make a dispassionate decision about whether the recommendations that have come up are really in the best interest of the University,'" says Singer.
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As a package, the answer is no. Germany channels roughly half of all high-school students into the vocational education stream from the age of 16. In the US that would be seen as too divisive, even un-American. More than 40 per cent of Germans become apprentices. Only 0.3 per cent of the US labour force does so. But with the US participation rate continuing to plummet - last month another 496,000 Americans gave up looking for work - many US politicians are scouring Germany for answers.It is turning into something of a pilgrimage. Rick Snyder, the Republican governor of Michigan, and John Kasich, Republican governor of Ohio, have both recently toured vocational academies in Germany. The German embassy in Washington has even set up a programme called the "skills initiative" to cater to all the questions from the heartlands.
"The US is not a developing country so we don't need to send teams of technical advisers into the field," one German diplomat said. "We are just trying to respond to the curiosity about the German model."
The longer the US recovery continues, the more that curiosity increases. The US faces a deepening mismatch between what its labour market needs and what the education system is producing. There are two sides to this paradox. First, the US is underskilled. It has high unemployment at a time when there are 3.5m job vacancies, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Some economists argue that the US "skills gap" is imaginary - a shortage of engineers would have shown up in salary inflation, which has not happened. The average hourly cost of a US manufacturing worker is $32. In Germany it is $48. Yet US employers insist the shortage of skilled labour is a growing problem.
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In the spring of 2011, Sebastian Thrun was having doubts about whether the classroom was really the right place to teach his course on artificial intelligence. Thrun, a computer-science professor at Stanford, had been inspired by Salman Khan, the founder of the online Khan Academy, whose videos and discussion groups have been used by millions to learn about everything from arithmetic to history. And so that summer, Thrun announced he would offer his fall course on Stanford's website for free. He reorganized it into short segments rather than hour-long lectures, included problem sets and quizzes, and added a virtual office hour via Google Hangout. Enrollment jumped from 200 Stanford undergraduates to 160,000 students around the world (only 30 remained in the classroom). A few months later, he founded an online for-profit company called Udacity; his course, along with many others, is now available to anyone with a fast Internet connection.Meanwhile, two of Thrun's Stanford colleagues, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, founded another for-profit company, Coursera, that posts courses taught by faculty from leading universities such as Prince- ton, Michigan, Duke, and Penn. Three million students have signed on. Not to be outdone, Harvard and MIT announced last spring their own online partnership, edX, a nonprofit with an initial investment of $60 million. A new phenomenon requires a new name, and so MOOC--massive open online course--has now entered the lexicon. So far, MOOCs have been true to the first "o" in the acronym: Anyone can take these courses for free.
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Dylan Pauly, Legal Counsel Steve Hartley, Chief of Staff (PDF):
It is the policy of the School Board to consider the establishment of charter schools that support the DISTRICT Mission and Belief Statements and as provided by law. The BOARD believes that the creation of charter schools can enhance the educational opportunities for Madison Metropolitan School District students by providing innovative and distinctive educational programs and by giving parents/students more educational options within the DISTRICT. Only charter schools that are an instrumentality of the DISTRICT will be considered by the BOARD.Related:The BOARD further believes that certain values and principles must be integrated into all work involving the conceptualization, development and implementation of a new charter school. These guiding principles are as follows:
1. All charter schools must meet high standards of student achievement while providing increased educational opportunities, including broadening existing opportunities for struggling populations of students;
2. All charter schools must have an underlying, research-based theory and history of successful practice that is likely to achieve academic success;
3. All charter schools will provide information to parents and students as to the quality of education provided by the charter school and the ongoing academic progress of the individual student;
4. All charter schools will ensure equitable access to all students regardless of gender, race and/or disability;
5. All charter schools must be financially accountable to the DISTRICT and rely on +' sustainable funding models;
6. All charter schools must ensure the health and safety of all staff and students;
7. All externally-developed charter schools must be governed by a governance board that is registered as a 501(c)(3), tax-exempt charitable organization;
8. All charter schools must have a plan to hire, retain and recruit a highly-qualified, diverse staff;
9. All charter schools must have a clear code of student conduct that includes procedures for positive interventions and social emotional supports
The rejected Studio charter school.
Minneapolis teacher's union approved to authorize charter schools.
"We are not interested in the development of new charter schools".
Notes and links on the rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School.
Madison School District Open Enrollment Leavers Report, 2012-13.
Madison's disastrous long term reading results..
Interview: Henry Tyson, Superintendent of Milwaukee's St. Marcus Elementary School.
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Private school enrollment has steadily declined across Wisconsin over the past 15 years, but that's not the case in Madison and Dane County.The largest challenge to Madison's $392,000,000 public schools is not the threat of vouchers. Rather, it is the District's long time disastrous reading results that undermine its prospects and reputation.St. Ambrose Academy, a West Side Catholic middle and high school, has been rapidly expanding and is discussing the addition of an elementary school. EAGLE School is planning a $3 million expansion at its Fitchburg campus with the goal of increasing its student body by a third. And High Point Christian School on Madison's Far West Side is full, so some students board a bus there and travel across town to its sister campus on the Far East Side.
"The Madison metropolitan area is definitely bucking the national trend," said Michael Lancaster, superintendent of Madison Catholic Schools. "I wouldn't say we're growing at any kind of geometric or exponential rate. But we're very solid in the Madison area."
The vitality of local private schools could help explain the muted level of interest in Madison for the publicly funded voucher expansion proposed in Gov. Scott Walker's biennial budget. Vouchers also face intense opposition from Dane County political and public school leaders.
Voucher expansion
Walker has proposed expanding the state's voucher program from Milwaukee and Racine to school districts with more than 4,000 students and at least two schools with low ratings on the state's new school report card. Based on the first report cards released last fall, students in Madison and eight other districts would qualify for vouchers.On March 4, the Wisconsin Council of Religious and Independent Schools held the first public voucher meeting in Madison at St. James Catholic School on the Near West Side. Fewer than 10 parents and private school administrators attended.
A similar meeting last week in Beloit, a smaller city with far fewer private schools, drew about 40 people, WCRIS executive director Matt Kussow said.
Suburban district growth and open enrollment leavers are also worth contemplation and action.
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Is Stanford still a university? The Wall Street Journal recently reported that more than a dozen students--both undergraduate and graduate--have left school to work on a new technology start-up called Clinkle. Faculty members have invested, the former dean of Stanford's business school is on the board, and one computer-science professor who taught several of the employees now owns shares. The founder of Clinkle was an undergraduate advisee of the president of the university, John Hennessy, who has also been advising the company. Clinkle deals with mobile payments, and, if all goes well, there will be many payments to many people on campus. Maybe, as it did with Google, Stanford will get stock grants. There are conflicts of interest here; and questions of power dynamics. The leadership of a university has encouraged an endeavor in which students drop out in order to do something that will enrich the faculty.Stanford has been heading in this direction for a while. As Ken Auletta reported in this magazine a year ago, the connections between Stanford and Silicon Valley are deep. Federal Telegraph was started by a Stanford grad a hundred and four years ago. William Hewlett and David Packard started inventing things as students, as did the Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. I was a student in the late nineties, and I worked for a start-up soon afterward. Classmates of mine went on to manage epic failures and astonishing successes in technology. Instagram was founded by Stanford graduates. When Auletta was reporting his story, he talked with a student, Evan Spiegel, who had an interesting start-up that was just beginning to grow--Snapchat, which now has at least sixty million photos a day flowing through its servers. Stanford feeds Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley nurtures Stanford. You can't have one without the other.
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Mark Moy came to the U.S. from China, paid his way through medical school at the University of Illinois in the 1970s and became an emergency room physician.His son Matthew, a third-year medical student, has racked up $190,000 in debt and still has a year to go. Accrued interest on his medical-school loans has swelled his balance by 13 percent over three years.
"When I think about it, it will keep me up at night," said Matthew Moy, 28. "I'm dreading the exit interview when I will find out exactly how much I'll have to pay back."
The next generation of U.S. physicians is being saddled with record debt amid a looming shortage of doctors needed to cope with a rising elderly population. The burgeoning debt burden may be turning students away from primary care, which pays about $200,000 a year, toward more lucrative specialties and scaring off low-income and minority students fearful of taking on big loans.Median tuition and fees at private medical schools was $50,309 in the 2012-2013 academic year, more than 16 times the cost when Moy's father became a doctor. The median education debt for 2012 medical-school graduates was $170,000, including loans taken out for undergraduate studies and excluding interest. That compares with an average $13,469 in 1978, said Jay Youngclaus, co-author of a February 2013 report on medical school debt. The 1978 amount would be about $48,000 in today's dollars.
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A fascinating new study reveals that Americans are more likely to call their children "intelligent," while European parents focus on happiness and balance. Here's why.If you ask American moms, we are raising a nation of baby Einsteins. Here's what one parent had to say about the intelligence of her 3-year-old, which was apparent to her from the very first moments of her life:
"I have this vivid memory when she was born of them taking her to clean her off ... And she was looking all around ... She was alert from the very first second ... I took her out when she was six weeks old to a shopping mall to have her picture taken -- people would stop me and say, "What an alert baby." One guy stopped me and said, "Lady, you have an intelligent baby there." ... And it was just something about her. She was very engaging and very with the program, very observant. She's still fabulously observant.The biggest difference between American parents and their counterparts in Europe might be that they are far more relaxed about enrichment than we are, according to a study released this week by Sara Harkness and Charles M. Super at the School of Family Studies at the University of Connecticut.
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Los Angeles teachers overwhelmingly expressed "no confidence" in L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy in the first vote of its kind in the nation's second-largest school system.In the weeklong referendum that ended Wednesday, 91% of the participating teachers expressed disapproval of Deasy, with about 17,700 of the union's more than 32,000 members casting ballots, the teachers union announced Thursday.
The superintendent called the vote "nonsense" even before knowing its outcome, and a group of civic leaders rallied to Deasy's defense. But United Teachers Los Angeles said it would now press more assertively against Deasy initiatives that have made the city a crucible for education debates playing out nationwide.
"It's important to look at the data and impossible to ignore the results," union President Warren Fletcher said.
Deasy has angered some teachers by pushing for evaluations that include the use of student standardized test scores. He also has tried to limit job and seniority protections and to speed up the dismissal of teachers accused of serious misconduct or ineffectiveness in the classroom.
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Just a few generations ago, physical activity was an integral part of daily life. In the name of progress, we've now chipped away at it so thoroughly that physical inactivity actually seems normal.In less than two generations, physical activity has dropped by 20% in the U.K. and 32% in the U.S. In China, the drop is 45% in less than one generation. Vehicles, machines and technology now do our moving for us. What we do in our leisure time doesn't come close to making up for what we've lost.
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Once, being a college professor was a career. Today, it's a gig.That, broadly speaking, is the transformation captured in the graph below from a new report by the American Association of University Professors. Since 1975, tenure and tenure-track professors have gone from roughly 45 percent of all teaching staff to less than a quarter. Meanwhile, part-time faculty are now more than 40 percent of college instructors, as shown by the line soaring towards the top of the graph.
This doesn't actually mean that there are fewer full-time professors today than four-decades ago. College faculties have grown considerably over the years, and as the AAUP notes, the ranks of the tenured and tenure-track professoriate are up 26 percent since 1975. Part-time appointments, however, have exploded by 300 percent. The proportions vary depending on the kind of school you're talking about. At public four-year colleges, about 64 percent of teaching staff were full-time as of 2009. At private four-year schools, about 49 percent were, and at community colleges, only about 30 percent were. But the big story across academia is broadly the same: if it were a move, it'd be called "Rise of the Adjuncts."
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Beware the DSM-5, the soon-to-be-released fifth edition of the "psychiatric bible," the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. The odds will probably be greater than 50 percent, according to the new manual, that you'll have a mental disorder in your lifetime.Although fewer than 6 percent of American adults will have a severe mental illness in a given year, according to a 2005 study, many more--more than a quarter each year--will have some diagnosable mental disorder. That's a lot of people. Almost 50 percent of Americans (46.4 percent to be exact) will have a diagnosable mental illness in their lifetimes, based on the previous edition, the DSM-IV. And the new manual will likely make it even "easier" to get a diagnosis.
If we think of having a diagnosable mental illness as being under a tent, the tent seems pretty big. Huge, in fact. How did it happen that half of us will develop a mental illness? Has this always been true and we just didn't realize how sick we were--we didn't realize we were under the tent? Or are we mentally less healthy than we were a generation ago? What about a third explanation--that we are labeling as mental illness psychological states that were previously considered normal, albeit unusual, making the tent bigger. The answer appears to be all three.
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One of the more thoughtful voices in education, Larry Cuban, has delivered an interesting brief for the argument that there is no such thing as a "corporate reform movement." While he acknowledges that America's corporate elite largely share a view of how to reform America's schools, focused on the creation of educational marketplaces and business-model schools as the engines of change, Cuban argues that it is mistake to overstate the homogeneity of perspectives and purposes. The power players of the reform movement have "varied, not uniform motives," are "drawn from overlapping, but distinct spheres of influence," and "vary in their aims and strategies." The use of a term such as "corporate education reform" suggests "far more coherence and concerted action than occurs in the real world of politics and policymaking."Cuban's argument amalgamates two different senses of the term "corporate education reform" - the notion that there is a movement for education reform led by corporate elites and the idea that there is a movement for education reform that seeks to remake public education in the image and likeness of for-profit corporations in a competitive marketplace.
In co-mingling these two distinct senses of the term, Cuban is adopting a common usage. And it is a usage not entirely without justification: many of the strongest advocates for transforming public schools into educational corporations are found in the corporate elite. But it is vital, I will argue here, that we separate these two conceptions of "corporate education reform" if we are to adequately understand the complexity of the political terrain on which the battles over the future of public education are being fought.
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District of Columbia Public Schools officials have long maintained that a 2011 test-cheating scandal that generated two government probes was limited to one elementary school. But a newly uncovered confidential memo warns as far back as January 2009 that educator cheating on 2008 standardized tests could have been widespread, with 191 teachers in 70 schools "implicated in possible testing infractions."The 2009 memo was written by an outside analyst, Fay "Sandy" Sanford, who had been invited by then-chancellor Michelle Rhee to examine students' irregular math and reading score gains. It was sent to Rhee's top deputy for accountability.
The memo notes that nearly all of the teachers at one Washington elementary school had students whose test papers showed high numbers of wrong-to-right erasures and asks, "Could a separate person have been responsible?"
It recommends that DCPS contact its legal department "as soon as you think it advisable" and ask them to determine "what possible actions can be taken against identified offenders."
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THE Bhandari Modern Public School can be approached only by technological downshifting. Full-sized taxis cannot penetrate the narrow, crowded streets, so you have to switch to a tuk-tuk. Soon the streets become alleyways, so you switch to a bicycle-rickshaw.The Brahmpuri slum in New Delhi is an energetic place, home to migrants, Muslims and other marginals. A barber with a cut-throat razor and a bucket of dirty water shaves clients on the pavement. Factories hum in people's front rooms. Animals and children are everywhere: buffaloes pulling carts, white ponies doing nothing in particular (they are popular for wedding ceremonies), children hawking bicycle pumps and washing powder.
The school, despite its name, is private, and it is a miracle of compression: floor upon floor of children, 25 to a class, crowded into a narrow concrete block. It is also a miracle of order: the children wear uniforms and stand up to greet visitors. One classroom is decorated with bright pictures and perky slogans such as: "We will get more than 80% in maths." The teacher worked for Infosys, a giant IT firm, before finding her vocation. Other classrooms are drabber. Dr Bhandari, the school's owner and headmaster, is clearly a shrewd businessman. He runs a fancier school next door, decorated with images of Mickey Mouse. He has an impressive collection of certificates. He uses an interpreter to explain that one of his school's strengths is that it is "English medium".
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SUSAN PATTON, the Princeton alumna who became famous for her letter urging Ivy League women to use their college years to find a mate, has been denounced as a traitor to feminism, to coeducation, to the university ideal. But really she's something much more interesting: a traitor to her class.Her betrayal consists of being gauche enough to acknowledge publicly a truth that everyone who's come up through Ivy League culture knows intuitively -- that elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.
Every elite seeks its own perpetuation, of course, but that project is uniquely difficult in a society that's formally democratic and egalitarian and colorblind. And it's even more difficult for an elite that prides itself on its progressive politics, its social conscience, its enlightened distance from hierarchies of blood and birth and breeding.
Thus the importance, in the modern meritocratic culture, of the unacknowledged mechanisms that preserve privilege, reward the inside game, and ensure that the advantages enjoyed in one generation can be passed safely onward to the next.
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Why or Why Not?
- "Possibly--I think it depends on the size of the state and who they work with to develop the materials. Broader adoption would depend on them being externally validated in some way."
- "The Common Core creates a national market for effective curriculum, and it supports efficient scaling. The Common Core will therefore democratize curriculum development and adoption processes in a manner that will disrupt the current order."
- "Ultimately this is all about standardizing America's classroom and what goes on within it. Like anything else mandated from the top, the first to market are going to have the advantage of stories being written about what they're doing and then all of a sudden other state [leaders] are going to latch on, thinking A) this must be good for my kids, too, and B) they won't have the time or the will to tell people they represent why they're behind the curve."
- "First to market will rule the roost. The laggards will simply model on those who come before them, hoping to save money and time."
- "It's too soon to tell. The disappointment here is that states have been unable to coalesce. There is less 'common' in the Common Core than people imagined."
- "Unless CA, TX, and FL are the ones furthest ahead forget about it. The primary concern of the publishers is making sure the largest states and their state contracts are happy."
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Reform fatigue - that's a phrase used last week by an Indiana legislative leader talking about how the drive to expand private school vouchers has hit a lot of resistance, despite the fact that the political situation in Indiana looks highly favorable to vouchers.In short, enough legislators who were generally voucher supporters were concerned about the budget impact of expanding vouchers and the impact on public schools that the brakes were put on action, at least for now, according to an Associated Press report.
Sounds like what might unfold in another Midwestern state a couple hundred miles to the northwest of Indianapolis in coming weeks.
But consider the term "reform fatigue" more broadly and you could consider things going on all across the nation.
One of the most important aspects of education policy-making in the United States for the last decade-plus has been the struggle between what are, in at least broad terms, two schools of thought.
One is those who want to change education in ways that emphasize market forces; increased accountability for schools, principals, and teachers; and stepping on the gas when it comes to expectations. We can solve education first and that will do a lot to solve poverty - that's an underlying belief.
The other camp includes those who say poverty and other social factors are at the core of why educational outcomes are, overall, so weak among low-income and minority students and we need to deal with the broader context of schooling. The existing system will work if it's kept strong and given a fair chance with kids.
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Turner and state Sen. Luther Olsen's education policy analyst, Sarah Archibald, who also participated in the design team meetings, said letter grade opponents worried bad grades could stigmatize schools and their students.Related: NJ DOE Releases New School Performance Reports; Wisconsin? Stays Quo....Turner said the bigger problem was that in only their first year, the report cards would not be reliable enough to translate into simple grades. Walker "needed to have failing schools in Ds and Fs," he said, as a pretext for expanding vouchers.
But Walker spokesman Cullen Werwie said letter grades were simply an easily understandable shorthand for the rating system's five official designations, which range from "significantly exceeds expectations" to "fails to meet expectations."
Indeed, the five designations do lend themselves to the five traditional letter grades. The report cards also rate schools on a 100-point scale, which also often translates into letter grades.
If Walker betrayed the DPI and the accountability team by introducing letter grades, DPI and the team are a bit naive if they thought no one ever would.
But more important is why Walker feels compelled in ways small -- using letter grades -- and large -- basing voucher expansion on School Report Cards -- to aggravate a public education establishment already aggravated by his moves to end teacher collective bargaining and cut education funding.
The governor's voucher proposal was going to be controversial no matter what.
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This paper is one of three in a series on higher education costs. The series also includes "Initiatives for containing the cost of higher education" and "Public policies, prices, and productivity in American higher education."Higher education productivity, as measured by academic degrees granted by American colleges and universities, is declining.[1] Since the early 1990s, real expenditures on higher education have grown by more than 25 percent, now amounting to 2.9 percent of US gross domestic product (GDP)--greater than the percentage of GDP spent on higher education in almost any of the other developed countries.[2] But while the proportion of high-school graduates going on to college has risen dramatically, the percentage of entering college students finishing a bachelor's degree has at best increased only slightly or, at worst, has declined.[3]
Figure 1 shows the trend in productivity from 1970 to 2006, expressed in terms of the ratio of degrees granted to total sector expenditures.[4] The downward slope is steepest among universities, where current productivity is less than half of what it was 40 years ago. Even when adjusted for the growth in overall labor costs in the economy (see dashed lines in figure 1), the decline in bachelor's-degree production is nearly 20 percent. If these declines continue, maintaining the current rate of bachelor's-degree production will cost an additional $42 billion per year 40 years from now.[5] Thus, even if state support for public higher education did not continue to decline, tuition would have to increase by an average of $6,885 per full-time equivalent (FTE) student in public universities to maintain current spending, almost doubling today's tuition.[6]
What accounts for declining productivity in higher education? Prior research provides an array of potential explanations.[7] Most analysts point to the role of rising costs, and others focus on declining degree attainment.[8] Collectively, these explanations reinforce a widespread perception among higher education administrators and many scholars that productivity is impossible to control. According to economists Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman, "The problem in higher education is that productivity growth often is synonymous with lower quality. Adding more students to each class can diminish the benefit for each student, leading to diminished outcomes and lower graduation rates. Increasing the number of courses a professor teaches would reduce research or community service."[9] Similarly, in a study of college presidents' attitudes, a two-year president said: "I don't think there are any more efficiencies left to be squeezed out of public universities across the nation. . . . There are no more efficiencies to be had."[10] So, at least some institutional leaders feel helpless when it comes to improving productivity without sacrificing quality.[11] Even when costs are considered, institutions tend to focus on enrolling more students rather than helping them graduate.[12]
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A blue-ribbon panel is calling for an overhaul of the federal Pell-grant program for low-income college students, reflecting concerns that not enough of the award recipients end up graduating.The report--set to be released Tuesday by a panel of educators convened by the College Board, a trade group of universities and colleges--adds to the debate about federal student-aid programs, which have grown rapidly under President Barack Obama.
The president is expected to propose a budget Wednesday that would again spend heavily on grants and loans, despite complaints from some Republican lawmakers and other critics that the programs, which require congressional approval, have become too costly and often ineffective in helping Americans get jobs. The grants are exempt from the sequester, the across-the-board spending cuts that began in March.
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Scholars continue to get more comfortable with e-only journals, and they increasingly get access to the material they want via digital channels, including Internet search engines and more-specific discovery tools provided by academic libraries. When it comes time to publish their own research, though, faculty members still seek out journals with the highest prestige and the widest readership in their fields, whether or not those journals are electronic and make articles free online.Faculty members also say they still appreciate many of the services traditional publishers offer, but the traditional services of libraries, the scholars say, are less valuable than they used to be.
Those are some of the significant findings from the 2012 Ithaka survey of faculty attitudes, which went public on Monday. The survey has been run every three years since 2000 by Ithaka S&R. (That's the consulting-and-research arm of the nonprofit Ithaka group, which works to help the academic community make better use of digital technologies for preservation, research, and teaching.)
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While Gotham and the Windy City have experienced modest growth and significant net domestic out-migration, burgeoning if often disdained urban regions such as Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Charlotte, and Oklahoma City have expanded rapidly. These low-density, car-dominated, heavily suburbanized areas with small central cores likely represent the next wave of great American cities.There's a whole industry led by the likes of Harvard's Ed Glaeser, my occasional sparring partner Richard Florida and developer-funded groups like CEOs for Cities, who advocate for old-style, high-density cities, and insist that they represent the inevitable future.
But the numbers tell a different story: the most rapid urban growth is occurring outside of the great, dense, highly developed and vastly expensive old American metropolises.
An aspirational city, by definition, is one that people and industries migrate to improve their economic prospects and achieve a better relative quality of life. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, this aspirational spirit was epitomized by cities such as New York and Chicago and then in the decades after World War Two by Los Angeles, which for many years was the fastest-growing big city in the high-income world.
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Is there any institution of higher learning that isn't gaming the system to gain athletic advantage? I've come to believe the answer is no.Harvard? Last year, before announcing that the university had uncovered widespread cheating, a Harvard administrator sent an e-mail to the university's resident deans, saying that potentially culpable athletes might withdraw from school temporarily. That way, the cheating scandal wouldn't cost them eligibility.
On the other side of the country, the University of California, Davis, had long kept athletics in perspective -- until 2007, when it inexplicably joined the big boys in Division I. Vowing not to cut any "minor" sports, it did just that as athletic expenses soared. Promising not to lower standards, it abandoned that vow, too. After the U.C. Davis faculty athletic representative refused to support the application of "a talented basketball player with a questionable academic background," she was removed from that position, according to a report by the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley. The basketball player was admitted.
Which brings us to today's subject: the military academies. Incredibly, even the Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy and West Point, charged with training the next generation of military leaders, systematically abandon their standards and admissions processes when a good athlete is within reach. Their highly questionable enrollment practices make one wonder whether the academies care as much about their mission these days as they do about winning football games.
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In spite of all the alarm over rising costs and excessive borrowing for college, one person is confident that college will be far less expensive in just a few years.In the vision outlined by Vance H. Fried, there will be little need for federally subsidized loans. Many parents will be able to pay for college for their children out of current income.
Fried is no utopian. He is a professor of entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University who earlier wrote a paper explaining how a full-fledged residential college could operate with tuition less than $8,000 a year.
His new paper, "College 2020," forecasts what he thinks will happen as online education increases its competitive impact. The paper is published by the Heritage Foundation's Center for Policy Innovation.
Some commentators worry that tuition-dependent colleges will have to go out of business because they can't control their costs and low-priced suppliers are going to take away their students. But Fried thinks that colleges and universities can survive, if they act soon.
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At long last the New Jersey Department of Education has released its "NJ School Performance Reports," which replace the old School Report Cards. Details on school performance is greatly expanded now includes, according to the Christie Administration's press release, "brand new data on college and career readiness and provide comparison to "peer schools" in order to provide a more complete picture of school performance for educators and the general public."The Wisconsin DPI.....Here's coverage from the Star-Ledger, The Record, the Courier-Post, Asbury Park Press, Press of Atlantic City, NJ Spotlight, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The state also released the annual Taxpayers' Guide to Education. Annual per pupil spending in NJ (if you use the state's algorithm; others say it inflates costs) is $18,045, up 4.2% since last year.
Of course, there's enormous range within that average. Fairview Boro (Bergen), for example, spends $13,317 per pupil. Asbury Park City spends $30,502. The plush magnet schools in Bergen County spend $35,900.
March, 2013: Evers on report cards: this last year was a pilot year. It's just not ready for prime time.
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On Tuesday, the Department of Public Instruction released the latest round of graduation rate data for Wisconsin. While it showed that more students were earning diplomas in four years in 2012 than they had in 2010 and 2011, there was still a persistent gap in attainment between the state's white, African American, and Hispanic students. A closer look at that data suggests that this problem is prevalent in the state's biggest cities - but minimal in Milwaukee.A survey of 18 Wisconsin districts - all districts that served more than 7,000 students plus Beloit and Superior - showed that double-digit differences in four-year graduation rates persisted in 16 cities. Only Elmbrook, with high matriculation marks across the board, and Superior, which didn't have enough minority students to comprise a significant sample size, avoided this label. Gaps between African-American students and white students were, on average, 10.1 percent higher than the gaps between Hispanic students and white students in these cities.
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Last month Nakisha Bishop took out a loan to buy a $23,000 Toyota Camry and pay off several thousand dollars still owed on her old car. The key to making it work: she got more than six years--75 months in all--to pay it off.Related: Math Forum."I had a new baby on the way, and I was trying to keep my monthly payment a little bit lower to help afford child care," Ms. Bishop, a 34-year-old sheriff's deputy in Palm Beach County, Fla., said recently. She pays $480 a month for the 2013 Camry, just $5 a month more than the note on her old car. The car won't be paid off until her 1-month-old daughter is heading to first grade.
Ms. Bishop's 75-month loan illustrates two important trends rippling through the U.S. auto industry. Rising new-car prices and competition among lenders to attract borrowers is pushing loans to lengthier terms. In part, banks see the longer terms as a way to attract buyers, by keeping monthly payments under $500 a month.
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Most parents would probably hesitate about allowing their children to visit a potential war zone.But the group of Hong Kong high school students who returned on Saturday from an eight-day tour of North Korea will have holiday stories better than anything their friends will have managed in Phuket or Singapore.
Twenty-two students from Chinese International School watched teenagers practise military drills in Pyongyang, took photos with "friendly" soldiers in the demilitarised zone and stayed two days in the region of Kaesong.
Last week, North Korea banned South Korean managers from entering Kaesong's joint industrial park, striking a blow against the decade-old symbol of inter-Korean co-operation.
But the returning travellers said they noticed little unease among the North Koreans they encountered.
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Conspiracy theories abound when it comes to professors and politics. To hear some conservatives tell it, a liberal-dominated professoriate attempts to brainwash students and to keep out of the faculty club any who challenge leftist orthodoxy. Ph.D. programs in the humanities teach some sort of secret handshake that lets those with politically correct views land the best jobs. To hear some liberals talk about it, there is no such thing as a liberal professoriate. Rather, a well-financed group of conservatives and their foundations use the politics issue to trash higher education. If there aren't more conservative professors around, it's because those on the right prefer the world of money to the world of ideas, and flock to Wall Street.Neil Gross will disappoint most of the conspiracy theorists with his new book, Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?, which is being released today by Harvard University Press.
Gross has spent years conducting research -- large-scale national surveys and smaller experiments and focus groups -- on professorial politics. And the book combines many of his studies, interviews with players in the debate, and a mix of history and sociology.
From the part of the book title that asks "why are professors liberal," it's clear that Gross has no problem saying that faculty members are in fact, on average, to the left of most other Americans. The degree to which this is true may differ by institution and discipline, and there are of course plenty of exceptions. But Gross cites his own past research to show that professors do indeed lean to the left. But that same research shows that most faculty members are not as radical as many believe and that there is a large center-left following in the academy.
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Thomas Friedman, via a kind reader's email:
There was a time when middle-class parents in America could be -- and were -- content to know that their kids' public schools were better than those in the next neighborhood over. As the world has shrunk, though, the next neighborhood over is now Shanghai or Helsinki. So, last August, I wrote a column quoting Andreas Schleicher -- who runs the global exam that compares how 15-year-olds in public schools around the world do in applied reading, math and science skills -- as saying imagine, in a few years, that you could sign on to a Web site and see how your school compares with a similar school anywhere in the world. And then you could take this information to your superintendent and ask: "Why are we not doing as well as schools in China or Finland?"Related: www.wisconsin2.orgWell, that day has come, thanks to a successful pilot project involving 105 U.S. schools recently completed by Schleicher's team at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which coordinates the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA test, and Jon Schnur's team at America Achieves, which partnered with the O.E.C.D. Starting this fall, any high school in America will be able to benchmark itself against the world's best schools, using a new tool that schools can register for at www.americaachieves.org. It is comparable to PISA and measures how well students can apply their mastery of reading, math and science to real world problems.
The pilot study was described in an America Achieves report entitled "Middle Class or Middle of the Pack?" that is being released Wednesday. The report compares U.S. middle-class students to their global peers of similar socioeconomic status on the 2009 PISA exams.
The bad news is that U.S. middle-class students are badly lagging their peers globally. "Many assume that poverty in America is pulling down the overall U.S. scores," the report said, "but when you divide each nation into socioeconomic quarters, you can see that even America's middle-class students are falling behind not only students of comparable advantage, but also more disadvantaged students in several other countries."
American students in the second quarter of socioeconomic advantage -- mostly higher middle class -- were significantly outperformed by 24 countries in math and by 15 countries in science, the study found. In the third quarter of socioeconomic advantage -- mostly lower middle class -- U.S. students were significantly outperformed by peers in 31 countries or regions in math and 25 in science.
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When the business school at the University of California, Davis, started its master's program in accounting last year, administrators expected to attract aspiring accountants from nearby colleges.What they got instead was a wave of interest from overseas: Roughly two-thirds of the 189 applications received for last fall's entering class came from Chinese citizens.
"Frankly, we were shocked at the deluge of applications...for what we saw as a program that prepared students for a U.S. credential," says James Stevens, assistant dean of student affairs.
Davis has plenty of company. Specialized master's degrees in accounting, finance and other disciplines--generally aimed at students just out of college and lasting one year--have found tremendous popularity in recent years among Chinese nationals seeking a competitive edge and U.S. experience.
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However, this process yields sheer lunacy, mostly because of the ridiculous ineptitude of every single person involved. I remember specifically the first grant project I helped to evaluate. The local state government was offering up to $2,000,000 for grant proposals which would help the students in grades 6-8 who had failed their end-of-year standardized reading exam (a well-made test, in my opinion, in which failure basically means illiteracy). The specific project I was evaluating had only gotten $800,000 out of the maximum $2m. Its strategy was to purchase the male students iPod Touches, the female students makeovers, manicures, and pedicures at a local beauty parlor, and all students were offered an additional iPod Touch or Makeover, respectively, if they passed the exam at the end of the current year. The grant proposal had specifically listed these actions as being the goal of the proposal. If the iPods and makeovers were purchased, that constituted success.$Money first........ Reading last, apparentlyWhen I asked the man who was in charge of the project if he really meant that these actions were the 'strategy', not the 'goal'. He expressed confusion; he thought if the male students had iPod Touches, they obviously would get better at reading, and if the girls got makeovers, it would improve their self esteem and they would be more confident and get better at reading, so obviously isn't the goal of the project to purchase iPods and Makeovers for the students? I explained to him that the goal was to make students, who had previously failed the exam, pass it on their next try. Success would, obviously, be measured in terms of how many students passed the exam. The strategy was whatever actions you took, whereas the goal was what you were trying to achieve. Now that the project was over, I told him that he had to go look at the reading scores and see if they improved. He couldn't understand why he had needed to do this, and indeed, refused. I asked him how he had identified the students who he needed to give iPods to in the first place. Did he use their reading scores? Did he ask the school for a list of students who had failed the exam? No. He had asked the school for the free-lunch list, which determined which students came from low-income families, and for the bus route list, which determined which students came from low-income areas. He picked out any students who were on both of these lists who were also black. Since black students tend to have low reading scores, and low-income students tend to have low reading scores, those are the students who need the most help, and so are the students he targeted with his project. When I asked the school for the list of students who had failed the reading exam, it turns out that only 25% (14/56) of the students targeted by the program had failed the reading exam in the first place.
When I wrote up my evaluation, I described in rigorous detail everything the man had done wrong, put in a strong recommendation to not award him grant money in the future, and suggested that some sort of corruption investigation be conducted to see if he had committed any crimes (23 iPods + 23 Makeovers does not total to $800,000, after all). When I submitted this to my boss for approval, she was flabbergasted, and explained that the evaluators job was to collude with the grant proposal submitter, so that we got more evaluation jobs from them in the future. Over the next couple days, we had a long conversation, and in the end, she allowed my evaluation to go through.
The next project I evaluated was just as criminally neglectful as my first. And the next. And the next. In fact, for the first three years I worked at the firm, every single project I evaluated listed their 'process' and then said that their 'goal' was to enact the process. Every single project had used any subsidized lunch lists, bus route data, or demographic data they could get their hands on to decide which students to target; not a single project actually looked at test scores, for deciding either which students to target or figuring out if the project had even succeeded.
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Tina Rosenberg, NYT
By the time a poor child is 1 year old, she has most likely already fallen behind middle-class children in her ability to talk, understand and learn. The gap between poor children and wealthier ones widens each year, and by high school it has become a chasm. American attempts to close this gap in schools have largely failed, and a consensus is starting to build that these attempts must start long before school -- before preschool, perhaps even before birth.
There is no consensus, however, about what form these attempts should take, because there is no consensus about the problem itself. What is it about poverty that limits a child's ability to learn? Researchers have answered the question in different ways: Is it exposure to lead? Character issues like a lack of self-control or failure to think of future consequences? The effects of high levels of stress hormones? The lack of a culture of reading?
Another idea, however, is creeping into the policy debate: that the key to early learning is talking -- specifically, a child's exposure to language spoken by parents and caretakers from birth to age 3, the more the better. It turns out, evidence is showing, that the much-ridiculed stream of parent-to-child baby talk -- Feel Teddy's nose! It's so soft! Cars make noise -- look, there's a yellow one! Baby feels hungry? Now Mommy is opening the refrigerator! -- is very, very important. (So put those smartphones away!)
The idea has been successfully put into practice a few times on a small scale, but it is about to get its first large-scale test, in Providence, R.I., which last month won the $5 million grand prize in Bloomberg Philanthropies' Mayors Challenge, beating 300 other cities for best new idea. In Providence, only one in three children enter school ready for kindergarten reading. The city already has a network of successful programs in which nurses, mentors, therapists and social workers regularly visit pregnant women, new parents and children in their homes, providing medical attention and advice, therapy, counseling and other services. Now Providence will train these home visitors to add a new service: creating family conversation.
The Providence Talks program will be based on research by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley at the University of Kansas, who in 1995 published a book, "Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children." (see here for a summary.) Hart and Risley were studying how parents of different socioeconomic backgrounds talked to their babies. Every month, the researchers visited the 42 families in the study and recorded an hour of parent-child interaction. They were looking for things like how much parents praised their children, what they talked about, whether the conversational tone was positive or negative. Then they waited till the children were 9, and examined how they were doing in school. In the meantime, they transcribed and analyzed every word on the tapes -- a process that took six years. "It wasn't until we'd collected our data that we realized that the important variable was how much talking the parents were doing," Risley told an interviewer later.
This is important stuff. Read the entire article here.
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Dan Zevin
Please use a sharp No. 2 pencil and gloves to fill in each circle completely or maybe a little less.
1. Agree or Disagree? "It is my duty as a pedagogue to help each and every pupil arrive at the correct answer."
2. When helping each and every pupil arrive at the correct answer, which pedagogical method do you find most effective?
(a) memorization
(b) deconstruction
(c) jumbo eraser
3. A troubled student has defaced the playground with graffiti that reads, "This school sucks." Would you:
(a) defer to the school psychologist
(b) vigorously scrub the "k" with turpentine and spray paint the letters "c, e, e, d" in its place.
4. Teaching fine motor skills is a crucial component of early childhood education. Please rate your level of proficiency in this area.
(a) somewhat proficient
(b) less than proficient
(c) extremely proficient
5. If you selected "a" or "b," please demonstrate your fine motor skill proficiency by applying the pink tip of your writing implement to the circle, and using a series of tightly controlled wrist motions to restore the page to its original state. Remove traces of rubber residue by pursing your lips and exhaling upon the page while concurrently brushing it with the side of your gloved pinkie finger. Darken circle "c."
6. Because many children are not developmentally capable of mastering verbal articulation, they frequently say the opposite of what they truly mean. Do you believe this extends to their written work as well?
a) Yes
7. When Lily wrote that 2+2=17 on her math test, what did Lily truly mean?
(a) 2+2=15
(b) 2+2=16
(c) 2+2=4
8. Please refer to Question 5.
9. What do you like better, permanent markers or dry erase markers?
10. Jimmy has failed five quizzes, six tests and one midterm. On his final exam, Jimmy gets every answer right. How do you predict the principal will react?
(a) "Jimmy is engaged in wrongdoing."
(b) "Jimmy's teacher is doing an outstanding job."
11. In basic algebra, when does X=Y?
(a) when X^2 < Y
(b) when X/2=πr^2
(c) when you erase the bottom right part of the X
12. Studies show that children who do poorly in school experience decreased self-esteem. Do you consider yourself to be the type of instructor who wants to decrease a child's self-esteem?
(a) Yes, I want to decrease a child's self-esteem.
(b) No, I do not wish to decrease a child's self-esteem.
13. Cognitive psychologists have identified several key ways in which individuals retain and share the information they hear on a daily basis. Which of the following techniques do you find most useful?
(a) note taking
(b) review sessions
(c) wiretap
14. If you chose C, we are sorry, but we do not have any openings at this time. Thank you for thinking of the Atlanta public school system.
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You'll find Jennifer Cheatham, new superintendent of the Madison School District, at the Capitol Wednesday when local education officials talk about how Gov. Scott Walker's proposed budget would hurt Dane County schools.Reading has been job one for quite some time, unfortunately.But don't expect her to be spending much time making political statements, Cheatham told me and other staff members of the Cap Times Tuesday. Too much focus on politics would distract her from her work in the Madison schools, she said.
"I think my major role is to work on improving schools in Madison. That's why I was hired and I need to remain focused on that," Cheatham said. "But I do think there are times it is important for me to voice my opinion on behalf of the school district on state issues."
That includes the Walker education budget.
Cheatham is scheduled to be on hand at noon Wednesday when School Board members, superintendents, parents and other advocates from around Dane County talk about the impact of Walker's education proposals in Room 411, the large Senate meeting room.
The Madison School Board has already actively lobbied against the Walker budget, urging local legislators not to support a plan that is "bad for our students, our taxpayers and the future of public education."
Board members say expanding vouchers into Madison, as Walker has proposed, is a particularly bad idea. They note there's no consistent evidence that kids using publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools do better academically, and they say that funding vouchers is likely to raise local property taxes.
It's not just school officials who are weighing in on the highly politicized issue of school vouchers. The Madison City Council passed a resolution last month, sponsored by all 20 members, opposing expansion of vouchers to Madison. The Dane County Board is considering a similar resolution.
Right to read lawsuit filed in Michigan.
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Tech people are very fond of whining about the U.S. educational system, complaining that it is not producing the sort of workers they need. With a few notable exceptions-Bill and Melinda Gates and Dean Kamen come quickly to mind-the are much less good when it comes to doing anything about the problems of schools.OK, here's your chance. It won't even cost you anything-calls for better education seem to die quickly in places like Silicon Valley when the talk turns to taxes-except some leadership.
The Common Core State Standards are the most important school reform to come along in many years. The standards fo mathematics and language arts lay out what we expect students to learn, year by year, from kindergarten through high school. They are not a curriculum, but a set of mileposts for what curriculum should cover, and they inject a badly needed dose of rigor into education. If you have any interest in K-12 education, you should take the time to read them here.
Despite a studied effort by their authors and sponsors at the National Governors' Association and Council of Chief State School Officers to avoid political pitfalls, the standards have come under increasing attack from both the left and right. CCSS was initially adopted by 48 states and the District of Columbia, but three states have withdrawn their support and their is pressure in many others to do the same.
On the left, opposition to CCSS is closely tied to opposition to standardized testing, based on the assumptions, not necessarily warranted, that the standards will lead to increased testing. The anti-testing advocacy group FiarTest argues:
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In 2012, education technology firms attracted $1.1 billion from venture capitalists, angel investors, corporations, and private equity--an order of magnitude more than the industry was pulling in 2002. Startups Coursera and Udacity, which offer high-quality online college courses to the masses, have each received more than $20 million from investors. Big corporations are buying their way into the industry, with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. leading the way in 2010 by dropping $360 million to acquire ed-tech firm Wireless Generation and luring education superstar Joel Klein away from his gig as the head of New York City schools.But will the rush of cash translate into a radically transformed education landscape? When this kind of money flowed into tech companies in other sectors of the economy, we saw radical improvements in everyday transactions, as well as some dramatic booms and busts. Think Amazon instead of the mall, iTunes instead of the record shop, Expedia instead of a travel agent. But also think Pets.com and Full Tilt Poker, where intense competition and bad politics squelched what looked like good bets. There has been a flowering of good ideas in online education, like hybrid learning, in which kids still head off to school every morning but receive the bulk of their instruction from an infinitely patient piece of software instead of a harried, overworked teacher. Yet education, particularly K-12, has remained mostly immune to the improving and empowering forces of the Internet, leaving millions of kids stuck in offline backwaters for six hours a day. Per-pupil spending on public education has more than doubled over the past three decades, while student performance has flatlined.
As the parent of a toddler, I'd love to start banking on my daughter's virtual elementary school matriculation. I want more choices than just the neighborhood public school or an exorbitantly priced private school offering pretty much the same curriculum in nicer facilities. Personalized learning and highly specific feedback appeal to me as a parent. But while Wall Street's interest in online education may bode well for entrepreneurs and students, bullish investors and parents would do well to listen to war stories from weary education policy wonks.
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The Trenton Times is reporting that Princeton High School, one of NJ's highest-performing high schools, "allowed a 'significant' number of students to graduate over a four-year period despite their excessive absences, and in some cases could not provide documentation to justify the waiving of attendance requirements, a state investigation concluded."According to the article, the state Department of Education's Office for Fiscal Accountability and Compliance released a report that shows that during the period of 2008-2012 "district staff altered transcripts by hand to show students earning credits that had been lost because of excessive absences." In addition, PHS Principal Gary Snyder tried to "dodge a question" related to the alterations.
The Princeton Board of Education has released a statement, which concludes,
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Several Texas A&M professors know something that generations of teachers could only hope to guess: whether students are reading their textbooks.They know when students are skipping pages, failing to highlight significant passages, not bothering to take notes -- or simply not opening the book at all.
"It's Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent," said Tracy Hurley, the dean of the school of business.
The faculty members here are neither clairvoyant nor peering over shoulders. They, along with colleagues at eight other colleges, are testing technology from a Silicon Valley start-up, CourseSmart, that allows them to track their students' progress with digital textbooks.
Major publishers in higher education have already been collecting data from millions of students who use their digital materials. But CourseSmart goes further by individually packaging for each professor information on all the students in a class -- a bold effort that is already beginning to affect how teachers present material and how students respond to it, even as critics question how well it measures learning. The plan is to introduce the program broadly this fall.
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Orchestra students in the Middleton-Cross Plains School District had their music world expanded with a visit by Chitravina N. Ravikiran, who is known as the "Mozart of Indian Music."He is a world-renowned composer, slide instrumentalist and vocalist who visited the orchestra students in fifth through 12th grades last month and was commissioned to create compositions for them to play. The high schoolers have performed their piece, and the middle schoolers will play the one created for them at a concert May 23.
Fifth-graders came to Glacier Creek Middle School, where Ravikiran visited with all of the district's middle school orchestra students although the younger students won't play one of Ravikiran's pieces in a concert.
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Three unions have gone to court to protect the lucrative pension backdrop, whose passage caused a public outcry that led to the ouster of former Milwaukee County Executive F. Thomas Ament and seven county supervisors. The unions have filed suit against the county and its Pension Board, arguing the backdrop is a vested property right that can't be taken away.As Urban Milwaukee has reported, more than 1,700 county employees have collected a backdrop benefit, with some 255 getting at least $250,000, 40 getting more than $500,000 and three getting more than $1 million. The complete list of backdrops can be found here.
The benefit grows bigger the longer employees work past the date they are eligible for retirement, so the benefit is growing for many current employees on a monthly basis. As a press release by Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele noted, the county has already paid out $200 million for backdrops and could pay another $100 million, but the reform championed by him could reduce the blow, by freezing the backdrop benefit for employees who are eligible to retire and eliminating it for future retirees who are eligible for the benefit.
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Two Madison high school students have won Achievement Scholarship awards through the National Achievement Scholarship Program, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation announced Wednesday.Alondra P. Harris and Imani Lewis-Norelle, both from East High School, were among about 800 outstanding black American high school seniors who received the awards. Harris' probable career field is genetics, while Lewis-Norelle chose "activism."
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t's college touring season, and many parents are on the road with their teenagers, driving from school to school and thinking about the college application -- and financial aid -- process that looms ahead.
Many baby boomers have already been through this stage with their kids, but because the generation spans about 20 years, others still have kids at home. So how should boomers plan to pay for school when, on average, students graduate from college in the U.S. with $25,000 in debt?
Ron Lieber, who writes about personal finance for The New York Times, tells Morning Edition's David Greene about planning strategies and pitfalls to avoid. Go to npr.org to read or listen to the rest of the story
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Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:
The ACLU has filed a civil rights action on behalf of Michigan students who, despite not being proficient in reading, have not received the legally-required intervention intended to bring them to grade level within 12 months. Defendants in the lawsuit include the Highland Park School District, the charter operator to whom responsibility for HPSD was delegated, and other individuals and educational entities at the state and local level.Read the complaint here [PDF].Under Michigan law, "Excluding special education pupils, pupils having a learning disability, and pupils with extenuating circumstances as determined by school officials, a pupil who does not score satisfactorily on the 4th or 7th grade [MEAP] reading test shall be provided special assistance reasonably expected to enable the pupil to bring his or her reading skills to grade level within 12 months." [MCL 380.1278(8).]
In 2011-12, only 35% of 4th graders and 25% of 7th graders in HPSD scored proficient or better on the state reading test. According to the complaint, "There is no excuse for the deprivations of educational opportunity described in this Complaint. Consistent with the statutory and constitutional provisions cited, it has been repeatedly recognized that nearly all children can learn to read and achieve literacy skills and knowledge appropriate to their age and development with adequate intervention where necessary. Under the State's own content standards, all students should be able to read fluently, accurately, and with appropriate intonation and expression by second grade. Education research has demonstrated the effectiveness of structured, systematic, direct and explicit teaching of the English language reading code to all children, including older students who are substantially behind in their reading ability and related skills."
Many links, here.
Related: Madison's disastrous reading results.
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Claudio Sanchez
National Public Radio
The federal government each year gives needy college students billions of dollars they don't have to pay back -- $34.5 billion to be exact. More than 9 million students rely on the Pell Grant program. But a new study says much of the money is going to people who never graduate.
Sandy Baum, an expert on student financial aid, has been leading a group in a study of the 48-year-old Pell Grant program. Their report, commissioned by the nonprofit College Board, confirms what many have known for years about grant recipients.
"We have always known that the completion rates are lower than what we'd like them to be," Baum says. "But what we really learned was that there are so many students who are not the traditional Pell Grant student, who are not young people from low-income families but rather are adults seeking to improve their labor force opportunities. So understanding how important Pell Grants are to these students, and how poorly designed they are to actually serve these students, was something of an awakening."
aum says these are people 25 years and older who were hit hard by the recession -- lost their jobs, went back for more training and education, but have struggled to complete their schooling.
Baum says they get little or no guidance about what to study or even what school to choose. "If you're an adult, you're more likely to see a sign on the bus or hear that your neighbor went to school someplace. You really don't have many options," she says. Older, nontraditional students, Baum says, now make up nearly half of all Pell Grant recipients, but only 3 percent ever earn a bachelor's degree. High dropout rates, though, are not limited to older students. Among 18- to 25-year-olds in the program, only a fraction earn a bachelor's degree within six years -- often because they're just not ready for college-level work.
Sophia Zaman, a recent graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, says Pell Grant recipients like her don't drop out because they can't handle the work -- higher tuition and fees push them out. "I have numerous friends who were unable to afford taking on a fourth year of college because -- and my university was not unique -- we faced a 16 percent tuition increase," she says. Zaman, who now lobbies Congress on behalf of the U.S. Student Association, says the $8,600 she received in Pell Grants over four years wasn't enough. She still had to work three part-time jobs to make ends meet.
Researchers agree that Pell Grants cover only a fraction of what they once covered. Their key finding, however, is that the Pell Grant program must now serve two equally needy but very different populations -- young and old.
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ALONG his block in Newark's West Ward, where drugs are endemic and the young residents talk about shootings with alarming nonchalance, Najee Little is known as the smart kid. He got all A's his sophomore year, breezing through math and awing his English teachers. His mother, a day care worker, and father, who does odd jobs to make ends meet, have high aspirations for him. They want him to earn a college degree.
So last year, when Bard College opened an early college high school in Newark for disadvantaged students with dreams of a bachelor's degree, he was sure he'd do well there. He wrote his first long paper on Plato's "Republic," expecting a top grade. He got a D minus. "Honestly," he recalled, "I was kind of discouraged."
That paper marked the beginning of a trying academic path that would both excite and disillusion him. The past two years have been peppered with some promising grades -- an A in environmental science -- and some doozies. He failed "Africa in World History" and squeaked by in calculus. Mostly, he came to realize that getting into college and staying there would be a herculean task. There was tricky grammar, hard math and tons of homework. There was the neighborhood cacophony to tune out and the call of his Xbox. And there was the fact that no one in his house could help him.
"My work is more advanced than anyone at home has experienced," he said. And that, it turns out, is why the school had accepted him.
High poverty, high ability, high expectations, high achievement.
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Educators and researchers have long recognized the importance of mastering reading by the end of third grade. Students who fail to reach this critical milestone often falter in the later grades and drop out before earning a high school diploma. Now, researchers have confirmed this link in the first national study to calculate high school graduation rates for children at different reading skill levels and with different poverty rates. Results of a longitudinal study of nearly 4,000 students find that those who don't read proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to leave school without a diploma than proficient readers. For the worst readers, those who couldn't master even the basic skills by third grade, the rate is nearly six times greater. While these struggling readers account for about a third of the students, they represent more than three fifths of those who eventually drop out or fail to graduate on time. What's more, the study shows that poverty has a powerful influence on graduation rates. The combined effect of reading poorly and living in poverty puts these children in double jeopardy.
The study relies on a unique national database of 3,975 students born between 1979 and 1989. The children's parents were surveyed every two years to determine the family's eco- nomic status and other factors, while the children's reading progress was tracked using the Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT) Reading Recognition subtest. The database re- ports whether students have finished high school by age 19, but does not indicate whether they actually dropped out.
For purposes of this study, the researchers divided the children into three reading groups which correspond roughly to the skill levels used in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP): proficient, basic and below basic. The children were also separated into three income categories: those who have never been poor, those who spent some time in poverty and those who have lived more than half the years surveyed in poverty.
The findings include:
-- One in six children who are not reading proficiently in third grade do not graduate from high school on time, a rate four times greater than that for proficient readers.
-- The rates are highest for the low, below-basic readers: 23 percent of these children drop out or fail to finish high school on time, compared to 9 percent of children with basic reading skills and 4 percent of proficient readers.
-- Overall, 22 percent of children who have lived in poverty do not graduate from high school, compared to 6 percent of those who have never been poor. This rises to 32 percent for students spending more than half of their childhood in poverty.
-- For children who were poor for at least a year and were not reading proficiently in third grade, the proportion that don't finish school rose to 26 percent. That's more than six times the rate for all proficient readers.
-- The rate was highest for poor Black and Hispanic students, at 31 and 33 percent respectively--or about eight times the rate for all proficient readers.
-- Even among poor children who were proficient readers in third grade, 11 percent still didn't finish high school. That compares to 9 percent of subpar third grade readers who have never been poor.
-- Among children who never lived in poverty, all but 2 percent of the best third- grade readers graduated from high school on time.
-- Graduation rates for Black and Hispanic students who were not proficient readers in third grade lagged far behind those for White students with the same reading skills.
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Three weeks ago, North America's pre-eminent quiz bowl organization announced it had discovered scofflaws in its midst. In a blog post, National Academic Quiz Tournaments revealed that four players--MIT's Joshua Alman, Harvard's Andy Watkins, Michigan's Scot Putzig, and a Delaware high schooler--had improperly accessed Web pages containing tournament questions. Though NAQT reported there was "neither direct nor statistical evidence that [three of the players] took advantage of their prior access in game situations," their behavior still went "against competitors' expectations of fair play." (NAQT believes there is statistical evidence that MIT's Alman used ill-gotten information to improve his tournament performance. He denies the charge, saying in an email, "When I competed in tournaments, I was hearing the questions for the very first time. I did not cheat.") As a consequence of their actions, all of the players' schools were stripped of their tournament victories.Multiple major news outlets pounced as soon as the quiz bowl scandal hit the Web. Predictably, all of the stories focused on Andy Watkins and Harvard, which was forced to vacate the national championships it won in 2009, 2010, and 2011--the quiz bowl equivalent of the 2004 USC football team losing its BCS title. "For me, it's just amusing at this point how the only time quiz bowl can ever get coverage is the typical 'Harvard sucks' or 'Harvard's corrupt' kind of story," says Ted Gioia, one of Watkins' Harvard quiz bowl teammates.
But Watkins wasn't just the media's main target--the quiz bowl community has focused its rage on him as well. After all, neither Putzig nor Alman did as much damage as Watkins, who helped his team win multiple now-tainted championships. (Putzig did not respond to requests to comment.) Quiz bowler Jarret Greene, a student at Ohio State, puts it simply: "He accomplished the most from his cheating, and therefore his actions hurt quiz bowl the most."
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The field of education is contentious and resistant to innovation or change. There seems to be a growing sense that the problems that education systems face is just too difficult and multifaceted to fix. Most importantly, the focus is on how to "fix education infrastructure" (improve teachers, reduce class size, improve curriculum, develop alternative school models, etc.) rather than to "build better learners" by enhancing each child's neural capacities and motivation for life-long learning.Less than two decades ago the concept that you could improve educational outcomes by increasing each person's neural capacities for learning would have been inconceivable because mainstream medicine and science believed that brain anatomy (and hence learning capacity) was fixed at birth. It is commonly believed that children enter school with differing (genetically endowed) brain capacities and that teachers must just make-do with these individual differences in learning capacity. Recent breakthroughs in the neuroscience of learning have demonstrated that this view is fundamentally wrong.
The US has spent billions of dollars on educating and supporting teachers or developing curricula but no resources are applied to "improving the brain" that a student brings to the classroom. To this end, the educational systems lack an understanding of and do not utilize recent advances in the neurological underpinnings of learning. As such, these systems do not successfully take into account individual differences in brain development, or have tools to optimally address these.
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In 2010-2011, more than 48,000 Wisconsin students were suspended. The disruptive behavior leading to these suspensions is detrimental to teachers, school cultures, and ultimately, student learning. Reducing suspension rates in Wisconsin school districts with high numbers of disruptive pupils can substantially increase achievement levels in those districts. An analysis of suspension rates in Wisconsin shows that decreasing those rates by five percentage points would yield an almost five percentage point increase in math proficiency, and a three and one-half percentage point increase in reading proficiency on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam.In other words, reducing disruptive behavior can yield substantial achievement gains for Wisconsin pupils.
This report reviews existing research on the link between student disruption and academic achievement, reviews current Wisconsin statues and practices regarding student behavior, includes comments from a discussion with teachers from the state's largest school district, and uses data from both the Department of Public Instruction and from the National Center for Education Statistics to test several hypotheses. The finding that student behavior affects student achievement at the school district level is both intuitive and well-supported by evidence.
The findings are particularly interesting because the other factors that significantly affect achievement in Wisconsin districts, such as the socioeconomic makeup of the student population, cannot be readily addressed in the ways that student behavior can.
Ultimately, this report concludes that Wisconsin must honor its commitment to make a public education available to all of its students, but must not do so at the expense of the vast majority of pupils who do not engage in disruptive behaviors. Similarly, teachers must be supported and allowed to teach in an environment where their focus can be on student learning, not discipline.
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Freeman Hrabowski was a 9th grader in Birmingham, Alabama, when he heard a dynamic, impassioned speaker at church -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time, King was organizing a march for children, and Hrabowski begged his parents to let him be a part of it.Freeman Hrabowski: 4 pillars of college success in scienceHrabowski won their blessing to march in the Children's Crusade, a pivotal moment in the American Civil Rights Movement in 1963. He was taken to jail for participating, even though he was just 12-years-old. In today's talk, Hrabowski shares the words that King said to him and the others inside the jailhouse: "What you children do this day will have an impact on children who have not been born."
Today, Hrabowski is the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), a college that serves students of all backgrounds and that is known for supporting students of color in two areas of study where they are severely underrepresented -- science and engineering. The school currently leads the country in graduating African-Americans who go on complete Ph.Ds and MD/Ph.Ds in these fields.
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Union Information - Please Read - eepurl.com/xQ3MH
— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) April 8, 2013
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Low-income housing provider and former teacher Dean Loumos will join the Madison School Board later this month after his opponent in a very close race conceded Tuesday.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.Retired Madison Police Lt. Wayne Strong said the 278-vote margin, or about 0.76 percent of the total vote, was not close enough to justify a recount.
Loumos' victory margin decreased by one vote from the original total after nearly 200 absentee ballots were counted.
A recent change in state law that allows absentee ballots to come in after Election Day has made it harder to know the winner immediately in close races. There were more than 1,300 absentee ballots that hadn't come into the Madison City Clerk's Office by election night, but not all were returned by the Friday deadline.
State law allows a candidate to seek a recount at no cost if the margin is 0.5 percent of the total vote or less. Strong said if the absentee ballots had closed the margin to that level, he might have sought a recount.
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An Oxford University researcher will soon test whether applying an electric current to part of the brain can help children learn math--an effect previously demonstrated in adults. Parents are already lining up for access to the device. But is the technique safe? And is this an ethical way to improve a child's performance in school?
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Why is private college tuition so astronomically expensive these days?Ask an administrator, and they'll likely tell you that it's because they're taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor. Many schools advertise sky-high tuition rates that only the wealthiest students ever actually pay, while dolling out generous financial aid packages to needier attendees. At Harvard, to pick a famous example, tuition is $37,000, but students from families earning $65,000 or less per year pay zero. In the higher-ed world, this all gets called the "high-tuition, high-aid" model.
But exactly how much of the last decade's rising tuition has actually been used to cover rising aid?
Quite a bit, it turns out. Over at Education Sector, Andrew Gillen put together this handy chart comparing tuition increases to changes in financial aid at 911 private, non-profit colleges between 1999 and 2010 in nominal dollars. On average, schools spent 60 cents of every new tuition dollar on aid (as shown via the green line). Overall, 58 percent of schools devoted at least half their new tuition money to aid. (Schools above the red line spent spent more than 100% of their tuition hikes boosting aid, while schools below it spent spent less than 100%)
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A great deal has been written about the impact of retrieval practice on memory. That's because the effect is sizable, it has been replicated many times (Agarwal, Bain & Chamberlain, 2012) and it seems to lead not just to better memory but deeper memory that supports transfer (e.g., McDaniel et al, 2013; Rohrer et al, 2010).("Retrieval practice" is less catchy than the initial name--testing effect. It was renamed both to emphasize that it doesn't matter whether you try to remember for the sake of a test or some other reason and because "testing effect" led some observers to throw up their hands and say "do we really need more tests?")
Now researchers (Szpunar, Khan, & Schacter, 2013) have reported testing as a potentially powerful ally in online learning. College students frequently report difficulty in maintaining attention during lectures, and that problem seems to be exacerbated when the lecture occurs on video.
In this experiment subjects were asked to learn from a 21 minute video lecture on statistics. They were also told that the lecture would be divided in 4 parts, separated by a break. During the break they would perform math problems for a minute, and then would either do more math problems for two more minutes ("untested group"), they would be quizzed for two minutes on the material they had just learned ("tested group"), or they would review by seeing questions with the answers provided ("restudy group.")
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Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Bettner email (PDF):
Since the late 1960's, MTI members have had the benefit of the best health insurance available. Stressing the importance of having quality health insurance in providing economic security, members have made known that health insurance is their #1 priority via their responses to the Union's Bargaining Survey. And, the Union not only was able to bargain specific benefits, such as acupuncture and extended mental health coverage, as demanded by MTI members, but due to a 1983 MTI victory in the Wisconsin Supreme Court, MTI was able to have an equal voice in which insurance company would provide the plan. This is important because varied insurance companies have different interpretations of the same insurance provisions.Unfortunately, the District Administration took advantage of the increased leverage in negotiations enabled by Governor Walker's Act 10, and forced concessions in health insurance and other Contract provisions, in exchange for agreeing to Collective Bargaining Agreements for MTI's five bargaining units through June 2014.
Members who elected Physicians Plus health insurance under the revisions made by the District, will now lose that coverage June 30, 2013. For coverage effective July 1, options available are via Dean Health Plan, Group Health Cooperative and Unity. Each offers an HMO and a Point of Service Plan. The Point of Service enables greater coverage options, but at a higher premium.Note: The three current carriers enabling a special open enrollment/annual choice to add or change coverage to members of ALL five MTI bargaining units until April 26, 2013. Changes in coverage will be effective July 1, 2013. The deadline for application to change coverage must be received in Human Resources by 5:00 p.m., April 26, 2013. The District has scheduled two health insurance information sessions for those with questions to seek answers from the above-referenced plans.
Health Insurance Information Sessions:April 8 - La Follette Room C17 - 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. April 9 - Memorial Neighborhood Center - 4:00 to 6:00 p.m.
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What if a corporation raised $500 million in a securities offering on the premise that the proceeds would go for operating expenses, then disclosed a few months later that $300 million of this amount would instead be used to service a debt that wasn't disclosed in the offering document?This would be false advertising, subject to sanction by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Unfortunately, the SEC doesn't have jurisdiction over state politicians engaging in the same behavior, and, in the case of California, involving sums that are 100 times bigger.
Last November, California politicians persuaded voters to support a proposed seven-year, $50 billion tax increase, largely on the vow that the money would go to public education. The first five words of the initiative's title were "Temporary Taxes to Fund Education."
Now, just four months after the election, the state's Legislative Analyst's Office has announced that the California State Teachers' Retirement System requires an extra $4.5 billion a year for 30 years -- $135 billion -- to cover its unfunded liability for teacher pensions and that the money will have to come from some combination of school districts and the state. To the extent that it comes from the school districts, $4.5 billion a year is 167 percent of the annual amount those districts expected from the tax increase. To the extent that it comes from the state, $4.5 billion is more than 100 percent of the annual amount it expected in new revenue.
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Every year hundreds of thousands of students write essays for large-scale standardized tests. The scores are used in life-changing decisions. Students are accepted into, placed within, and rejected from educational programs. Graduates are hired or not hired. Teachers are qualified, evaluated, promoted, and fired. Learning institutions are compared, accredited, and punished. Yet in a major disservice to all involved, more and more of these essays are scored not by human readers but by machines.Related: Robo Essay GradingLet's face the realities of automatic essay scoring. Computers cannot "read." They cannot measure the essentials of effective written communication: accuracy, reasoning, adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical stance, convincing argument, meaningful organization, clarity, and veracity, among others. Independent and industry studies show that by its nature computerized essay rating is
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The best part of the rise of online education is that it forces us to ask: What is a university for?,Are universities mostly sorting devices to separate smart and hard-working high school students from their less-able fellows so that employers can more easily identify them? Are universities factories for the dissemination of job skills? Are universities mostly boot camps for adulthood, where young people learn how to drink moderately, fornicate meaningfully and hand things in on time?
My own stab at an answer would be that universities are places where young people acquire two sorts of knowledge, what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott called technical knowledge and practical knowledge. Technical knowledge is the sort of knowledge you need to understand a task -- the statistical knowledge you need to understand what market researchers do, the biological knowledge you need to grasp the basics of what nurses do.
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Harvard has finally retained some adult legal supervision to sort out its cheating-and-e-mail-snooping fiasco. That's the good news.The bad news remains that the country's most closely followed institution of higher education has already done damage to its valuable brand. The university's clumsy reaction to the mess has made an embarrassing situation worse.
First, the latest headline: As reported by our colleagues at Bloomberg News, University President Drew Faust announced that David Barron, a professor at Harvard Law School, will head a new task force to develop recommendations on campus e-mail policy. Barron, a former journalist who went on to more respectable pursuits, including clerking for former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and serving in the Justice Department during President Obama's first term, is a noted expert on constitutional and administrative law. Faust said she would also ask Michael Keating, a leading Boston business litigator with the old-line firm Foley Hoag, to help sort out the situation.
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In November 2000, the Milwaukee County Board approved, on a 20-to-5 vote, a plan with new pension benefits for non-union workers that were particularly lucrative for veteran employees. In February, 2001, the board voted 22-2 to extend similar benefits to union employees.The plan was passed with no media scrutiny. In October 2001, then MilwaukeeWorld.com editor Bruce Murphy (current editor of UrbanMilwaukee.com) wrote a story detailing the benefits and wrote second story filling in more details. Murphy's story reported that Milwaukee County Executive F. Thomas Ament, should he serve as planned until 2008, would leave with a "backdrop" lump sum pension payment in excess of $2 million.
The issue received little attention until Murphy did a feature story for Milwaukee Magazine on the issue. This soon prompted the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to report the story on January 6, 2002, the first of a run of front-page stories devoted to the issue, reinforced by considerable coverage by TV and radio news coverage.
The resulting public outrage forced Ament to fire many of his cabinet members, sign a form foregoing his backdrop and eventually resign from office. Seven county supervisors were also recalled from office. Measured by the number of officials thrown out of office, it was the biggest political scandal in Milwaukee history.
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Well before the cleanup from Superstorm Sandy was in full swing, students could read about the weather system that slammed the East Coast in their textbooks.Welcome to the new digital bookcase, where traditional ink-and-paper textbooks have given way to iPads and book bags are getting lighter. Publishers update students' books almost instantly with the latest events or research. Schools are increasingly looking to the hand-held tablets as a way to sustain students' interest, reward their achievements and, in some cases, actually keep per-student costs down.
"We must use technology to empower teachers and improve the way students learn," said Joel Klein, a former New York City schools' chief who now leads News Corp.'s education tablet program. "At its best, education technology will change the face of education by helping teachers manage the classroom and personalize instruction."
News Corp. introduced their Amplify tablet during a breakfast Wednesday at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. Priced at $299, the 10-inch unit runs on a school's wireless Internet system and comes with software for teachers to watch each student's activities, offer instant polls and provide anonymous quizzes to gauge student understanding.
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Asha Jain will be making her fourth trip to the National Geographic Bee in Washington, D.C., in May. This time she's going as a participant, rather than a spectator.Asha, a 12-year-old seventh-grader from Minocqua-Hazelhurst-Lake Tomahawk Elementary School in Minocqua, won the Wisconsin National Geographic Bee competition held Friday at the American Family Insurance national headquarters in Madison by correctly answering all 27 questions she faced.
In doing so she follows in the footsteps of her brother Vansh, who had won three of the previous four state bees and placed second last year in the national bee. Vansh also won the state bee in 2009 and 2010 and went on to place fourth and sixth, respectively, at the national bee.
"We like geography," Vansh said of his family dynasty. "I'm happy and proud of her. She always lost to me before, so I wanted her to win."
After being blocked by her big brother the past three years -- only one contestant from each school can make it to the state level -- Asha was determined to make the most of her opportunity.
"We study a lot," said Asha, whose family has a world map mural on its living room wall. "We look at a lot of maps and go through the notes over and over."
All that work paid off as Asha was the only girl to advance to the finals along with nine boys.
One by one, the boys were eliminated as Asha was the only contestant to answer each question correctly through 14 rounds. That brought her to the championship round against Andrew Tai, a seventh-grader from Templeton Middle School in Sussex.
They each answered the three championship-round questions and the first of the tie-breaker round.
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Should business school students be made to foot the bill for academic research that no one reads? Not any more, says Larry Zicklin, a former chairman of Wall Street investment firm Neuberger Berman, a clinical professor at New York University's Stern School and a lecturer on ethics at the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania.With academic journals under increasing attack from several quarters, Mr Zicklin has upset some colleagues in urging schools to cut tuition fees by making faculty members focus more on teaching and less on publishing research in journals. He points to research that uses the University of Texas at Austin as a case study and says that fees could be halved if 80 per cent of faculty with the lowest teaching loads were to teach only half as much as the 20 per cent with the highest teaching loads. He predicts that the rise of massive open online courses, or Moocs, and other market forces will conspire against schools that fail to act.
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It asks the question "who escapes poverty and at what cost?" And reflects on the role of luck, effort, education and parental engagement.
GOOD PEOPLEProduced by Forward Theater Co.
Wednesday through Saturday, April 10-13, 7:30 p.m., Sunday, April 14, 2 p.m., Thursday and Friday, April 18-19, 7:30 p.m., Saturday, April 20, 2 and 7:30 p.m., Sunday, April 21, 2 p.m.
Running time is two hours and 30 minutes, with one intermission.
Playhouse, Overture Center, 201 State St.
$10-38; $15 student rush
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Gerald J. Conti, via a kind Rebecca Wallace-Segal email:
It is with the deepest regret that I must retire at the close of this school year, ending my more than twenty-seven years of service at Westhill on June 30, under the provisions of the 2012-15 contract. I assume that I will be eligible for any local or state incentives that may be offered prior to my date of actual retirement and I trust that I may return to the high school at some point as a substitute teacher.m
As with Lincoln and Springfield, I have grown from a young to an old man here; my brother died while we were both employed here; my daughter was educated here, and I have been touched by and hope that I have touched hundreds of lives in my time here. I know that I have been fortunate to work with a small core of some of the finest students and educators on the planet.
I came to teaching forty years ago this month and have been lucky enough to work at a small liberal arts college, a major university and this superior secondary school. To me, history has been so very much more than a mere job, it has truly been my life, always driving my travel, guiding all of my reading and even dictating my television and movie viewing. Rarely have I engaged in any of these activities without an eye to my classroom and what I might employ in a lesson, a lecture or a presentation. With regard to my profession, I have truly attempted to live John Dewey's famous quotation (now likely cliché with me, I've used it so very often) that "Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself." This type of total immersion is what I have always referred to as teaching "heavy," working hard, spending time, researching, attending to details and never feeling satisfied that I knew enough on any topic. I now find that this approach to my profession is not only devalued, but denigrated and perhaps, in some quarters despised. STEM rules the day and "data driven" education seeks only conformity, standardization, testing and a zombie-like adherence to the shallow and generic Common Core, along with a lockstep of oversimplified so-called Essential Learnings. Creativity, academic freedom, teacher autonomy, experimentation and innovation are being stifled in a misguided effort to fix what is not broken in our system of public education and particularly not at Westhill.
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For many young people who aspire to be scientists, the great bugbear is mathematics. Without advanced math, how can you do serious work in the sciences? Well, I have a professional secret to share: Many of the most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more than semiliterate.During my decades of teaching biology at Harvard, I watched sadly as bright undergraduates turned away from the possibility of a scientific career, fearing that, without strong math skills, they would fail. This mistaken assumption has deprived science of an immeasurable amount of sorely needed talent. It has created a hemorrhage of brain power we need to stanch.
I speak as an authority on this subject because I myself am an extreme case. Having spent my precollege years in relatively poor Southern schools, I didn't take algebra until my freshman year at the University of Alabama. I finally got around to calculus as a 32-year-old tenured professor at Harvard, where I sat uncomfortably in classes with undergraduate students only a bit more than half my age. A couple of them were students in a course on evolutionary biology I was teaching. I swallowed my pride and learned calculus.
I was never more than a C student while catching up, but I was reassured by the discovery that superior mathematical ability is similar to fluency in foreign languages. I might have become fluent with more effort and sessions talking with the natives, but being swept up with field and laboratory research, I advanced only by a small amount.
Fortunately, exceptional mathematical fluency is required in only a few disciplines, such as particle physics, astrophysics and information theory. Far more important throughout the rest of science is the ability to form concepts, during which the researcher conjures images and processes by intuition.
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Not far off a scruffy boulevard lined with dollar stores and payday loan shops in a neighborhood of run-down brick bungalows, Corning Achievement Elementary School here is a pristine refuge, with gleaming tile floors and signs in classrooms proclaiming "Whatever it takes."In this Mississippi River town marked by pockets of entrenched poverty, some of the worst schools in the state are in the midst of a radical experiment in reinventing public education.
Last fall, Tennessee began removing schools with the lowest student test scores and graduation rates from the oversight of local school boards and pooling them in a special state-run district. Memphis, where the vast majority of public school students are black and from poor families, is ground zero: 80 percent of the bottom-ranked schools in the state are here.
Tennessee's Achievement School District, founded as part of the state's effort to qualify for the Obama administration's Race to the Top grant, is one of a small handful of state-run districts intended to rejuvenate chronically struggling schools. Louisiana's Recovery School District, created in 2003, is the best-known forerunner, and this year Michigan also set up a state district for failing schools. In February, Virginia legislators passed a measure to set up a similar statewide district.
The achievement district is a veritable petri dish of practices favored by data-driven reformers across the country and fiercely criticized by teachers' unions and some parent groups.
Most of the schools will be run by charter operators. All will emphasize frequent testing and data analysis. Many are instituting performance pay for teachers and longer school days, and about a fifth of the new district's recruits come from Teach for America, a program in which high-achieving college graduates work in low-income neighborhood schools. And the achievement district will not offer teachers tenure.
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There is a monopoly of mediocrity in American education.The challenge to New Jersey: Break it.
The great "Wizard of Menlo Park," Thomas Edison, once said, "The three things that are most essential to achievement are common sense, hard work and stick-to-it-iv-ness." It is an ethic that has served New Jersey well, helped the state weather many storms, and made it one of the first great centers for innovation in the United States.
Student achievement in New Jersey schools is evidence of hard work and perseverance in the Garden State.
According to the Nation's Report Card, New Jersey ranks second in the United States in overall fourth- and eighth-grade reading achievement. The state has a four-year high school graduation rate of 86.5 percent.
Good news -- but not nearly good enough.
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Rutgers students are starting to become inured to seeing the name of their university associated with some negative story ("Tapes told Rice tale," April 4). Is it a string of bad luck? Probably not. I think that it is most likely a problem that the university administration has created as a result of its policy choices and the undue attention it has devoted to athletics.For years, the administration at Rutgers has been trying to develop a national brand for the university as an athletic powerhouse. Doing so, they claim, will increase alumni funding, draw more resources and talented students and faculty, and generally increase the prestige of the university. As a student who does not participate in athletics, I believe my academic opportunities have been short-changed by this misguided policy. Athletes have been more recognized and better supported by the administration than scholars.
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Chief among them has been this notion from state superintendent Tony Evers that the state's new accountability system, known as state report cards, shouldn't be used to determine which districts get vouchers.John Nichols appears to support the present DPI approach. Status Quo K-12 vs a Little "Reform" Rhetoric at a Wisconsin Budget Hearing.Under Walker's plan, districts with at least 4,000 students and two or more schools getting a D or an F under a new rating system would be eligible for vouchers. Evers -- no fan of vouchers anyway -- says the report cards were not intended for such use and need more refinement over several years.
But what was the purpose of spending more than a year working with a diverse group of education and business groups and state elected officials to create the report cards -- which replaced the widely panned No Child Left Behind system -- if not to use them to make consequential decisions about education?
On Thursday, Department of Public Instruction director of Education Information Services John Johnson called the report cards a "work in progress" that aren't an appropriate tool for making a "major policy decision."
Among their current limitations are that they are based on tests that are expected to change two years from now, they can't show growth in high school student achievement, some schools weren't rated, and there's too little data to reliably identify trends in school performance.
Adam Gamoran, director of the UW-Madison-based Wisconsin Center for Education Research and a skeptic on voucher programs, agrees that the tool isn't perfect and may well change, but "that doesn't mean we shouldn't use them now" to rate schools.
It's also not as if DPI itself didn't expect to use the report cards. Its budget request -- which Walker didn't include in his budget -- included about $10.3 million over the next two years to replicate best practices from schools deemed high-performing by the report cards, as well as to help schools deemed low-performing by the report cards get better.
Related: The Wisconsin DPI in 2008:
"Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum".
http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2013/03/wisconsin_educa_14.php
A citizen, parent, voter and taxpayer might ask what the DPI has been
with state and federal taxpayer dollars since 2008?
Meanwhile, Alabama (!), Minnesota, Florida and Massachusetts are
continuing to aim high and compare their students to the world.
http://nces.ed.gov/Timss/benchmark.asp
And, Vietnam is teaching computer science concepts in primary school.
http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2013/03/primary_school_.php
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The problem is that a monopoly always protects itself. The teachers' unions and many Democratic politicians, who receive their campaign contributions, oppose school choice, which would improve not only public schools, but also the chances of poor and minority children to have a better life. The current approach appears to be to keep disadvantaged children in underperforming schools so that underperforming teachers keep their jobs and the politicians they support keep theirs. As long as the monopoly survives, we can expect more cheating and corner-cutting and less real achievement for children who ought to be everyone's first concern.Instead, as Atlanta would suggest, public school children are subject to all manner of manipulation and disservice by people charged with educating them. Perhaps if parents had the freedom to send their children to a school they believed would offer them a better shot at true success they would fare better. Could school choice be the answer?
Indiana thinks so. Last week, the state's Supreme Court upheld a voucher program that gives poor and middle-class families access to tax dollars to help them pay private school tuition. Parents should decide where their children go to school.
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The images in the slideshow above are all pictures that I took at the 2011 and 2012 FIRST Robotics Competiton Silicon Valley Regional. (FIRST stands for "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology"). I've taken my sons to this event for four years now, partly to encourage my school and my participating students, and partly because it's fun watching six robots zooming around and smacking into each other in a race to lift and place large inflatables, or play basketball, balance on a ramp or zoom up a pole.If I've posted this online, then we're on our way to the San Jose Event Center to watch the first day of this year's competition, which is called "Ultimate Ascent" - yes, frisbee time! Watch the animated film below to see this year's game.
But actually, the main reason I keep coming back to this event is that I love watching education in action. On the surface, it's all fun and games, as long as you're a kid who understands robotics, computers, engineering, CAD, and a variety of other technical and mechanical skills. If you look at the slideshow above, you can see there are great things happening here among the students, audience, coaches and mentors, referees and event organizers.
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Most people who are not straight white men would probably smirk at the idea that straight white men feel alienated in the higher education workplace.Those who smirk, Sandra Miles said here at the annual conference of NASPA: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, are hindering meaningful discussion about race.
Miles, whose dissertation on the professional experiences of black women in her field produced an unexpected sub-study about the alienation of straight white men, made this argument to a couple hundred people who turned up to hear more about her research. The ensuing debate was, unsurprisingly, somewhat contentious.
A comment by one white graduate student toward the end of the session summed it up well. He described a recent discussion about privilege in a higher education class, when he was shot down after offering his own thoughts.
"I couldn't even begin to have that conversation because it was automatically assumed I didn't understand," he said. "To go through that experience in a higher education class - which is supposed to be the safest place to talk about that - was just terrifying."
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Some time ago I posted on a striking claim of genetic prediction for autism risk that appeared in Nature Molecular Psychiatry:Predicting the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder using gene pathway analysis (Nature Molecular Psychiatry)Abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) depends on a clinical interview with no biomarkers to aid diagnosis. The current investigation interrogated single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of individuals with ASD from the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange (AGRE) database. SNPs were mapped to Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG)-derived pathways to identify affected cellular processes and develop a diagnostic test. This test was then applied to two independent samples from the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) and Wellcome Trust 1958 normal birth cohort (WTBC) for validation. Using AGRE SNP data from a Central European (CEU) cohort, we created a genetic diagnostic classifier consisting of 237 SNPs in 146 genes that correctly predicted ASD diagnosis in 85.6% of CEU cases. This classifier also predicted 84.3% of cases in an ethnically related Tuscan cohort; however, prediction was less accurate (56.4%) in a genetically dissimilar Han Chinese cohort (HAN). Eight SNPs in three genes (KCNMB4, GNAO1, GRM5) had the largest effect in the classifier with some acting as vulnerability SNPs, whereas others were protective. Prediction accuracy diminished as the number of SNPs analyzed in the model was decreased. Our diagnostic classifier correctly predicted ASD diagnosis with an accuracy of 71.7% in CEU individuals from the SFARI (ASD) and WTBC (controls) validation data sets. In conclusion, we have developed an accurate diagnostic test for a genetically homogeneous group to aid in early detection of ASD. While SNPs differ across ethnic groups, our pathway approach identified cellular processes common to ASD across ethnicities. Our results have wide implications for detection, intervention and prevention of ASD.
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The UK government's working group on expanding access to published research findings reported last June. The intention of the Finch report is admirable, the effort misguided. The report concentrates on how academic research will be published. It rather neglects what research will be published.Dame Janet Finch, advised less by academics than by organisations with interests in academic publishing, recommends open access - but open access to what? Perhaps only to the publications from which these organisations benefit most. Access to research findings unapproved by these organisations is likely to become more difficult.
Producing a vast report on academic publishing that does not mention research assessment is something of an accomplishment. Research assessment dominates academic life and academic publishing dominates research assessment. Publication in top journals is the main indicator of academic performance, determining salary, careers, research grants and a goodly slice of institutional funding.
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Earlier this week, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announced that the state will assume control over Camden City School District. Camden will be the fourth NJ district to undergo takeover, though this is the first time that the state will be removing control from an elected local school board, which will now serve in an advisory role (and have three additional members appointed by the Governor). Over the next few weeks, NJ officials will choose a new superintendent, and begin to revamp evaluations, curricula and other core policies.From the Governor's two page, fact sheet:Accompanying the announcement, the Governor's office released a two-page "fact sheet," much of which is devoted to justifying this move to the public.
Before discussing it, let's be clear about something - it may indeed be the case that Camden schools are so critically low-performing and/or dysfunctional as to warrant drastic intervention. Moreover, it's at least possible that state takeover is the appropriate type of intervention to help these schools improve (though the research on this latter score is, to be charitable, undeveloped).
That said, the "fact sheet" presents relatively little valid evidence regarding the academic performance of Camden schools. Given the sheer magnitude of any takeover decision, it is crucial for the state to demonstrate publicly that they have left no stone unturned by presenting a case that is as comprehensive and compelling as possible. However, the discrepancy between that high bar and NJ's evidence, at least that pertaining to academic outcomes, is more than a little disconcerting.
The problem is not a lack of funding, as Camden is receiving over $279.5 million in this year's budget, an increase of $3.6
million from last year.
• During the 2011-12 school year, Camden spent $23,709 per student, compared to the statewide average of $18,045.
• Additionally, the teacher/student ratio during those years was 9.3 to 1, which was the lowest statewide of the largest
106 school districts in the state.
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A recent analysis by a Madison think tank is trying to poke holes in the six-year work of the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP). The true discovery here, however, is that this report from the Forward Institute seems to be more interested in discrediting the SCDP's results than providing meaningful statistical analysis on the data or the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program itself. Even in that aspect, it falls short thanks to a limited view of the project's six years of analysis in Wisconsin's largest district.Related: Though not perfect, I think $13,063 (MPS) and $7,126 (MPCP) are reasonably comparative per-pupil public support numbers for MPS and the MPCP..According to the Forward Institute, the SCDP fails to provide compelling data that voucher schools are the underlying influence behind greater graduation and college attendance rates for students that leave MPS through the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
While the Forward Institute raises interesting points about the overall effect of familial influences on a child's education and their overall success, the group fails to examine the full scope of research that the SCDP has produced in the realm of high school attainment in Milwaukee's public and voucher schools.
Madison will spend about $15k per student during the 2012-2013 school year, yet continues to produce disastrous reading results.
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John Dickert writes from Mount Vernon Farms, Virginia:
It has been an exciting week here for those of us in Washington who are following the education scene.Parents: A New Way To Help Your Kids with Their HomeworkIn one of the counties in Maryland adjacent to Washington, the county executive (in this case, an elected position) has taken over more control of the school system, after first trying to completely override the school board and the office of the school superintendent. Part of what drives this effort is that while that county's academic scores are not high, its neighboring county to the west has the highest academic scores i the state of Maryland. The first linked article (released April 1st) will relate to that.
Then there was the test scoring scandal which broke in Atlanta. The next two articles (released April 4th) relate to that. The first was by Bill Gates. The second was printed next to it on the Op-ED pages of the Washington Post and relates to an educational incident in Wisconsin. I find that the ideas in the Bill Gates article will run into two roadblocks. The first is teat score envy, the concept that our district needs to keep up with the scores of those of our neighbors. The second is that in Education at the college (or university) level, success is measured by pushing the edge of the envelope in teaching methodology, in a field where success can not be measured until the suggestee is long graduated. When my children went through their pre-collegial schooling they were subjected to several new innovations in education, some of which worked and some of which were disasters. The creators of all these programs were rewarded before any of their programs were proven in the field.The final attachment was released in our (Fairfax County VA) public library weekly newsletter. It is a recently developed program for aiding parents in assisting with their child's homework. As it seems very involved, I can posit that only the most helicopterish of parents will be willing to use it.
As a window into my view of high school education when my oldest son entered high school back in 1996, Fairfax County Public Schools only required 3 years of social studies. Our high school offered a 4th year of the program, offered in the Sophomore year, the AP Modern European course. About 150 students would take the course each year offered in 5 periods by one teacher. It was highly sought after. In part due to this program our high school was one of the highest placing high schools on Jay Mathew's early High School Challenge listings, back when it was only published by the Washington Post. At the time the school was offering only some 5 or 6 AP courses, 2 of which were electives. In the intervening years the AP Challenge Index has gone national, and the AP course offerings have grown geometrically, with the situation that for many courses the only effective college-prep version of a course is the AP course. Initially the AP program was promoted as a way to give high school students a means to have a taste of college. Many high school seniors now are driven to take 4 such courses. AND none of these courses in the social sciences or English, requires the creation of a researched paper. When my youngest child was in high school (she graduated in 2007) I served on a school education committee, and wrote locally about this issue. I never could convince anyone that high school was really about preparing our children for college, not directing them to take the maximum number of College like courses as possible.
Library customers can now access a new resource to help with homework. To learn more about it, teachers and parents can sign up for a 30-minute demonstration on April 17. Online registration required: Wednesday, April 17 at 2 p.m.This new online service by Literati includes a host of resources such as educational content for K-12 students and adults, informational videos and tutorials and interactive discovery tools. Literati Public has been specifically customized for Virginia libraries. Online tutoring help from certified teachers is offered through the "Homework Help" tab Monday through Thursday from
3 p.m. - 9 p.m. and Saturdays from 9 a.m.-3 p.m. This service is offered to all students in Virginia (Grades 3-12) needing help in math, reading or writing. You can access this resource here. Select Fairfax County Public Library and Go; on the second screen enter your library card number.
There are multiple ways to access this new resource from the library website; here's one:
Go to the library home page: www.fairfaxcounty.gov/library;
Select Homework help under Library Services in the center column;
Select Find an Online Teacher to Help/Find Resources;
Then follow the steps above (select FCPL and Go/enter your card number).
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Who wouldn't want a job where you only have to work five hours a week, you get summers off, your whole job is reading and talking about books, and you can never be fired? Such is the enviable life of the tenured college literature professor, and all you have to do to get it is earn a Ph.D. So perhaps you, literature lover, are considering pursuing this path.Well, what if I told you that by "five hours" I mean "80 hours," and by "summers off" I mean "two months of unpaid research sequestration and curriculum planning"? What if you'll never have time to read books, and when you talk about them, you'll mostly be using made-up words like "deterritorialization" and "Othering"--because, as Ron Rosenbaum pointed out recently, the "dusty seminar rooms" of academia have the chief aim of theorizing every great book to death? And I can't even tell you what kind of ass you have to kiss these days to get tenure--largely because, like most professors, I'm not on the tenure track, so I don't know.
Don't do it. Just don't. I deeply regret going to graduate school, but not, Ron Rosenbaum, because my doctorate ruined books and made me obnoxious. (Granted, maybe it did: My dissertation involved subjecting the work of Franz Kafka to first-order logic.) No, I now realize graduate school was a terrible idea because the full-time, tenure-track literature professorship is extinct. After four years of trying, I've finally gotten it through my thick head that I will not get a job--and if you go to graduate school, neither will you.
You might think your circumstances will be different. So did I. There's a little fable from Kafka, appropriately called "A Little Fable," that speaks to why this was very stupid:
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WGBH Nova, via a kind Richard Askey email:
In 1900, a storm blew a boatload of sponge divers off course and forced them to take shelter by the tiny Mediterranean island of Antikythera. Diving the next day, they discovered a 2,000 year-old Greek shipwreck. Among the ship's cargo they hauled up was an unimpressive green lump of corroded bronze. Rusted remnants of gear wheels could be seen on its surface, suggesting some kind of intricate mechanism. The first X-ray studies confirmed that idea, but how it worked and what it was for puzzled scientists for decades. Recently, hi-tech imaging has revealed the extraordinary truth: this unique clockwork machine was the world's first computer. An array of 30 intricate bronze gear wheels, originally housed in a shoebox-size wooden case, was designed to predict the dates of lunar and solar eclipses, track the Moon's subtle motions through the sky, and calculate the dates of significant events such as the Olympic Games.
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- removes the ability of an individual board member to initiate a charter proposal - must be initiated by the board instead (superintendent can also initiate)Madison will spend about $15k/student during the 2012-2013 school year.- $6,500 per pupil funding formula, with reductions in district funding after the 3rd or 4th year (unclear) of between 10-20% based on private fundraising.
Related: Many notes and links on the rejected (by a majority of the Madison School Board) Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School.
Madison Mayor Paul Soglin: "We are not interested in the development of new charter schools". More, here.
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Only one in 10 students surveyed would choose to take the crucial admissions test online vs. using the traditional No. 2 pencil and fill-in-the-ovals sheet.Even in this digital age, college-bound teens say they would prefer taking the SAT the old-fashioned way -- with paper and pencil.
Asked if they would like to take the standardized college entrance exam on a computer, just one in 10 students said yes, according to a survey by Kaplan Test Prep.
Many parents didn't see that one coming. In a companion survey, nearly two out of three parents thought their kids would rather take the SAT online.
Daniel Clayton,18, a senior at Uniondale (N.Y.) High School on Long Island, N.Y., says he completes multiple-choice school assignments on an online system for his school but that doesn't mean he would welcome an online SAT.
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For years, the quest to understand and leverage effective teaching has been at the center of the public discussion over how to improve America's education system.For the country's hard-working educators, great teaching and common-sense reform aren't simply policies or ideas backed by bureaucrats or legislators. Teachers are living the realities of the classroom every day. In order to promote positive change in our system, we must listen to the educators on the front lines.
For too long, individual teacher voices have fallen on deaf ears in favor of the self-preserving agenda of the teachers unions, which are focused primarily on maintaining a system of forced dues and political power. The public is beginning to recognize that the union does not have the best interest of students -- or even teachers -- in mind.
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Vouchers, charters, public school spending, treatment of teachers - isn't there something we're not fighting about when it comes to education?Why, yes, and last week's quiet end to a boring race for state superintendent of public instruction underscores one of the biggest examples of that: The Common Core learning standards initiative.
The Common Core is the biggest thing in Wisconsin education that you hardly ever hear about, unless you're employed in the school world. Then you hear about it all the time. For a lot of schools, teachers and students, it's bringing clear, significant and, let us hope, ultimately productive changes in what goes on daily.
Take a tour of a school or talk to school leaders about what they're up to anywhere in the state and two out of every three sentences you hear include the phrase "Common Core." At least it feels that way.
In many classrooms, each student now has explicit goals to work on daily ("Use place value understanding to round whole numbers to the nearest 10 or 100," for example, from the third-grade math standards) and will gladly tell you what standard they're focused on at the time you ask (I've asked). Or perhaps show you the standard and their work on it on their iPad. If this hasn't come to your child's school yet, look for something like this soon.
The Common Core movement has swept across the nation in the last five years. It arose largely from among governors, state education chiefs, corporate leaders and education advocates who believed the nation as a whole was not aiming high enough in education and that the wide variation from state to state in defining good achievement and what it takes to get a high school diploma was a problem.
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The Atlanta public-school system turns out to have engaged in widespread cheating, whereby teachers were pressured into altering their students' test scores to create the illusion of massive gains. The test-cheating problem has become a favorite talking point for opponents of education reform. Eugene Robinson concludes that the whole idea of using tests to evaluate teachers or schools has been disproved: "It is time to acknowledge that the fashionable theory of school reform -- requiring that pay and job security for teachers, principals and administrators depend on their students' standardized test scores -- is at best a well-intentioned mistake, and at worst nothing but a racket."This is a common reaction, but a highly perverse one. The factual premise -- that connecting teacher and principal incentives to student achievement leads to more cheating -- is probably true. Is this a reason to get rid of incentives? No, it isn't.
Incentivizing any field increases the impetus to cheat. Suppose journalism worked the way teaching traditionally had. You get hired at a newspaper, and your advancement and pay are dictated almost entirely by your years on the job, with almost no chance of either becoming a star or of getting fired for incompetence. Then imagine journalists changed that and instituted the current system, where you can get really successful if your bosses like you or be fired if they don't. You could look around and see scandal after scandal -- phone hacking! Jayson Blair! NBC's exploding truck! Janet Cooke! Stephen Glass! -- that could plausibly be attributed to this frightening new world in which journalists had an incentive to cheat in order to get ahead.
It holds true of any field. If Major League Baseball instituted tenure, and maybe used tee-ball rules where you can't keep score and everybody gets a chance to hit, it could stamp out steroid use. Students have been cheating on tests forever -- massive, systematic cheating, you could say. Why? Because they have an incentive to do well. Give teachers and administrators an incentive for their students to do well, and more of them will cheat.
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William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, Kelly A. Lack & Thomas I. Nygren:
Online learning is quickly gaining in importance in U.S. higher education, but little rigorous evidence exists as to its effect on student learning outcomes. In "Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities: Evidence from Randomized Trials," we measure the effect on learning outcomes of a prototypical interactive learning online (ILO) statistics course by randomly assigning students on six public university campuses to take the course in a hybrid format (with machine-guided instruction accompanied by one hour of face-to-face instruction each week) or a traditional format (as it is usually offered by their campus, typically with 3-4 hours of face-to-face instruction each week).
We find that learning outcomes are essentially the same--that students in the hybrid format "pay no price" for this mode of instruction in terms of pass rates, final exam scores, and performance on a standardized assessment of statistical literacy. These zero-difference coefficients are precisely estimated. We also conduct speculative cost simulations and find that adopting hybrid models of instruction in large introductory courses have the potential to significantly reduce instructor compensation costs in the long run.
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I have no doubt that my M.B.A. from New York University's Stern School of Business was one of the best investments I ever made. It helped me climb the corporate ladder and become an entrepreneur. As a tech executive, I would readily pay a premium to hire B-school graduates. I also used to advise tech startups to strengthen their management teams by recruiting professional managers from M.B.A. programs.mI no longer advise startups to hire M.B.A.s and I discourage students who want to become entrepreneurs from doing an M.B.A.
That's because I have seen a growing mismatch between the skills that business schools teach and what fast-paced startups require. And corporate management isn't the best path to entrepreneurship anymore--the best way is to work for a startup.
Most business schools are geared toward churning out investment bankers and management consultants. That is who they put on the pedestal. In his new book, "Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth," the dean of my alma mater, Peter Blair Henry, goes as far as to prescribe that countries measure their success "through the lens of their stock exchanges." This is the same lens that business schools use to measure the success of their students.
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Now that the Madison School Board election is over, the board should take a serious look at reforming how elections are organized. The system of electing members on a districtwide basis from numbered seats worked reasonably well until this year. But the challenges that arose in the District 5 race after one of two primary winners quit the contest identified vulnerabilities in the process.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board elections, here.T.J. Mertz and Sarah Manski won a primary that also included Ananda Mirilli. Manski then quit, leaving Mertz in a noncompetitive "contest." We urged Mirilli to mount a write-in campaign and she seriously considered doing so. But she and her supporters determined that mounting a citywide run would be expensive and difficult. That was a credible conclusion. And it raises a question: Might there be a way to avoid such circumstances?
For instance, what if School Board members were elected from districts? With a smaller pool of voters in relatively tight-knit neighborhoods, it would be easier for all candidates, not just write-in contenders, to mount grass-roots campaigns. That could reduce the cost of campaigns and get candidates back on the doorsteps.
Another fix might be to have all candidates run in one citywide race, rather than for numbered seats. If six candidates were contending for three seats, one candidate could exit the contest and the competition would remain.
Some communities have employed instant runoff voting, in which voters rank candidates in order of preference rather than simply selecting a single candidate. Votes cast for the weakest candidates are transferred to stronger contenders, creating the purest reflection of voter preferences.
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The real vocation of some people entrusted with delivering primary and secondary education is to validate this proposition: The three R's -- formerly reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic -- now are racism, reproduction and recycling. Especially racism. Consider Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction. It evidently considers "instruction" synonymous with "propaganda," which in the patois of progressivism is called "consciousness-raising."mWisconsin's DPI, in collaboration with the Orwellian-named federal program VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America; the "volunteers" are paid), urged white students to wear white wristbands "as a reminder about your privilege, and as a personal commitment to explain why you wear the wristband." A flyer that was on the DPI Web site and distributed at a DPI-VISTA training class urged whites to "put a note on your mirror or computer screen as a reminder to think about privilege," to "make a daily list of the ways privilege played out" and to conduct an "internal dialogue" asking questions such as "How do I make myself comfortable with privilege?" and "What am I doing today to undo my privilege?"
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Preschool is an exciting, exploratory time for little ones, characterized by what feels like all fun and play. Children aren't aware of the educational and interpersonal skills they're developing while finger painting and singing nursery rhymes, but the effects are apparent in the long run. Children who attend pre-K are more prepared for kindergarten than their peers who do not, having already begun their emotional and intellectual growth.mThis period of schooling is as enjoyable as it is pivotal in a child's life, and policy makers are working to expand this opportunity to all children. With the help of researchers at Harvard University, the Boston Public Schools (BPS) system is at the forefront of this education revolution in its attempt to widen quality pre-kindergarten access. By using a research-backed course of study and coaching for individual teachers, the BPS pre-K program has had a significant impact on about 2,000 students of various ethnic and economic backgrounds.
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What is technical intelligence? Technical intelligence involves the accurate appraisal and expression of the ability to interact with machines in a way that enhances living. But how do we get there, why is it important for our world, and what is the relation to our company?A Brief on IQ
Undoubtedly, we have a world that is familiar with the idea of IQ. In it's raw form, IQ stands for intelligence quotient, and is based upon a test invented by famous psychologist William Stern. Stern, and many subsequent psychologists, refined this test in the hopes that it would become the standard to measure someone's intelligence. They also hoped that IQ could predict things like personal, financial, and professional success.IQ is unique from other forms of testing because it is considered 'innate' i.e. a high genetically driven IQ predisposes us to be more successful. The problem with this sort of thinking is doesn't reflect the reality of our world, mainly, that there are many other drivers besides pure intelligence that enhance our ability to achieve things. IQ, not surprisingly, isn't a very good predictor of success in school or life. For instance:
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At first sight, it seems unlikely - a continent most associated with war and famine producing globally significant scientific research.However, in many ways, the groundwork is there - knowledge, ingenuity, willingness to learn and adapt, coupled with the rapid expansion of digital technology. All of this is really allowing Africa to play a major part in global scientific collaborations.
Holding development back, higher education remains poor.
Many non-governmental organisations (NGOs), churches and development agencies push basic literacy - it is a huge international industry.
But there is nothing at the higher end, very little money for tertiary education. It is quite hard to study in Africa, and encouraging talented students to leave is an industry in itself, with a large variety of academic bursaries available for study in the US and Europe.
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Jen Cheatham, who started Monday as Madison's new schools superintendent, said she was planning to visit each of the district's schools by the end of May.Related: Up, Down & Transparency: Madison Schools Received $11.8M more in State Tax Dollars last year (2012), Local District Forecasts a Possible Reduction of $8.7M this Year.The visits will include community meetings at each of the district's high schools, allowing parents and community members to share what's working and what needs to improve in the district, Cheatham said.
"It's important to me to learn about what's working and what isn't working," Cheatham said. "Often, new superintendents make changes to things that are actually beneficial to the district -- unknowingly."
Cheatham said she would start working soon with the school board on a list of priorities, which would include bridging the district's minority achievement gap. The board will have at least two new members after Tuesday's spring election, with Maya Cole and Beth Moss retiring.
The superintendent warned that state funding cuts, which district administrators have estimated will cost Madison schools about $8 million next year, may force the district to raise property taxes. She called Gov. Scott Walker's school voucher proposal "a real threat to the quality of education we can provide."
One would hope that the new Superintendent's job 1 is addressing the District's long term disastrous reading results.
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Please see the following information from Kathryn Bush, School Psychology Consultant at DPI.Many of you have asked for more information about the "Formative Assessment System for Teachers," with an eye toward possible use in your school districts.
Dr. Ted Christ has arranged a "virtual" meeting next week regarding "Formative Assessment System for Teachers" (FAST)What: Overview of FAST system
Who: Anyone who has the URL for the meeting can enter the "virtual" room. There is no limit to the number of attendees.When: April 11th from 12:30 - 2:30 PM CST
Where: Wisconsin Adobe Connect Pro meeting at URL: https://umconnect.umn.edu/wisconsinfast/ Please use the URL to access the meeting.Why: To gain information about a low cost computer adaptive screener (benchmarking system) for reading and math, with an associated CBM-Reading for progress monitoring. Although FAST is being used around the country, it is a relative unknown in Wisconsin.
$$$: There is no cost for this presentation.For more information about FAST: FAST is a suite of efficient assessment tools designed in collaboration with teachers for screening, progress monitoring, and program evaluation as part of a Response to Intervention (RtI) model of service delivery. It is distributed by researchers from the University of Minnesota at low cost to schools around the country. For more information, go to https://fast.cehd.umn.edu (Use Firefox or Safari, not internet explorer)
Sign in: guest@fast.umn.edu Password: guest@fast.umn.edu
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Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction invites you to attend our upcoming Literacy (un)Conference. Aimed toward literacy leaders, especially principals and reading specialists serving grades K-3, this online professional learning opportunity includes pre-recorded sessions and live chats.Sessions about standards-based instruction and assessment will be posted Monday, April 15, 2013. A live chat about this content will be held April 15 at 7:00 p.m.
Sessions about planning for professional learning and collaboration will be posted Tuesday, April 16, 2013. A live chat about this content will be held April 25 at 7:00 p.m.
Watch this space for further details including links to the conference site and live chat events. More details can be found here.
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"THIS BUSINESS", SAYS John Demby, the principal (headmaster) of Sussex Tech, a high school in Delaware, "has changed dramatically in a very short period." This year, like all principals in the state, he is evaluating teachers under a new system for the first time. The state is also adopting a new curriculum for English and maths, the "common core". That will require changes to the state's regular computerised tests for students, themselves only three years old. On top of all that, Sussex Tech is launching a scheme to allow students to start accumulating college credits while still in high school. And it is overhauling the vocational training it offers in order to serve local businesses better and to provide students with more useful qualifications.It is not just Sussex Tech; all Delaware's schools are undergoing a similar upheaval, thanks to a series of reforms championed by Jack Markell, Delaware's governor. He has made education reform a centrepiece of his tenure because he sees it as critical to the state's competitiveness. (It is the states that regulate education in America, although the federal government often tries to bribe them to adopt its pet policies.)
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Kenneth K. Wong and Francis X. Shen:
Using mayoral governance--in which a city's mayor replaces an elected school board with a board that he or she appoints--as a strategy to raise urban school performance began about two decades ago, when then-Mayor of Boston Raymond Flynn (D) gained control over the city's school district. Boston was soon followed by Chicago, where Mayor Richard M. Daley (D) appointed both the chief executive officer and the entire school board of the school system. Over the past 20 years, mayoral governance of schools has been featured prominently in nearly 20 urban school systems across the country. (see Table 1 in the PDF)Mayoral control and accountability is one of very few major education reforms that aim at governance coherence in our highly fragmented urban school systems. A primary feature of mayoral governance is that it holds the office of the mayor accountable for school performance. As an institutional redesign, mayoral governance integrates school-district accountability and the electoral process at the systemwide level. The so-called education mayor is ultimately held accountable for the school system's performance on an academic, fiscal, operational, and managerial level. While school board members are elected by fewer than 10 percent of the eligible voters, mayoral races are often decided by more than half of the electorate. Under mayoral control, public education gets on the citywide agenda.
Governance constitutes a structural barrier to academic and management improvement in too many large urban districts, where turf battles and political squabbles involving school leaders and an array of stakeholders have for too long taken energy and focus away from the core mission of education. Many urban districts are exceedingly ungovernable, with fragmented centers of power tending to look after the interests of their own specific constituencies. Consequently, the independently elected school board has limited leverage to advance collective priorities, and the school superintendent lacks the institutional capacity to manage the policy constraints established in state regulations and the union contract. Therefore, mayoral accountability aims to address the governing challenges in urban districts by making a single office responsible for the performance the city's public schools. Citywide priorities such as reducing the achievement gap receive more focused attention.
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Imagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue book and getting a grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the "send" button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program.Related: Robo Essay Grading.And then, instead of being done with that exam, imagine that the system would immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improve your grade.
EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.
The new service will bring the educational consortium into a growing conflict over the role of automation in education. Although automated grading systems for multiple-choice and true-false tests are now widespread, the use of artificial intelligence technology to grade essay answers has not yet received widespread endorsement by educators and has many critics.
Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX, predicted that the instant-grading software would be a useful pedagogical tool, enabling students to take tests and write essays over and over and improve the quality of their answers. He said the technology would offer distinct advantages over the traditional classroom system, where students often wait days or weeks for grades.
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If you are a low-income prospective college student hoping a degree will help you move up in the world, you probably should not attend a moderately selective four-year research institution. The cards are stacked against you.That's the sobering bottom line of Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality (Harvard University Press), a new book based on five years of interview research by Elizabeth A. Armstrong, an associate professor of sociology and organizational studies at the University of Michigan, and Laura T. Hamilton, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California at Merced.
It's not entirely the colleges' fault, Hamilton says. Declining state and federal support and rising tuition have made it critical to recruit students who can pay more (and who continue to donate after they leave). But the out-of-state and affluent students attending these colleges are not in it for the academics - those students are going to the Harvards, Michigans and Berkeleys of the world.The students who end up at Midwestern University - a pseudonym for the flagship institution where Armstrong and Hamilton follow a group of women through their college careers, from the dorm floor to a year post-graduation - are socially minded. Thus, to lure and keep those students, institutions have come to structure their academic and social frameworks in a way that accommodates that population.
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National Council on Teacher Quality
Elementary and Special Education Teacher Preparation in Reading InstructionNew legislation now requires as a condition of initial licensure that all elementary and special education teachers pass an examination identical to the Foundations of Reading test administered as part of the Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure. The passing score on the examination will be set at a level no lower than the level recommended by the developer of the test, based on the state's standards.
2011 Wisconsin Act 166, Section 21, 118.19(14)(a)
https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/2011/related/acts/166.pdfTeacher Preparation Program Accountability
Each teacher preparation program must submit a list of program completers who have been recommended for licensure. Also, a system will be developed to publicly report measures of performance for each prep program. Beginning in the 2013-2014 school year, each program must display a passage rate on the first attempt of recent graduates on licensure exams.2011 Wisconsin Act 166, Section 14, 25.79, Section 17, 115.28(7g)
https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/2011/related/acts/166.pdfWisconsin Response to Policy Update
States were asked to review NCTQ's identified updates and also to comment on policy changes related to teacher preparation that have occurred in the last year, pending changes or teacher preparation in the state more generally. States were also asked to review NCTQ's analysis of teacher preparation authority (See Figure 20).Wisconsin noted that middle childhood--early adolescence elementary teachers are required to earn a subject area minor. Wisconsin also included links and citations pertaining to content test requirements for adding to secondary certifications.
The state asserted that its alternate route programs require the same basic skills tests and passing scores for admission that are required for institutions of higher education (IHEs). The state added that alternate route programs are required to use the same content tests and passing scores as IHEs and that content tests are taken as an
admissions requirement.Wisconsin referred to its handbook and approval guidelines for alternate route programs and noted that the state has added a new pathway, "License based on Equivalency." The state noted that its new website, Pathways to Wisconsin Licensure, along with updated materials, will be posted in mid-August 2012 at http://dpi.wi.gov/tepdl/
licpath.html.In addition, Wisconsin was helpful in providing NCTQ with further information about state authority for teacher preparation and licensing
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A conservative Republican governor walks into a university president's office.It sounds like the start of a bad joke (or, in certain parts of the country these days, an academic's nightmare), but it's a daily occurrence here, where Mitch Daniels recently assumed leadership of Purdue University after a high-profile eight-year run as Indiana's governor.
Daniels might seem an odd choice for Purdue, a public land-grant university with an emphasis on science and engineering. The institution has historically been led by accomplished researchers and academic administrators, and most of Daniels's predecessors held advanced academic degrees in science, medicine, math or engineering.
Daniels, who attended Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs as an undergraduate and received a law degree from Georgetown University, is not a scientist or engineer, nor does he have significant academic experience. His C.V. includes no peer-reviewed papers, no courses taught and no previous academic administrative experience. His career spans a range of government and private-sector administrative jobs, and his fame in the political world comes predominantly from the budget-cutting, small-government attitude with which he approached these various positions.
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All right, children: it's time for Aunty Megan to bore you with how things were In Her Day. Way back in 1989, when I was applying to college, there was a certain amount of creativity applied to college applications. The particular school I attended was structured to make you look good on college applications: athletics were practically mandatory, extracurriculars were strongly encouraged. The essay seemed to require an epiphany, whether or not you'd actually had one, so we did our best to emulate personal insight.But the things that we achieved were basically within reach of a normal human being who was going about the business of growing up: playing a sport, perhaps badly; taking classes; occasionally volunteering as a candy striper. Most of us took the SAT without the benefit of test prep services, and the "test prep" we got in class consisted of--learning vocabulary and algebra. People like me, who were painfully unathletic and had hashed some early high school classes still had a shot at an Ivy League School
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It is crazy and unsupportable. But who is this "we" he is talking about?Huddleston, like other university officials, ties the price of his product to state subsidies, but not to the underlying cost of his product. That cost is the real issue and always have been. If UNH administrators wanted to reduce the price, they would slash the cost. Instead, they would rather pressure legislators to hike the subsidies. That, not lowering tuition, is what this PR campaign is all about.
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People may now order a printed on demand copy or copies of the Winter 2012 issue, with this link.
https://www.createspace.com/4206242
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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 week, Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee professor and author of "The Higher Education Bubble," 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, a college education is rapidly becoming unaffordable for average families without relying on their retirement savings, an inheritance or loans to foot those bills.
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Joe Gothard, assistant superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District in Wisconsin: According to School Exec Connect, Gothard is the second in command at a " highly successful district." He has a master's degree and a six-year superintendent-principal's license. Previous to becoming an assistant superintendent, Gothard was a principal at both the high school and middle school level.Via a Matthew DeFour Tweet."He took on one of the toughest high schools in the city and turned it around, basically," said Dr. Kenneth Dragseth, of School Exec Connect. "I got an e-mail from a parent who said he turned their kid's life around."
Dragseth said that all sources described Gothard as a "rising star," who is actively involved in his community and "extremely well-liked" by everyone he came across. Dragseth added that Gothard is "very familiar" with the issues that arise in a diverse district like Burnsville's.
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1.7MB PDF via a kind Kaleem Caire email:
Between January 1, 2011 and December 31, 2012, the Urban League of Greater Madison stood on the firm shoulders of its founders - Leslie Fishel, Jr., Sydney Forbes, Isobel Clark and Frank Morrison - and demonstrated exceptional courage and foresight by launching a well-orchestrated campaign to raise the community's consciousness about an embarrassing and unconscionable racial achievement gap that is leaving hundreds of Black, Latino and Asian children behind each year. We also informed the community about the acceleration of middle class families moving their children out of Madison's public schools, either through relocation or utilizing the state's inter-district public school choice program. Between 1989 and 2012, the student population in Madison schools grew from 24% non-white to 55% non-white. We also began an aggressive campaign to enlist the support of businesses, education institutions, community partners and resource providers to expand workforce development and career training opportunities for unemployed and underemployed adults in Dane County, and address diversity and inclusion opportunities among them.The Urban League's Board of Directors is interesting in its breadth. Mo Andrews, architect of WEAC's rise is an interesting member.The public should consider our 2013-14 Strategic Plan to be Phase II of the League's efforts to provide courageous and transformational leadership to ensure thousands more children, adults and families succeed in our schools, colleges, workplaces, neighborhoods and communities. In 2020, the Urban League of Greater Madison would like local citizens and the national media to report that Madison, Wisconsin has indeed become "Best [place] in the Midwest for Everyone to Live, Learn and Work". Early returns on the investment made thus far indicate that our vision can become a reality.
This Strategic Plan covers a 24-month period, from January 1, 2013 through December 31, 2014. We believe shorter time-windows enable us to keep the organization focused on achieving a reasonable number of high impact goals, and with the appropriate sense of urgency necessary to produce the results it seeks and the community needs. As our nation has demonstrated extraordinary courage and overcome extraordinary challenges in years past, we will do so again.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (PDF):
Each year about this time MTI begins the process of developing its budgets for the ensuing fiscal year, in this case July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2014. MTI has two (2) budgets, one for MTI (the Union) and one for the MTI Building Corporation, the owner of MTI's headquarters building.MTI's budget is the operating budget under which the Union provides services to the members of its five (5) bargaining units; i.e. the Teacher/professional unit (MTI); the Educational Assistants bargaining unit (EA-MTI); the Clerical/Technical bargaining unit (SEE-MTI); the Substitute Teacher bargaining unit (USO-MTI); and the Security Assistants bargaining unit (SSA-MTI).
This year's proposed budgets are based on last year's dues levels; i.e. no dues increase. This is the second straight year the Union has not proposed a dues increase.
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The election night parties ran late Tuesday night at The Fountain bar downtown and Badger Bowl on the south side as supporters of Madison School Board candidates Dean Loumos and Wayne Strong waited for the results in what turned out to be a very tight race.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.There was a good-sized, lively crowd at each of the parties making plenty of noise, but one thing I couldn't help but notice is that the Fountain crowd was predominately white, like Loumos, and the Badger Bowl crowd was predominately African-American, like Strong.
The significance of that is up for debate, but this much is clear: Race was very much an issue in this School Board election. And candidates of every stripe identified the embarrassing race-based achievement gap as the most pressing issue facing the district.
The results of the Seat 3 match-up between Loumos and Strong won't be known until next week. Loumos held a 279-vote margin with all wards reporting early Wednesday, but Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell told the Wisconsin State Journal that there were potentially hundreds of absentee ballots yet to be counted.
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Congratulations to Madison's white power elite, especially to Democrats, organized labor, John Matthews and his teachers union. You very well may have elected a teachers union-first ("Collectively we decide ..."), children second school board. You also just handed Scott Walker a powerful case for expanding private school vouchers.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.What are you afraid of? That more parents might not choose the taxpayer-coerced public school monopoly? What do you expect, when you leave them no (ahem) ... choice.
I would like to hold out hope that absentee ballots will make the difference, but 279 votes is probably too many for Wayne Strong to overcome to defeat Dean Loumos, who holds an 18,286 to 18,007 lead. If there are 1,333 absentee ballots that need to be counted, as the city clerk's website advertises, Strong would have to beat Loumos 806 to 527 in those uncounted votes.
(BTW: Is this the new normal? As absentee voting becomes more popular, winners won't be declared for a week after the election?)
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Amy Barrilleaux:For state superintendent Tony Evers, reelection was the easy part. He handily beat his opponent, staunch conservative Rep. Don Pridemore (R-Town of Erin), with over 60% of the vote Tuesday.
"Voters spoke loudly and clearly, affirming their commitment to Wisconsin's strong public schools and calling for a much-needed reinvestment to support the over 870,000 public school kids in our state," says Evers in a statement.
But despite the big win, Evers faces an even bigger battle in the Legislature, where lawmakers are considering Gov. Scott Walker's latest budget. It's unclear whether the Republican majority is united behind Walker's plan to increase funding for the state's voucher schools by $73 million -- something Evers campaigned against, insisting there is no evidence that voucher programs are working.
"The academic data just does not justify expansion," he told the Joint Finance Committee (PDF) during a hearing in March.
It also remains to be seen whether lawmakers will give more money to traditional public schools, which were hit with a historic $800 million cut in Walker's previous budget. Despite pleas from Evers, almost none of that money has been restored by Walker this time around.
State Rep. Don Pridemore says he doesn't understand why fellow Republican Gov. Scott Walker didn't endorse him in his race for state superintendent.Pridemore's statements, the muted campaign against incumbent Evers and a reasonably quiet state supreme court race make this observer wonder what sort of a deal might have been cut....Pridemore lost to incumbent Tony Evers in Tuesday's election.
Evers signed the petition to recall Walker, but the governor still refused to endorse anyone in the race.
Pridemore says after his loss that he is disappointed Walker didn't help him with his campaign. Pridemore says people should question why Walker "didn't support someone who would be a much friendlier person in this job."
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So this piece has been making the rounds since Monday. It's on op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by high school senior Suzy Lee Weiss waxing bitter about being rejected from college. She blamed her rejections (she doesn't say how many, or whether she was accepted someplace) on the fact that she is a straight, white person with normal abilities and habits. It's the most-read piece on the WSJ's site and has been shared more than 10,500 times, according to the site Who Shared my Link.
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Paula Monarez Diaz and David Burge
The controversial El Paso Independent School District forensic audit, which is expected to detail which educators may have been a part of a districtwide test-cheating scheme, will be released Monday.Related: Removal of El Paso School District principals opposed.The $800,000 audit by Weaver and Tidwell LLP, will be posted on the district's website by Monday afternoon, interim Superintendent Vernon Butler said.
The audit is being released as a response to outcries from some parents and students, as well as County Judge Veronica Escobar, who criticized the removal of four high school principals and other school administrators because of the audit.
Escobar, in a letter to Butler, asked that the audit be made public. And students rallying Friday on behalf of a principal asked the school district to let the principals know what they did wrong and why they were being removed.
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Alan Schwarz and Sarah CohenNearly one in five high school age boys in the United States and 11 percent of school-age children over all have received a medical diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to new data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
These rates reflect a marked rise over the last decade and could fuel growing concern among many doctors that the A.D.H.D. diagnosis and its medication are overused in American children.
The figures showed that an estimated 6.4 million children ages 4 through 17 had received an A.D.H.D. diagnosis at some point in their lives, a 16 percent increase since 2007 and a 41 percent rise in the past decade. About two-thirds of those with a current diagnosis receive prescriptions for stimulants like Ritalin or Adderall, which can drastically improve the lives of those with A.D.H.D. but can also lead to addiction, anxiety and occasionally psychosis.
"Those are astronomical numbers. I'm floored," said Dr. William Graf, a pediatric neurologist in New Haven and a professor at the Yale School of Medicine. He added, "Mild symptoms are being diagnosed so readily, which goes well beyond the disorder and beyond the zone of ambiguity to pure enhancement of children who are otherwise healthy."
Read more here.
A thoughtful (and personal) commentary here.
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The results of the Seat 3 match-up between Loumos and Strong won't be known until next week. Loumos held a 279-vote margin with all wards reporting early Wednesday, but Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell told the Wisconsin State Journal that there were potentially hundreds of absentee ballots yet to be counted.Matthew DeFourThe shocking withdrawal just after the Seat 5 primary of Sarah Manski, the candidate of the local progressive establishment, pushed third place finisher, Latina Ananda Mirilli, off the ballot and set up a disturbing tension between the local progressive community and communities of color. Kaleem Caire, CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison and architect of the controversial Madison Preparatory Academy, used the occasion to resurrect some of the divisive stands around the proposed charter school for African-American students that was rejected in 2011 by the School Board.
Loumos, in addition to backing from unions like Madison Teachers Inc, AFSCME and South Federation of Labor AFL-CIO, also boasted an array of the progressive endorsements that usually win races in Madison: Progressive Dane, Four Lakes Green Party, Fair Wisconsin PAC.
But he insisted Tuesday that that tension between progressives and communities of color wasn't a factor in his race, in part because he doesn't have the profile for it.
Loumos has worked for decades with people struggling at the edges of society, many of them black and Latino. Currently executive director of a nonprofit agency that provides housing for homeless people, he used to teach in Madison School District programs for kids who were faltering.
But the race between Dean Loumos, executive director of Housing Initiatives Inc., and retired Madison Police lieutenant Wayne Strong remained too close to call.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.Loumos held a 279-vote margin with all wards reporting, but Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell said there were potentially hundreds of absentee ballots yet to be counted. Those won't all be counted by the canvassing board until next Tuesday, due to a recent change in state law, McDonell said.
Strong said he would wait to make a decision about whether to seek a recount. Loumos said he respected Strong's position and he didn't declare victory.
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As a student at University of Indiana's Kelley School of Business, Derek Pacqué lost his coat at a bar, got angry, and came up with a business plan. He borrowed and saved $500 to purchase racks and hangers to start a coat check business at local hangouts.CoatChex does not require patrons to keep tickets, which often get lost. Instead, someone at a kiosk photographs clients' faces and coats with an iPad or smartphone and then uses their phone number and photos for secure pick-up. A paltry original investment eventually had Pacqué negotiating with--and turning down--a $200,000 offer from entrepreneur Mark Cuban on ABC's Shark Tank for a 33 percent stake in the business. In the last two months, CoatChex earned $100,000.
"You go to school to get a job or an education," says Pacqué, who graduated in 2011. "I went to college because I wanted to create my own career, to create something of value."
Pacqué is among a new breed of undergraduate business students. Professors and classmates say they hunger to be their own bosses. More undergraduate business students than ever before are launching startups right after graduation--or sometimes while still at school, say administrators. A query to the top 20 undergraduate business schools asking for contacts with promising startups launched by students, or by very recent graduates, resulted in at least 100 responses.
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At last night's NJ Spotlight Roundtable entitled "Camden Schools and the Future of Urban Education in New Jersey, Camden School Board Member Sean Brown (a last-minute replacement for Asst. Superintendent Patricia Kenny) related this story to a large and boisterous audience at the Camden-Rutgers Campus Center.In August 2011, Mr. Brown paid an unannounced visit to the Camden Public Schools' Central Office, about two weeks before school started. In a back room he discovered "at least a hundred boxes of smart boards." Smart boards are interactive white boards, popular in classrooms, that retail for about $5,000. Disturbed by the sight, he took a picture and texted it to then-Superintendent Bessie LeFra Young and his fellow school board members.
The response? He was reprimanded for paying the unexpected visit and told that Security and Maintenance shouldn't have let him in.
The following week he repeated his visit. With school due to start in one week, the smart boards were still in their original boxes. As an aside, he remarked, "At last night's NJ Spotlight Roundtable entitled "Camden Schools and the Future of Urban Education in New Jersey, Camden School Board Member Sean Brown (a last-minute replacement for Asst. Superintendent Patricia Kenny) related this story to a large and boisterous audience at the Camden-Rutgers Campus Center.
In August 2011, Mr. Brown paid an unannounced visit to the Camden Public Schools' Central Office, about two weeks before school started. In a back room he discovered "at least a hundred boxes of smart boards." Smart boards are interactive white boards, popular in classrooms, that retail for about $5,000. Disturbed by the sight, he took a picture and texted it to then-Superintendent Bessie LeFra Young and his fellow school board members.
The response? He was reprimanded for paying the unexpected visit and told that Security and Maintenance shouldn't have let him in.
The following week he repeated his visit. With school due to start in one week, the smart boards were still in their original boxes. As an aside, he remarked, "as a board member, I'm lied to all the time."
Posted by Jim Zellmer at 4:03 AM | Comments (0) Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom:
Critics -- whether district superintendents or teachers' unions or school boards or a traveling band of academic doubters -- snipe at the newcomers, arguing that they're siphoning students and money from traditional public schools.Related: Madison Mayor Paul Soglin: "We are not interested in the development of new charter schools"But as evidence from the 20-year-old charter experiment mounts, the snipers are in need of a new argument. There's little doubt left that top-performing charters have introduced new educational models that have already achieved startling results in even the most difficult circumstances.
That doesn't mean all charters are automatically good. They're not. But it's indisputable that the good ones -- most prominently, KIPP -- are onto something. The non-profit company, which now has 125 schools, operates on a model that demands much more of students, parents and teachers than the typical school does. School days are longer, sometimes including Saturday classes. Homework burdens are higher, typically two hours a night. Grading is tougher. Expectations are high, as is the quality of teachers and principals, and so are the results.
KIPP's eighth-grade graduates go to college at twice the national rate for low-income students, according to its own tracking. After three years, scores on math tests rise as if students had four years of schooling, according to an independent study.
A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school.
Minneapolis teacher's union approved to authorize charter schools
.
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James Heckman is one of the nation's top economists studying human development. Thirteen years ago, he shared the Nobel for economics. In February, he stood before the annual meeting of the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and Industry, showed the assembled business executives a chart, and demolished the United States' entire approach to education.The chart showed the results of cognitive tests that were first performed in the 1980s on several hundred low-birthweight 3-year-olds, who were then retested at ages 5, 8 and 18.
Children of mothers who had graduated from college scored much higher at age 3 than those whose mothers had dropped out of high school, proof of the advantage for young children of living in rich, stimulating environments.
More surprising is that the difference in cognitive performance was just as big at age 18 as it had been at age 3.
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As the world of big business lurches from one crisis to the next, a quiet change of perspective is taking place in many European business schools. The focus on schooling students to expect the prize of a well-paying executive-level position at a large multinational is giving way to a fresh look at one of the oldest types of enterprise in the world - the family business.While some schools are looking to ramp up their family business education offering, others are expecting to benefit from never having taken their eye off the ball.
The number of family businesses in Europe supports the rationale for renewed interest in such enterprises. Julian Franks, professor of finance at London Business School, estimates that in Italy, which he considers to be the European country with the strongest tradition of family businesses, 60 per cent of companies are family-owned or family-controlled. In France and Germany the proportion is 40 per cent, and in the UK it is only 20 per cent.
Marina Puricelli, professor of small and medium-sized enterprises and family business at SDA Bocconi School of Management in Italy, believes the numbers for Italy are even stronger than Prof Franks thinks. She estimates that 90 per cent of Italiancompanies have fewer than 10 employees.
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A couple of years ago, I showed my daughters a video put online by the Khan Academy, which has become famous as a pioneer in open-access education. The video was an amateurish but charming explanation of basic arithmetic. We had fun but the girls were not transformed into mathematical prodigies. Their mathematical education remains the sole responsibility of a rather traditional school in North Oxford. The only thing YouTube has taught them is how to draw manga cartoons.That experience would not surprise the British educational establishment. Massive Online Open Courses (Moocs) are all the rage but the top universities seem to regard them as mere amusements, unlikely to threaten traditional methods, which may be costly but are exclusive and of excellent quality.
The vice-chancellor of Cambridge university, in a speech in January, said that online courses would "challenge the nature of higher education" but that they would not change what happened at Cambridge.
Educational expert Karan Khemka seems to agree, explaining in this newspaper's comment page that the Mooc approach would eventually improve higher education, but "through incremental change rather than massive disruption".
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The MPS teachers' union wants to negotiate a new contract. They think that contract need not be compliant with Act 10 because of a Dane County circuit court decision holding that the law is unconstitutional. As I have written before, that decision does not create a window of opportunity to violate Act 10. Whether or not the union will ultimately be able to avoid Act 10 will depend on the decision of a higher court - almost certainly the Wisconsin Supreme Court.If that court concludes that the Dane County circuit court was wrong - a conclusion that is highly likely - then any new contract that violates Act 10 will be unlawful and presumably void.
Moreover, the fact that a single circuit court judge in Madison thinks the Act is unconstitutional will have exactly no impact on the deliberation of higher courts. Lower court decisions are entitled to deference when they involve factual findings or the exercise of discretion. The decision holding Act 10 to be unconstitutional involved neither and is subjected, as lawyers like to say, to de novo
Negotiating a new contract would be even more problematic than that. The attorney for the plaintiffs in the Dane County case seems to think that a municipality that does not agree to negotiate terms that are forbidden by Act 10 would be engaged in an unfair labor practice. In his view, the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission - to whom such charges are initially directed - would be bound by the circuit court decision because its members were defendants in the case.
But there are at least two problems with his argument. First, it us unclear that WERC, in its capacity as a tribunal, can be bound by a declaratory judgment in adjudicating the rights of a party who is not itself bound by that judgment. For example, if the Mequon-Thiensville School District is charged with an unfair labor practice for complying with Act 10, it was not a party to the case finding it to be unconstitutional. The question is one that only a civil procedure professor (and I've been one of those) could love.
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The March 18 headline in USA Today blares: "More teachers are grouping kids by ability." What's wrong with that? Because the actual problems of individual kids are overlooked when students, especially those starting in elementary schools, are tracked as a group by what they've learned.But Patrick Boodey, principal of the Woodman Park School in Dover, N.H., tries to remind us in the same story: "As a teacher, you know in your heart you need to meet the needs of each child" (Greg Toppo, USA Today, March 18).
Really? How many teachers do know that and act accordingly?
Disturbing answers to that question are documented in the most important article on education I've seen in many years: "The 'Quiet' Troubles of Low-Income Children," by Richard Weissbourd of the Harvard School of Education. The article was first published in the March/April 2008 issue of the Harvard Education Letter and is also included in a valuable book: "Spotlight on Student Engagement, Motivation and Achievement" (Caroline T. Chauncey and Nancy Walser, editors; Harvard Education Press, 2009).
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One of the worst things about "public" schools in many American jurisdictions is that even though the facilites are financed by the public they're de facto the private property of local homeowners. In DC where I live, for example, all you have to do to get your kid into a relatively high-performing DCPS school is move to the most expensive neighborhoods in the city. Meanwhile if you're poor you're out of luck.Charter schools aren't free of this kind of concern. Obviously if you plop a school down in an affluent area you're likely to attract a disproportionately affluent group of applicants if only because convenience counts. And there are things you can do with marketing to try to select the applicants you want. But a real virtue of charters in DC is that they need to be at least formally open to applicants from anywhere in the city, while Ward 3 "public" schools can simply refuse to take any kids from the poor parts of the city. For now, that is. One of our newer Council members, David Grosso, says charter schools should give preference in admissions to kids from nearby neighborhoods. And according to Rahul Merand-Sinha this kind of arrangement is fairly common and exists already in major cities such as New York and Chicago.
In my view, over the long term the question of how linked schools are to particular places is a more important issue than the cliché debate over "charters" vs "traditional" public schools. In a zoning-free Yglesiastopia this might not be such a big deal. But in a real world where real estate markets are defined by location, location, location tying school access to location turns the school system into a form of private property. You can call a facility "public" all you like, but if the only way to gain access to it is to first buy your way into an expensive neighborhood then there's nothing public about it. It's just owned collectively by the residents of the neighborhood, in much the way that a luxury condo might have a fitness center or a gated community might have a golf course.
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"If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might as well have viewed it as an act of war," wrote T.H. Bell in the 1983 report, "A Nation At Risk." Now thirty years after this groundbreaking report, the Fordham Institute's video, "A Nation at Risk: Thirty Years Later" discusses progress in education and what lies ahead.Experts including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, former Washington, D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michele Rhee, Fordham Institute President Chester Finn Jr., American Enterprise Institute's Rick Hess, and several former Secretaries of Education speak about the report's impact on both yesterday and today.
One of the video's panelists describes the report as the single most influential document in the history of American education. Before "A Nation at Risk," most Americans thought our country's education system was exceptional. The report was revolutionary because it revealed extreme inequality and deficits in student's learning. The report's call for choice, increased technology use, and common standards was what one panelist said made the report the "biggest wave in a very wavy ocean." The research and arguments continue to raise awareness of the big problems facing our education system.
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Controversy continues to rage over the requirement that Rhode Island high school students score highly enough on the New England Common Assessment Program test to receive a diploma.Related: What impact do high school mathematics curricula have on college-level mathematics placement?.The latest testing data show that 40 percent of students failed to meet the minimum math standard and risk being unable to graduate if their skills don't improve.
During the March 22 edition of Rhode Island Public Television's "A Lively Experiment," state Education Commissioner Deborah Gist defended the requirement.
Gist said that if you let students graduate without proficiency you're shortchanging them.
"Anyone who's telling these students that . . . it doesn't matter that they're able to do math at a basic level when they leave high school is just wrong. And it's not fair to them because what's going to happen to them when they leave our high schools and they go to the community college where 70-75 percent of them have to pay to take remedial courses to get the exact same math that we're talking about?"
Seventy to seventy-five percent of Rhode Island high school graduates who go to community college have to take remedial courses in math? That struck us as a huge percentage, even for those graduates who wanted a higher education but might not have had the grades, test scores or money to get into a four-year school. So we decided to check the numbers.
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Listening to Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, speak on stage to several hundred attendees at the 5th Anniversary Gala last week for Innosight Institute--the non-profit that I co-founded--I thought about how Clayton Christensen and I have speculated for some time that the long-term future of much of educational content will be in the business model of a facilitated network, a platform in which users essentially exchange modular pieces of educational content with each other.As Khan explained how his team is setting up its network, it reminded me that those who are discounting the long-term value of entities such as the Khan Academy and Knewton, an adaptive learning platform, may be making a significant mistake, as both are positioning themselves to make a run at being the learning platform of the future.
A common rap heard about the Khan Academy is that it's just a bunch of videos for homework help, nothing more. Even worse, people say, it perpetuates a failed lecture model of learning.
What these critics miss is the evolution of a disruptive innovation--and the steps that the Khan Academy is taking to improve what started as a "good enough" video solution for students who didn't have access to a tutor.
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Legislation to cut welfare benefits of parents with children performing poorly in school has cleared committees of both the House and Senate after being revised to give the parents several ways to avoid the reductions.The state Department of Human Services, which worked with Republican sponsors to draft the changes, withdrew its previous opposition to SB132. But the measure was still criticized by Democrats, including Rep. Gloria Johnson, D-Knoxville.
The bill is sponsored by Sen. Stacey Campfield, R-Knoxville, and Rep. Vance Dennis, R-Savannah. It calls for a 30 percent reduction in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits to parents whose children are not making satisfactory progress in school.
As amended, it would not apply when a child has a handicap or learning disability or when the parent takes steps to try improving the youngster's school performance -- such as signing up for a "parenting class," arranging a tutoring program or attending a parent-teacher conference.
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The new White House Score Card gives comparative information on the costs and success of colleges which should be helpful for students and their parents. At first glance, the information is shocking. It shows that a college education in Milwaukee can cost a great deal more than at Harvard University, long rated the nation's top university.According to the data, the average cost for one year of an undergraduate program at Marquette University runs about $28,746, which is $10,000 per year more than Harvard which charges $18,277. Also more expensive than Harvard is Milwaukee School of Engineering ($24,546), the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design ($24,285) and even the privately owned University of Phoenix-Milwaukee ($22,231).
Where does that number come from?
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In 1996, Waters set up the Edible Schoolyard Project, a small organic garden and classroom kitchen at Martin Luther King Jr middle school, in Berkeley, where students learn the values of healthy eating by growing their own lunch. Similar programmes have been set up in New Orleans and Greensboro, North Carolina, where obesity levels are among the highest in the country."I'm trying to get to a place where we educate children at a very early age and give them a meal in school that is free," says Waters. "But it doesn't happen without a curriculum that goes with it. They've tried to give kids healthier lunches and kids just throw them in the garbage. Kids have to be engaged with hands-on experience of growing and preparing the food. And so I have an idea for setting up an edible schoolyard at a high school. In fact that's why I'm going to meet with the mayor of Sacramento."
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Across the country, education reformers and their allies in both parties have revamped the way teachers are graded, abandoning methods under which nearly everyone was deemed satisfactory, even when students were falling behind.More than half the states now require new teacher evaluation systems and, thanks to a deal announced last week in Albany, New York City will soon have one, too.
The changes, already under way in some cities and states, are intended to provide meaningful feedback and, critically, to weed out weak performers. And here are some of the early results:
In Florida, 97 percent of teachers were deemed effective or highly effective in the most recent evaluations. In Tennessee, 98 percent of teachers were judged to be "at expectations."
In Michigan, 98 percent of teachers were rated effective or better.
Advocates of education reform concede that such rosy numbers, after many millions of dollars developing the new systems and thousands of hours of training, are worrisome.
"It is too soon to say that we're where we started and it's all been for nothing," said Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and policy organization. "But there are some alarm bells going off."
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Today's Star-Ledger reports that the Superintendent of West Winsor/Plainsboro Public Schools (Mercer County), Victoria Kniewel, is leaving in order to avoid a salary cut. Her contract, which sets her salary at $192.6K, expires in two years. Under NJ's superintendent salary cap, Kniewel would could earn no more than $175K under a new contract. Princeton's superintendent, Judith Wilson, is also leaving; she makes over $220K, and the salary cap would lop $57K off her annual earnings. (Caps are linked to total enrollment; the more students, the higher the cap.)The West Windsor School Board president comments that the salary cap interferes with districts' ability to "attract quality candidates" because other states don't enforce salary caps. That's true. But other states don't have as many school districts as we do; one could argue that NJ's abundance of central offices -- superintendents, business administrators, personnel directors, etc. -- leads to redundancy and inefficiency. We can't pay our superintendents as much as other states because each one is responsible for far fewer students.
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At the University of California Santa Cruz, where tuition runs to nearly $35,000 for non-residents, students every year pay more than 30 additional fees -- including a small charge for what's billed as "free" HIV testing. Students at Oklahoma State University pay a handsome sum to attend one of the state's flagship schools, but they are also responsible for covering 18 different fees, including a "life safety and security fee."The $100 "globalization fee" at Howard University is listed -- without explanation -- in the school's tuition and fees brochure. A school spokeswoman said the fee "supports internationalization initiatives" such as study abroad. Students pay the fee even if they have no intention of studying abroad themselves.
Worcester State University in Massachusetts, however, might have one of the most arresting fees. Students fortunate enough to be admitted face the challenge of paying the required tuition. But before they step foot on campus, they also will be hit with a fee to, well, step foot on campus. A portion of the school's "parking/pedestrian fee" goes to the upkeep of the sidewalks on campus.
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Hays County's state representative has filed a comprehensive piece of legislation that could pave the way for a new approach to public education.House Bill 300, filed by State Rep. Jason Isaac (R-Dripping Springs) on March 7, would create an alternative to the mandate-filled education code currently followed by all Texas school districts. The bill would give school districts the option to create their own agendas, goals and measurements of success, bucking the current one-size-fits-all approach mandated by the state government, Isaac said.
"(HB 300) gives school districts the flexibility to manage their own curriculum, teachers the freedom to attend to the needs of their students and parents the ability to have more say in ensuring the best education for their children," Isaac said.
The current education code, which is approximately 1,100 pages long, would be replaced with 50 pages of framework that school districts could tailor to fit their individual needs, Isaac said. For instance, the bill would give school districts the control to allocate financial resources as they see fit and focus on individual programs and areas as needed.
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Duke University faculty members, frustrated with their administration and skeptical of the degrees to be awarded, have forced the institution to back out of a deal with nine other universities and 2U to create a pool of for-credit online classes for undergraduates.Duke's Arts & Sciences Council, which represents faculty from Duke's largest undergraduate college, voted 16-14 on Thursday against plans to grant credits to Duke students who would have taken online courses from the pool. The vote effectively killed Duke's participation in the effort, and it immediately withdrew.
The courses were to be offered by Duke and other top-tier universities in a partnership organized by 2U, formerly known as 2tor. Unlike massive open online courses, or MOOCs, only a few hundred students were expected to enroll in each course - which would feature a mix of recorded lectures and live discussions - but each course would be divided into sections of no more than 20 students led by an instructor, perhaps a graduate student. The effort, known as Semester Online, will go on without Duke and offer its first classes this fall, 2U's CEO said.
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I ended my previous post by arguing that (1) if teaching is at least as valuable as research, and (2) nontenure-track (NTT) faculty teach at least as well as tenure-track (TT) faculty, then the very large pay disparities between the two classes of faculty that characterize American universities today violate a basic principle of workplace fairness: equal pay for equal work. When conditions (1) and (2) are met, then, all an institution can do to defend current practice is plead poverty: we can't afford to do what we ourselves must acknowledge to be "the right thing."But what about places like the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, where I work? Is condition (1) met in what are sometimes called "R1" universities like mine? If not, maybe big pay disparities are warranted by the fact that, in such universities, research is a much higher institutional priority than undergraduate teaching. If teaching is a low enough priority, current pay inequalities could be justified by the fact that NTT faculty are not paid to do research and publishing - even though many of them do it - and, conversely, that most TT faculty pay is for their research and publishing, rather than their teaching.
We can estimate what we might call the "implicit" value of teaching at a place like UM-AA, by starting with the unrealistic assumption that TT and NTT faculty are paid the same to teach a course. At my university, the median full-time NTT faculty member, if they start (as most do) as a Lecturer I, will be paid an average of $38,289 to teach six courses. That is about $6,381 per course. The median Assistant Professor will be paid $80,361 to teach three courses. Three courses at $6,381 per course is about $19,144. This implies that the value of the median Assistant Professor's non-teaching work (mainly research, though there is some service work here too) is $80,361-$19,144 = $61,217.
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528K Powerpoint Presentation. Via a kind reader.
Notes and links on the Madison School District's "Strategic Planning Process", begun under former Superintendent Dan Nerad.
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At last year's State of the City speech, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced the creation of a public high school called the Academy for Software Engineering. The school would be part of an ambitious expansion of computer science education in the city, and Mr. Bloomberg called it the "brainchild" of a local teacher named Michael Zamansky.Related: Primary School Computer Science (!) Curriculum in Vietnam and, Dave Winer comments.Mr. Zamansky was seated on the stage, a few steps from the mayor. But by that point, he said recently, the project was his in name only: he said he had been effectively cut out of the school's planning process, and his vision of an elite program had given way to one that was more focused on practical job skills.
"I don't know if they think my plans are too grandiose, or too unrealistic or if I'm an elitist snob," he said.
The mayor spoke about other efforts to train the city's future engineers and entrepreneurs. But Mr. Zamansky worried that the new school would be too small: not enough students, not enough ambition.
Mr. Zamansky, 45, had spent two decades developing the computer science program at Stuyvesant High School. Former students now working at Google and Facebook call him a mentor, a role model, a man who showed them their future.
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I'm in favor of spending more money on schools. Education is important. Important things need to be given the right support.Am I in favor of spending more of my money on schools? A trickier question. I mean it when I say I support education spending. But I don't like getting the bill. There are a lot of competing demands on my money, starting with my own needs.
How do I navigate this? How do I get it right when it comes to balancing what I favor supporting and what I actually am going to pay for? Come May and June, resolving this is going to be one of the most interesting, controversial and important plot developments in the final stretch of the state budget drama going on in Madison as we as a state decide this.
You can see tension between what people want in general and what they want when the discussion gets specific in results from the Marquette Law School Poll released a few days ago. (Disclosure: I am one of the people who work on the poll and I helped draft the education-related questions.)
When a sample of people statewide were asked if they support spending more money on public education, their answers were overwhelmingly yes. Sixteen percent said they wanted the amount given to support schools to increase more than the rate of inflation (about 2% over the last year). Another 41% said they thought the amount should go up in line with the rate of inflation. And 14% said they favored an increase of 1% a year (a figure used because it has been proposed by some Republican state senators).
That comes to 71% in favor. Gov. Scott Walker has proposed keeping the "revenue cap" on schools flat for the next two years, which would have the general effect of keeping spending for operations unchanged. Seventeen percent favored no increase in public school spending. And 8% wanted to reduce the amount given to public schools.
But not so fast in concluding there is big support for more money for schools. The poll also asked what was more important to people, to reduce property taxes or increase school spending. Walker's budget proposal increases state aid to schools by about 1.5%, but, because the revenue cap would be flat, the money would go, in effect, to property tax relief.
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Superintendent Jane Belmore (PDF):
The professional learning priorities for 2013-14 are improving practices on both academic and behavior sides of the Multi-tiered System of Support (MTSS) Triangle. More specifically, these priorities are in (a) literacy/English Language Arts and Common Core State Standards and (b) Positive Behavior Supports/Social Emotional Learning. An essential part of this professional learning involves their integration with a MTSS, the Danielson Framework for Teaching, and culturally & linguistically responsive practices. Math will also remain a focus at the secondary level and a summer focus for elementary. Our student data demonstrate the need to focus professional learning on Tier I "core" practices within a MTSS, where the needs of 80-90% of students should be met.
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Rocketship Milwaukee is Rocketship Education's first expansion city outside of California. This is a unique opportunity to collaborate and contribute - with Rocketship Education's executive staff - on the development of a regional entity, ensuring success for not only the city of Milwaukee and its communities, but many cities to come.Rocketship Milwaukee's Managing Director is responsible for the academic, operational and financial success of Milwaukee's Rocketship schools and continued growth. The Managing Director leads a team of Rocketeers including regional staff, school leaders and teachers towards closing the achievement gap for students and the Milwaukee community. The Managing Director will grow Rocketship Education's impact from one school in 2012 to 8 schools within 5 years as it works to eliminate the elementary achievement gap in Milwaukee. Internally, the Managing Director manages the regional leadership team that supports school staff, ensures strong and strategic financial management, and partners with national staff to build the best supports for schools possible.
Externally, the Managing Director builds deep community engagement and fosters public and political support for Rocketship to expand its impact as it works with the Milwaukee community to build first class options for all parents. Specifically, the Managing Director will oversee all community development, funder and authorizer relationships in order to drive regional growth.
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I'm extremely excited about online education, but I've noticed that online education products have a really serious problem: low retention. I've used Coursera, EdX, HackDesign, Duolingo, Codecademy... and I've churned from all of them. I bet you did too!I don't want to tear down these products or the people who've built them, I'm rooting for them all the way. They just need some tough love, and so this article explains why I churned: the starting commitment is too high, the re-engagement emails are terrible, and the pacing is impersonal.
How low IS their retention?
Coursera founder Daphne Koller said last year that only 7-9% of students who sign up actually "finish" the class. The definition of finish is a bit fuzzy, so I wanted to collect some more data.
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Harrison J. Kell, David Lubinski & Camilla P. Benbow:
Youth identified before age 13 (N = 320) as having profound mathematical or verbal reasoning abilities (top 1 in 10,000) were tracked for nearly three decades. Their awards and creative accomplishments by age 38, in combination with specific details about their occupational responsibilities, illuminate the magnitude of their contribution and professional stature. Many have been entrusted with obligations and resources for making critical decisions about individual and organizational well-being. Their leadership positions in business, health care, law, the professoriate, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) suggest that many are outstanding creators of modern culture, constituting a precious human-capital resource. Identifying truly profound human potential, and forecasting differential development within such populations, requires assessing multiple cognitive abilities and using atypical measurement procedures. This study illustrates how ultimate criteria may be aggregated and longitudinally sequenced to validate such measures.Steve Hsu has more.
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284,000:Number of American college graduates working in minimum-wage jobs in 2012.The Wall Street Journal this week reported on the troubling trend of college graduates getting stuck in low-skilled jobs, a problem that new researchsuggests may endure even after the economy improves.
As the story noted, college graduates tend to earn more than their less-educated coworkers, even within the same field. But that isn't true for everyone: According to the Labor Department, there were 284,000 graduates--those with at least a bachelor's degree--working minimum-wage jobs in 2012, including 37,000 holders of advanced degrees. That's down from a peak of 327,000 in 2010, but double the number in 2007 and up 70% from a decade earlier
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WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Teachers in the United States rate their lives better than all other occupation groups, trailing only physicians. They have an average Life Evaluation Index score of 68.8, besting workers in most other types of jobs, including managers and executives, nurses, and business owners.The research is based on interviewing conducted as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which consists of six sub-indexes that measure Americans' physical, emotional, and financial health. The nation's teachers score higher than almost all occupational groups on life evaluations plus four of the other five areas of wellbeing -- including emotional health, healthy behaviors, basic access, and physical health. In life evaluations, emotional health, and basic access specifically, teachers come in second -- trailing only physicians, who typically earn a much higher salary. The one area in which teachers do not score as well is work environment. More generally, teachers earn the second-highest score on the overall Well-Being Index, which is based on all six sub-components, as Gallup and Healthways previously reported.
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