| School Information System |
 | Sponsorships |
|
|
With affirmative action under attack and economic mobility feared to be stagnating, top colleges profess a growing commitment to recruiting poor students. But a comparison of low-income enrollment shows wide disparities among the most competitive private colleges. A student at Vassar, for example, is three times as likely to receive a need-based Pell Grant as one at Washington University in St. Louis."It's a question of how serious you are about it," said Catharine Bond Hill, the president of Vassar. She said of colleges with multibillion-dollar endowments and numerous tax exemptions that recruit few poor students, "Shame on you."
At Vassar, Amherst College and Emory University, 22 percent of undergraduates in 2010-11 received federal Pell Grants, which go mostly to students whose families earn less than $30,000 a year. The same year, the most recent in the federal Department of Education database, only 7 percent of undergraduates at Washington University were Pell recipients, and 8 percent at Washington and Lee University were, according to research by The New York Times.
Researchers at Georgetown University have found that at the most competitive colleges, only 14 percent of students come from the lower 50 percent of families by income. That figure has not increased over more than two decades, an indication that a generation of pledges to diversify has not amounted to much. Top colleges differ markedly in how aggressively they hunt for qualified teenagers from poorer families, how they assess applicants who need aid, and how they distribute the available aid dollars.
Some institutions argue that they do not have the resources to be as generous as the top colleges, and for most colleges, with meager endowments, that is no doubt true. But among the elites, nearly all of them with large endowments, there is little correlation between a university's wealth and the number of students who receive Pell Grants, which did not exceed $5,550 per student last year.
Reflections on the Road to Yale: A First-Generation Student Striving to Inspire Black Youth by Travis Reginal:
For low-income African-American youth, the issue is rooted in low expectations. There appear to be two extremes: just getting by or being the rare gifted student. Most don't know what success looks like. Being at Yale has raised my awareness of the soft bigotry of elementary and high school teachers and administrators who expect no progress in their students. At Yale, the quality of your work must increase over the course of the term or your grade will decrease. It propelled me to work harder.Reflections on the Road to Harvard: A Classic High Achiever, Minus the Money for a College Consultant by Justin Porter
I do not believe that increasing financial aid packages and creating glossy brochures alone will reverse this trend. The true forces that are keeping us away from elite colleges are cultural: the fear of entering an alien environment, the guilt of leaving loved ones alone to deal with increasing economic pressure, the impulse to work to support oneself and one's family. I found myself distracted even while doing problem sets, questioning my role at this weird place. I began to think, "Who am I, anyway, to think I belong at Harvard, the alma mater of the Bushes, the Kennedys and the Romneys? Maybe I should have stayed in Mississippi where I belonged."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"An Industry of Mediocrity"--The Chronicle of Higher EducationRelated: The National Council on teacher quality recently rated teacher preparation programs."Teacher Training's Low Grade"--The Wall Street Journal
"Are Teacher Prep Programs Worth the Money?" --Marketplace
Headlines were unanimous after the June release of the National Council on Teacher Quality's national study of teacher-preparation programs. The study's conclusions were precisely what the public had expected, bolstered by decades of critiques all adding up to the same conclusion: Teacher education is broken. Fortunately, there is a solution that can produce better teachers and do it faster and at less cost.
In the past, education schools were seen as the proverbial stepchild of higher education--a poor fit with the "more rigorous" academic disciplines, singled out for criticism, lowest on the scales of pay and prestige. These days, though, the criticisms leveled at teacher education have begun to resemble those aimed at higher education over all, including that it is too expensive and ineffective.
For example, a four- or even five-year education degree costs the same as other degrees, yet our field has failed to show that teachers who have these degrees are any more effective in the classroom than those licensed through alternative programs, or (in some cases) those who enter teaching with minimal preparation. Programs like Teach for America have capitalized on this point to their great advantage.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's latest plans to reinvent public education with the aid of the business community will accelerate this fall with the launch of a novel program that lets high school students take classes from the private sector on the public dime.State Superintendent John White said Monday that nearly 3,000 students have enrolled in an array of private-sector classes that the state has agreed to pay for, from math and literature to Japanese and German to hair styling, welding and nail manicuring. The classes, which carry regular high school credits, are taught by an eclectic mix of nonprofits, unions, trade associations and for-profit companies, as well as local colleges.
White said he had only budgeted $2 million for the program but would find another $1 million to cover demand, perhaps by leaving some open jobs in the state education department unfilled. And he plans to expand the program substantially next year. White said he is particularly interested in adding more vocational classes, though an analysis of enrollments that the state provided to POLITICO shows one of the most popular offerings is ACT Prep.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In Salon, Mario Goetz harkens back to what he regards as the good old days of higher education in post-World War II California, when the University of California System wasn't just rapidly expanding but also free:In their Fall 2012 article in Dissent, Aaron Bady and Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mike Konczal reveal what higher education used to mean and how it was systematically destroyed. Bady and Konczal transport us to 1950s-'60s California, where bipartisan support for a University of California system built the state into a land of prosperity and innovation, a burgeoning middle class sent its children to college for free, and progressive Republicans happily funded education to support inclusion and social mobility for California's next generation. In 1960, the Donahoe Act, or the Master Plan for Higher Education, represented California's commitment to educate anyone who wanted to be educated. Despite the concurrent trends of racism, sexism, and American imperialism that pervaded that era, California's higher education system was a golden example of what America could achieve.Let me see if I understand this correctly. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, less than one-fifth of American adults earned a bachelor's degree, and just 36 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that "a college education is very important." In that era even more than now, the majority of collegians came from relative privilege. And most college grads did very well for themselves -- ensuing decades confirm they are much more privileged than their no-degree counterparts.So what happened? Where did it go? In 1966, Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California and began dismantling the promising work of the past 20 years. Previously, admission had been free, except for a few relatively small fees, but the Reagan government lifted regulations on how much schools could charge in fees, allowing costs to skyrocket. Also, incentives were created for colleges to accept out-of-state students, who would pay higher fees. Both of these strategies shifted the financial responsibility for higher education onto students rather than the state. The process of culturally redefining higher education as not a right, or a public good, but an investment, subject to the whims of the marketplace and corporate capitalism, had begun.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Micah O. Mazurek, PhD and Christopher R. Engelhardt, PhD:
OBJECTIVES: The study objectives were to examine video game use in boys with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared with those with ADHD or typical development (TD) and to examine how specific symptoms and game features relate to problematic video game use across groups.METHODS: Participants included parents of boys (aged 8-18) with ASD (n = 56), ADHD (n = 44), or TD (n = 41). Questionnaires assessed daily hours of video game use, in-room video game access, video game genres, problematic video game use, ASD symptoms, and ADHD symptoms.
RESULTS: Boys with ASD spent more time than did boys with TD playing video games (2.1 vs 1.2 h/d). Both the ASD and ADHD groups had greater in-room video game access and greater problematic video game use than the TD group. Multivariate models showed that inattentive symptoms predicted problematic game use for both the ASD and ADHD groups; and preferences for role-playing games predicted problematic game use in the ASD group only.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"When you have two human beings collide at a high rate of speed -- especially if one of them is much bigger than the other -- then significant injuries are quite possible," Tonino said. "I don't believe it is worth the risk. So I advise parents to try to steer their children to alternative sports. We are just beginning to understand the long-term consequences of injuries sustained at young ages."
The most common football injuries are knee injuries, especially to the anterior or posterior cruciate ligament (ACL/PCL). Other common injuries are ankle sprains, shoulder injuries and overuse injuries that cause back pain and patellar tendonitis (knee pain). Heat stroke is a significant risk during summer training camp.A study published in the ournal Pediatricsfound that injury rates were similar in football and baseball. But while only 3 percent of baseball injuries were considered serious (fracture, dislocation, concussion), 14 percent of football injuries were considered serious.
But concussions are Tonino's biggest concern. Tonino notes that a position statement from the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine says the developing brain differs physiologically from the adult brain. Young athletes may have a more prolonged recovery and are more susceptible to concussions accompanied by a catastrophic injury.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Over the past several years, there's been a rise in the number of law enforcement officers taking up residence in public schools. This rise corresponds with the proliferation of zero-tolerance policies. Combined, these two factors have resulted in criminalization of acts that were once nothing more than violations of school policies, something usually handled by school administrators. As infractions have morphed into criminal acts, the severity of law enforcement "liaison" responses has also escalated.Here's a recent example of the severity of the response greatly outweighing the actual infraction.
The incident started when a Delaware State Police trooper, who was on assignment as a school resource officer in the Cape Henlopen School District, questioned the third-grader and a fifth-grader while investigating the theft of $1.
According to court papers, the questioning was so intense, complete with threats of the children being sent to a juvenile facility for lying, that the 8-year-old -- who was not a suspect -- burst into tears. His parents pulled him out of school because of the January 2008 incident and filed a lawsuit in January 2010 charging the officer violated the child's rights.
The theft of a dollar shouldn't have warranted much more than a visit to the principal's office, if that. But, because of these policies, the school automatically turned it over to a state trooper, who then interrogated two children, presumably attempting to get the 8-year-old to testify against the fifth-grader. Unfortunately, incidents like these are far from rare.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Locally speaking, what our communities spend on education is a pretty everyday topic, especially if you either have kids in school or are a teacher, changes are that you keep an eye on the school budgets and voting options. But its also interesting to take a look at education spending on a much larger level. This handy infographic below takes a look at the US education spending as compared with eleven other countries - what is the annual spending vs. what are the educational outcomes. Does the amount of money spent correlate at all to better educational outcomes? Keep reading to learn more.At roughly $15,000 per student, Madison spends about twice the United States national average.Spending vs. Outcomes: Does Money Make A Difference?
- The US leads in spending by a LOT - $809.6B per year. The next largest spender is Japan at $160.5B. That's a pretty huge gap!
- That translates to $7,743 per student in the US
- Finland spends only $10B per year (and is the fifth largest spender per student) but has a 100% literacy rate and the highest rank of math and science scores.
- Australia's students spend the longest amount of time in school - 21 years.
The recent expert review concluded that the Madison schools have the resources to address the achievement gap.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The ill-fated charter school Madison Preparatory Academy would have cost Madison School District taxpayers about $17.5 million over five years to start addressing the district's long-standing minority and low-income achievement gaps.Related: The Dichotomy of Madison School Board Governance: "Same Service" vs. "having the courage and determination to stay focused on this work and do it well is in itself a revolutionary shift for our district"..The achievement gap plan introduced by former superintendent Dan Nerad shortly after Madison Prep crashed and burned would have cost about $105 million over five years. Before being adopted, it was whittled down to about $49 million.
And the so-called "strategic framework" proposed last week by new superintendent Jennifer Cheatham?
Nada.
"The really exciting news is we have all the ingredients to be successful," she told this newspaper.
No doubt that could be thinking so wishful it borders on delusion or, worse, code for "we're not really all that interested in closing the gap anyway." But it could also be a harbinger of real change.
"The framework isn't meant to be compared to the achievement gap plan," district spokeswoman Rachel Strauch-Nelson said. It's "not about an array of new initiatives with a big price tag" but about focusing "on the day-to-day work of teaching and learning" and "what we know works."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Matt Schifrin, via a kind reader email
In late June, nearly two months after most incoming freshmen had sent in their deposit checks securing places at hundreds of colleges across America, Long Island University's Post campus, nestled in the wealthy New York City suburb of Brookville, N.Y., was testing a new approach in its efforts to fill up the 250 or so empty seats it had in its class of 2017.Behind Forbes College Financial GradesThe week of June 24 was "Express Decision Week" at LIU. High school seniors were invited to walk into Post's Mullarkey Hall any time from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., transcript, SAT scores and personal statement in hand, and LIU's admissions officers promised to make an acceptance decision on the spot. All application fees would be waived, and registration for fall classes would be immediate. An identical event was being held simultaneously at LIU's Brooklyn campus.
Post's aggressive marketing ploy is eerily reminiscent of the on-the-spot low-docmortgage approvals that occurred during the heady days leading up to the housing crisis. But the product here is bit less tangible than a loan that secures a house. These admissions officers are selling the promise of a better life through post-secondary-school learning.
LIU isn't alone. Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, N.Y. and Centenary College in Hackettstown, N.J. offer similar same-day, on-the-spot admissions events. According to Jackie Nealon, Long Island University's vice president of enrollment, LIU takes it a step further in the spring and sends admissions officers into Long Island high schools to admit students on location-the academic version of a house call.
If LIU sounds a bit desperate, it is. From a financial standpoint LIU is suffering from a host of ills common to hundreds of colleges today. According to the most recent financial data LIU has supplied to the Department of Education, its Post campus has been running at an operating deficit for three years. Its core expenses, or those essential for education activities, have been greater than its core revenues. Like many other schools, Post is a tuition junkie, with nearly 90% of its core annual revenues derived from tuition and fees.
This year Post raised its tuition and fees by 3.5% to $34,005, yet it offers steep tuition discounts to nearly every incoming freshman. In fact, a quick click over to its website shows the deals available. If your kid is an A student with an SAT score of about 1300 out of 1600, expect at least a $20,000 rebate per year.
This seeming paradox of raising prices while simultaneously offering deep discounts is a way of life among middling and lower-quality colleges in the market for higher education. It's a symptom of a deeply troubled system where the cachet of elite institutions like Harvard and Yale has led thousands of nonelite schools to employ a strategy where higher prices and deeper discounts are more effective than cutting prices and tightening discounts. According to the National Association of College & University Business Officers, the so-called tuition discount rate has risen for the sixth straight year and is now averaging 45%. In some ways colleges operate like prestige-seeking liquor brands. In other ways they are more like Macy's offering regular sales days, only quietly.
To do that we created the FORBES College Financial Grades, which measure the fiscal soundness of more than 900 four-year, private, not-for-profit schools with more than 500 students (public schools are excluded). For the purposes of our analysis we used the two most recent fiscal years available from the Department of Education-2011 and 2010. The grades measure financial fitness as determined by nine components broken into three categories.-Balance Sheet Health (40%): As determined by looking at endowment assets per full-time equivalent (15%), expendable assets (assets that can be sold in a pinch) to debt, otherwise known as a college's viability ratio (10%) and a similar measure known as the primary reserve ratio (15%). Primary reserve measures how long a college could survive if it had to sell assets to cover its expenses. Schools like Pomona and Swarthmore are so asset-rich, for example, that they could cover expenses for ten years without collecting a penny in tuition. Other well-known schools like Carnegie Mellon and Syracuse have primary ratios of about 1.0, meaning they could last about a year.
-Operational Soundness (35%): A blend of return on assets (10%), core operating margins (10%) and perhaps most important, tuition and fees as a percentage of core revenues (15%). Tuition dependency is the most serious risk facing middling colleges today.
-Admissions Yield (10%): The percentage of accepted students who choose to enroll tells not only how much demand there is from a specific school's target customers but also gives an indication of the effectiveness of its admissions staff.
-Freshmen Receiving Institutional Grants (7.5%): The most desperate schools use "merit aid" as a tool to lure more than 90% of incoming freshmen.
-Instructional Expenses per Full-Time ?Student (7.5%): Struggling schools tend to skimp in this area.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Sometime in 2004 Richard C. Vos, the admission dean at Claremont McKenna College, a highly regarded liberal arts school outside Los Angeles, developed a novel way to meet the school president's demands to improve the quality of incoming classes. He would simply lie.Over the next seven years Vos provided falsified data-the numbers behind our ranking of Claremont McKenna in America's Top Colleges-to the Education Department and others, artificially increasing SAT and ACT scores and lowering the admission rate, providing the illusion, if not the reality, that better students were coming to Claremont McKenna. He got away with it thanks to a disturbing lack of oversight; he was trusted to hand-calculate the data and submit it without review. What had made this longtime employee break bad? "He felt the same pressure to deliver as any executive does," Claremont McKenna spokesman Max Benavidez says. (Vos, who resigned in January 2012, couldn't be reached for comment.)
Just as an analyst's upgrade can spark a rally in a specific stock, a college's move up the rankings usually results in a financial windfall. "There's institutional pressure at colleges to achieve at all levels, and that includes rankings," says Troy Onink, a college planning expert and FORBES contributor. "It's a hypercompetitive world for the best students and for that tuition revenue."
Claremont McKenna isn't the only top college that lied. Bucknell University doctored SAT results from 2006 to 2012; Emory University provided numbers for admitted students rather than enrolled ones for more than a decade; and Iona College lied about acceptance and graduation rates, SAT scores and alumni giving for nine years starting in 2002. All have since fessed up and claim to have instituted better practices. As a penalty for their dishonesty-and an acknowledgment of the growing scope of the problem-we are removing the four institutions from our list of the country's best schools for two years.
Are there other cheaters out there? If there are, they also will be taken off the list. Stay tuned. We will be watching.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
My belief that the PowerPoint presentation is the worst thing that ever happened to modern education was verified a few months ago while I was observing a training session on the art of marketing complex technology. At one point, the teacher stopped his PowerPoint presentation to rant about the tyranny of PowerPoint presentations.The trainer bemoaned the skull-numbing effect that an endless stream of bullet points and images has on a listener.
He painstakingly detailed the absolute no-nos of trying to impart important information through such a limited method: Keep the number of slides to a minimum, use as little text on each slide as possible and never, ever, recite your bullet points verbatim.
Then he told us that the newest trend in high-level salesmanship is to perform important presentations without electronic aides. Apparently, top sales professionals have started learning to sketch so they can hand-illustrate their most important concepts on whiteboards during a talk in front of clients.
Such an effort demonstrates two things, the trainer said. "First, it shows the customer that you know your stuff, that you're not just regurgitating strings of facts because you need to have slides and fill them. And second, it shows your audience that you are tailoring how you impart information in a way that is relevant to them in the moment."
"Wow!" I thought. "That's exactly how teaching used to be."
Well, that's how it used to be a long time ago when teachers were masters of their subject areas and they shared their wisdom by lecturing and maybe making a few notes on a chalkboard. Back when students were -- gasp! --expected to listen and even -- double-gasp! -- take notes.
That method died sometime after I graduated from college and before I began my graduate-level teacher training nearly a decade later.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
As his two daughters enjoy their summer holiday, architect Marcin Klocek has school on his mind. The prospect of soaring fees at international schools has left him contemplating sending his children back to his native Poland for their education.Both his daughters, aged seven and 12, attend the financially troubled Discovery College. Faced with the need to repay a construction loan to the English Schools Foundation (ESF), the Lantau-based college has announced plans to increase fees by 53 per cent over the next five years, taking them above HK$130,000 per year for primary-school pupils and HK$180,000 for those in Year 7 to Year 11.
Discovery College parents, who have formed a 150-strong concern group to fight the fee increase, are not the only ones worried about rising fees.
Parents whose children begin studying at the four kindergartens, five secondary and nine primary schools run by the ESF after 2016 will find the fees much higher than they are now as the government begins phasing out its subsidy to ESF schools.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The number of new college graduates who claim to be "totally independent" financially is down 26% compared to 2011.That's according to a national poll from the PNC Financial Services Group.
This lack of financial security among the younger population is being dubbed the "Failure to Launch" syndrome, and it can have long-term effects.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Scientists have implanted a false memory in the brains of mice in an experiment that they hope will shed light on the well-documented phenomenon whereby people "remember" events or experiences that have never happened.False memories are a major problem with witness statements in courts of law. Defendants have often been convicted of offences based on eyewitness testimony, only to have their convictions later overturned when DNA or some other corroborating evidence is brought to bear.
In order to study how these false memories might form in the human brain, Susumu Tonegawa, a neuroscientist at the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics, and his team encoded memories in the brains of mice by manipulating individual neurons. He described the results of the study in the latest edition of the journal Science.
Memories of experiences we have had are made from several elements including records of objects, space and time. These records, called engrams, are encoded in physical and chemical changes in brain cells and the connections between them. According to Tonegawa, both false and genuine memories seem to rely on the same brain mechanisms.
In their work, Tonegawa's team used a technique known asoptogenetics, which allows the fine control of individual brain cells. They engineered brain cells in the mouse hippocampus, a part of the brain known to be involved in forming memories, to express the gene for a protein called channelrhodopsin. When cells that contain channelrhodopsin are exposed to blue light, they become activated. The researchers also modified the hippocampus cells so that the channelrhodopsin protein would be produced in whichever brain cells the mouse was using to encode its memory engrams.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
If you care about college costs and educational quality, you should care about MOOCs, or "massive open online courses," which deliver college courses digitally and just might revolutionize higher education. With MOOCs, a lecture course that draws a couple hundred students on campus can be converted to something that draws tens of thousands from around the globe. A seminar for 40 on campus can be reorganized to teach 800 when each on-campus student is deputized to be a virtual seminar leader for 20.
Whether for good or ill, MOOCs augur a disruption of the relationships among students, colleges and trade schools, and the credentials those schools offer -- a relationship that has stabilized higher education for at least a century. Yet if done right -- a big if, as recent events at San Jose State and Colorado State universities have shown -- they may help address the quality and cost of higher education.What's the nature of the disruption?
For the moment, providers of MOOCs make their courses available to anyone. There is no admissions process. As in a video game, anyone can start, but you have to master levels that can include very difficult work. For the10 percent who get to the end, the learning is real.
The range of subjects that might become available to everyone through MOOCs is potentially as broad as the array of specialties represented throughout the professoriate at all institutions. Already some of the most successful MOOCs involve not science and technology but rather Greek mythology and modern poetry.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The dichotomy that is Madison School Board Governance was on display this past week.
1. Board Member TJ Mertz, in light of the District's plan to continue growing spending and property taxes for current programs, suggests that "fiscal indulgences":
Tax expenditures are not tax cuts. Tax expenditures are socialism and corporate welfare. Tax expenditures are increases on anyone who does not receive the benefit or can't hire a lobbyist...to manipulate the code to their favor.be applied to certain school volunteers.
This proposal represents a continuation of the Districts' decades long "same service" approach to governance, with declining academic results that spawned the rejected Madison Preparatory IB Charter School.
2. Madison's new Superintendent, Jennifer Cheatham introduced her "Strategic Framework" at Wednesday's Downtown Rotary Club meeting.
The Superintendent's letter (jpg version) (within the "framework" document) to the Madison Community included this statement (word cloud): 
Rather than present our educators with an ever-changing array of strategies, we will focus on what we know works and implement these strategies extremely well. While some of the work may seem familiar, having the courage and determination to stay focused on this work and do it well is in itself a revolutionary shift for our district. This is what it takes to narrow and eliminate gaps in student achievement.The Madison School Board's letter (jpg version) to the community includes this statement:
Public education is under sustained attack, both in our state and across the nation. Initiatives like voucher expansion are premised on the notion that public schools are not up to the challenge of effectively educating diverse groups of students in urban settings.Madison School Board word cloud:We are out to prove that wrong. With Superintendent Cheatham, we agree that here in Madison all the ingredients are in place. Now it is up to us to show that we can serve as a model of a thriving urban school district, one that seeks out strong community partnerships and values genuine collaboration with teachers and staff in service of student success.
Our Strategic Framework lays out a roadmap for our work. While some of the goals will seem familiar, what's new is a clear and streamlined focus and a tangible and energizing sense of shared commitment to our common goals.The bedrock of the plan is the recognition that learning takes place in the classroom in the interactions between teachers and students. The efforts of all of us - from school board members to everyone in the organization - should be directed toward enhancing the quality and effectiveness of those interactions.
There is much work ahead of us, and the results we are expecting will not arrive overnight. But with focus, shared effort and tenacity, we can transform each of our schools into thriving schools. As we do so, Madison will be the school district of choice in Dane County.
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, signed a budget bill Friday that eliminates teacher tenure and--in a rare move--gets rid of the automatic pay increase teachers receive for earning a master's degree.The challenge for Madison is moving away from long time governance structures and practices, including a heavy (157 page pdf & revised summary of changes) teacher union contract. Chris Rickert's recent column on Madison's healthcare practices provides a glimpse at the teacher - student expenditure tension as well.The legislation targets a compensation mechanism that is common in the U.S., where teachers receive automatic pay increases for years of service and advanced degrees. Some research has suggested those advanced degrees don't lead to improved teaching.
Although a few other states have talked about doing away with the automatic pay increase for advanced degrees, experts say North Carolina is believed to be the first state to do so.
The budget bill--which drew hundreds of teachers to the Capitol in protest earlier this week--also eliminates tenure for elementary and high-school teachers and freezes teacher salaries for the fifth time in six years.
It comes as states and districts across the country are revamping teacher evaluations, salaries and job security, and linking them more closely to student performance. These changes have been propelled, in part, by the Obama administration and GOP governors.
Then Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman's 2009 Madison Rotary speech offers important background on Madison's dichotomy:
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
"Budget Cuts: We Won't Be as Bold and Innovative as Oconomowoc, and That's Okay".
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Stephanie Banchero & Meredith Rutland:
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, signed a budget bill Friday that eliminates teacher tenure and--in a rare move--gets rid of the automatic pay increase teachers receive for earning a master's degree.The legislation targets a compensation mechanism that is common in the U.S., where teachers receive automatic pay increases for years of service and advanced degrees. Some research has suggested those advanced degrees don't lead to improved teaching.
Although a few other states have talked about doing away with the automatic pay increase for advanced degrees, experts say North Carolina is believed to be the first state to do so.
The budget bill--which drew hundreds of teachers to the Capitol in protest earlier this week--also eliminates tenure for elementary and high-school teachers and freezes teacher salaries for the fifth time in six years.
It comes as states and districts across the country are revamping teacher evaluations, salaries and job security, and linking them more closely to student performance. These changes have been propelled, in part, by the Obama administration and GOP governors.
North Carolina's $20.6 billion budget for the fiscal year that began July 1 was crafted by Republican lawmakers and came after the GOP gained control of both legislative chambers and the governor's office for the first time in 144 years.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Zhao Bowen is late for a Satanic heavy metal concert. After haggling the doorman down to half price, he pushes into a Beijing bar with a ceiling low enough to punch. He follows the shriek of guitars down a corridor and into a mosh pit lit by strobe lights. It's hot as hell and looks like it too: Men onstage made up as demons are slashing through a song about damnation--the lyrics are in English--while headbangers worship at their feet. Zhao dives in.The strobes capture midair collisions of bodies, sprays of sweat. Someone's glasses fly off and are crushed underfoot. Over the faces of the onlookers spreads that distinctive look of thrill and fear that tends to presage a riot. But just then the song climaxes in a weird screamgasm and the band takes a break. The crowd responds with the ultimate compliment, chanting "Niu bi! " and pumping their fists. The phrase can be roughly translated as "fuck yeah!" but it literally means "cow's vagina."
Zhao blends right in with all the Chinese teenagers in this sweltering rock dungeon. He has big wide-set eyes framed by dark eyebrows and a pair of silvery geek glasses. It makes him look like a friendly cartoon character, and the effect is enhanced by full cheeks that make his head look spherical. He is neither strikingly handsome nor unattractive. Zhao is of average height, average weight.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
But the much bigger question is why young people and their families have to borrow so much money to begin with. Compared with the 400 percent increase in tuition and fees over the last quarter century, the interest rate debate in Congress is a sideshow.States and universities need to think big, embrace more technology and redesign the traditional classroom to help control expenses on the front end of a college degree.
Wisconsin just froze University of Wisconsin System tuition for the coming two years. That's a welcome change, though fees and room-and-board rates will still go up.
The governor had proposed a large increase in state aid for universities. State lawmakers canceled the boost after learning UW System had $650 million in reserves it could tap instead.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
If, as I have suggested, academia mainly functions to let us affiliate with impressive intellectuals, then academia should be at risk of suffering the same trend. That is, once upon a time we passed around the intellectual arguments and claims that a wide range of speakers could use in many contexts to persuade many listeners. But as we have gained better abilities to pass around the particular ways that particular speakers argue for claims, the above trend in jokes, song, and stories suggests that we did or will switch to focus more on the particular ways that particular intellectuals express claims and arguments, and less on the claims and arguments themselves.This is a problem because we have stronger reasons to expect that the arguments and claims that many people can use in many contexts to persuade varied listeners are more likely to be true, relative to those designed more to be parts of overall impressive displays by particular persons in particular contexts. If listeners actually care less if claims are true that if claimers are impressive, we should expect that when the audience for intellectuals can get better access to a rich personal display of attempted persuasion, they will lose much of their derived interest in the truth of claims. After all, maybe the audience never really cared that much if the claims were true - they mainly cared about claim truth as evidence of claimer impressiveness.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
There are few more cherished nostrums in American life than the importance of equal opportunities. Unfortunately, one of them is the importance of summer vacation. It's a cheap way of doing something nice for teachers, but summer vacation is a disaster for poor children and their parents, creating massive avoidable inequities in life outcomes and seriously undereducating the population.The country claims to take schooling seriously, but the school calendar says otherwise. There's no other public service that we would allow to just vanish for months at a time. To have no Army in February, no buses or subways in March, airports closed down for all of October, or the police vacationing en masse in December would be absurd. Schools, it turns out, matter a lot, too, and having them shut down all summer critically undermines them.
The entire issue tends to vanish from public debate, because the educated, affluent people who run the debate don't particularly suffer from it. Summer vacation costs money, but prosperous parents are happy to spend it on their kids. And of course there's the sentimentality factor. I'll always treasure tender thoughts of my beloved Camp Winnebago and would one day love to have the experience of picking up my kid from the very same camp I attended when I was young.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
National education news:Item 1: Georgia dropped out last week from a national consortium developing a new generation of standardized tests for kindergarten through 12th graders because the projected cost ($29.50 per student per year) was too high.
Item 2: A few days ago, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would sharply reduce the federal role in education. The vote was almost strictly along party lines. But the bill won't go anywhere in gridlocked Washington.
Item 3: The American Federation of Teachers released a study last week concluding that excessive standardized testing is taking up large amounts of time and money that could be used for actually educating students.
It seems it was so recently -- 18 months ago, maybe? -- when there was a high degree of consensus on where things should head in setting expectations for students and keeping an eye on their success. All but five states had signed on to the Common Core initiative outlining things students learn in reading, language arts and math and had joined in one of two big efforts to create tests pegged to the standards. Best as I could see, Wisconsin was one of the states that had the most to gain from these initiatives.
But the national consensus is getting frayed. Opposition to the Common Core, from the left and, more so, from the right, has gained energy. And Georgia is the fifth state to drop out or cut back its involvement in the now-quite-troubled testing consortium it joined.
Where does all this leave Wisconsin?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Donna St. George, via a kind reader's email:
For another semester, Montgomery County high school students flunked their final exams in math courses in startlingly high numbers, according to new figures that show failure rates of 71 percent for Geometry and 68 percent for Algebra 1.Related: Math Forum audio & video along with a number of connected matharticles.The numbers add to a phenomenon that goes back more than five years and came to widespread public attention this spring, setting off a wave of concern among parents as well as elected officials in the high-performing school system.
Latest math-exam figures show high failure rates persist in the high-performing school system.
The new figures, for exams given in June, show that failure rates worsened in Algebra 1 and Geometry; improved in Precalculus and Bridge to Algebra 2; and stayed fairly even in Algebra 2, Honors Precalculus, Honors Algebra 2 and Honors Geometry.
Overall, 45 percent of high school students in eight math courses failed their June finals -- about 14,000 students out of roughly 31,000 enrolled.
Exactly what explains steep failure rates for exam-takers has been an issue of debate in recent months.
In a memo to the school board, School Superintendent Joshua P. Starr released a preliminary figure on test-skipping: As many as 500 students were no-shows for the Algebra 1 exam in June, accounting for one-sixth of the 2,912 students who failed the test.
Starr said student motivation was one of a half-dozen issues under study as a newly created math work group seeks to understand the failure problem and suggest ways to turn it around. Other possible causes cited include alignment between the curriculum and the exam, school system practices and policies, and the "cognitive demands" of the exam.
2004 (!) Madison West High School math teacher letter to Isthmus on dumbing down the curriculum.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute, compared home schoolers and public school students on the results of three standardized tests -- the California Achievement Test, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the Stanford Achievement Test -- for the 2007-2008 academic year. With public school students at the 50th percentile, home schoolers were at the 89th percentile in reading, the 86th percentile in science, the 84th percentile in language, math, and social studies.Socio-economic factors may have a lot to do with why home schoolers do so much better. Virtually all have a mother and a father who are living together. Nearly two thirds of fathers and 62 percent of mothers have a bachelor's degree or higher.
The explosive growth in home schooling has been fueled by dissatisfaction with public schools.
We spend more per pupil than any other country, but among industrialized nations, American students rank near the bottom in science and math. Only 13 percent of high school seniors knew what high school seniors should know about American history, says the National Assessment of Education Progress. Half of 18 to 24 year olds in a National Geographic Society survey couldn't locate New York state on a map.
The United States is only major country where young people will not know more than their parents, the education expert for the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development told the BBC last year.
About 2 million children are home schooled. Since 1999, the number being home schooled has increased 7 percent a year. Enrollment in public schools fell 5 percent between 2005 and 2010.
The first students to leave public schools tend to be the better ones, because their parents care more about education, said University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds. "When they leave, the overall quality of the remaining students, and thus the schools, will drop."
When enrollment declines, funding is cut. Because teacher unions are so powerful, first on the chopping block are music, art and athletic programs. (In Buffalo, N.Y., where teachers get free cosmetic surgery, music programs may be eliminated in half the schools.) These cuts make public schools less attractive, accelerating departures.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Nima Sanandaji, via a kind reader:
Swedish fourth graders are leading the world in mathematics, followed closely by those in other developed European nations, at least if we look at students' reported self-confidence in the subject. Fully 77% of Swedish students at fourth grade express a high level of confidence about their learning, compared to merely 5% who express a low level. In Austria, Germany, Denmark, and Norway seven out of ten students have high confidence about their mathematics knowledge. One in ten or fewer have low confidence. Self-confidence is somewhat less common amongst US fourth graders, where 67% believe that they perform highly in mathematics and 10% express the opposite view. Unfortunately, this confidence - in America and elsewhere - is not backed up by high achievement.Related: www.wisconsin2.orgAs shown by the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, the average US student with high confidence only scored 551 on the test. This is just half a standard deviation from the average score of 500. The phenomenon where many students believe that they are doing well in mathematics - while they are in fact lagging behind other nations - is even more evident in several European nations. In Sweden the average score of the self-identified high achievers is only 514. The sureness of Swedish students seems to rise from a progressive school system. As more focus is put on promoting self-expression and raising self-esteem than on actual knowledge gathering and hard work, students with only slightly higher international scores identify themselves as being high achievers.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Flipped learning has been around for awhile. It's a rethinking of the standard classroom model that puts students in the driver's seat. With the influx of technology into education, the flipped classroom model has really taken off. In fact, it's one of the hottest education trends we've been monitoring on Edudemic for the past 4 years. We published a useful guide to flipped classrooms many moons ago but were excited to see an updated visual guide to flipped classrooms from the fine folks at We Are Teachers. It details the basics of flipping, apps that you should use in a flipped classroom, and more.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
What happens when an educational game designer has young kids?
I'm at an educational conference in Wisconsin taking a break to write an article about the importance of early childhood education. Just as I'm about to start writing I get a call from my 4-year-old son."Daddy, this game you made is really hard! I've been trying to solve it for three days. I tried everything."
He's trying to get through KickBox, a multi-step thinking game I released for the iPad a while back.
"Isn't it cool when it's hard to figure something out?" I ask him.
"Yes Daddy, it's cool, but I need two more lasers. Or maybe a laser that can shoot in two directions at the same time. That would also work."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A grand experiment in letting parents seize control of their neighborhood schools is unfolding in an impoverished Mojave Desert town -- and lawmakers as far away as Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan are watching, and pondering the implications for troubled schools in their own states.Desert Trails Preparatory Academy in Adelanto, Calif., will open for the academic year on Monday as the first school in the nation to have been remade under a law that gives parents the power to take over a low-performing public school and fire the principal, dismiss teachers or bring in private management.
The law, known as "parent trigger", passed in California in 2010 and has since been adopted by six other states -- Connecticut, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio and Texas -- though parents have not yet taken over schools in any of them.
Parent Revolution, a nonprofit dedicated to organizing trigger campaigns, anticipates a surge of interest in other state legislatures as Desert Trails and three other California schools transformed by parent activism reopen over the next month. Parent empowerment has strong bipartisan support in many states -- a sign of the diminished clout of teachers unions, which oppose trigger laws but have not been able to stop their traditional allies in the Democratic Party from endorsing the concept.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Cameron McWhirter & Douglas Belkin:
As Loyola University New Orleans gears up for fall classes next month, the 101-year-old Jesuit University faces a crisis: There will be 25% fewer freshmen than the school had banked on."It was a pretty big hit," said Marc K. Manganaro, provost and vice president for academic affairs.
Getting a targeted number of accepted students to commit to a college's freshman class--known as the "yield"--has become more crucial for thousands of schools.
Enrollment rates for numerous smaller and lesser-known colleges and universities are falling this year, due to a decline in the U.S. college-age population, years of rising tuition, increasing popularity of Internet courses and a weak job market for recent graduates.
Now, along with preparing for fall courses, Loyola officials are agonizing about how to plug a $9.5 million shortfall in the school's $163 million annual budget, the result of 221 fewer freshmen than expected.
Since last May, the 5,000-student private college has imposed a hiring freeze, reduced faculty hours, hired outside firms to revamp its marketing and financial aid, and is setting up early-retirement packages for some faculty. If that isn't sufficient to fill the gap, the school may tap its $275 million endowment. Layoffs are "a last option," a spokeswoman said.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The best ideas to put children on a path to school success rarely come from Washington.President Barack Obama has put forward a plan to make high-quality preschool affordable for all children -- a vital step in putting young people on a path to a thriving middle class. As I've seen firsthand in a pair of visits in the Minneapolis area, that effort builds on the work of states such as Minnesota.
The day began at Pond Early Childhood Family Center in Bloomington, Minn., where I sat with students who sang a song, recited the alphabet and discussed some of their favorite words.
The visit was an inspiring example of great educators helping children get ready for kindergarten in a setting of joy and support.
Later, Gov. Mark Dayton, Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius and other leaders from business, the military, government and the clergy joined a town-hall discussion at Kennedy Senior High School.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Still, the average cost of in-state tuition, room and board ($12,110 a year last year) at a four-year public university, after scholarships and tax breaks, has risen 40% faster than economywide inflation over the past decade, the College Board estimates. Private schools are more expensive (average net cost $23,840), but their inflation-adjusted net price has climbed more slowly, at 9%.White House insiders say the president is frustrated that increases in federal aid have coincided with--some say, fueled--rising costs in higher education and steep cuts in state funding. "Over the four years of the Obama administration, federal support for higher ed rose by $20 billion and states cut by $10 billion," says David Bergeron, who recently retired after 30 years at the U.S. Education Department.
Increasingly one hears parallels in Washington being drawn between higher education and health care. Both are heavily financed by the federal government. Both are essential and inefficient. Both are characterized by century-old institutions and habits that may block technology from improving productivity.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
An intense man who liked to argue and was fond of helping other researchers, Mr. Tukey was also an amateur linguist who made significant contributions to the language of modern times. In a 1958 article in American Mathematical Monthly, he became the first person to define the programs on which electronic calculators ran, said Fred R. Shapiro, a librarian at Yale Law School who is editing a book on the origin of terms. Three decades before the founding of Microsoft, Mr. Tukey saw that ''software,'' as he called it, was gaining prominence. ''Today,'' he wrote at the time, it is ''at least as important'' as the '' 'hardware' of tubes, transistors, wires, tapes and the like.''Much more on John Tukey, here.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Start with the student population that was using the Udacity courses; many of them were high school students or in the military. These people were not substituting a MOOC for sitting in a college classroom; they were substituting them for not taking the class at all. Even if only 12 percent of students passed one of the classes, that represents a substantial number of people who might otherwise never have learned the material at all.But possibly even more important is that MOOCs can change the whole approach to learning. In a traditional college classroom, you put a small number of kids in a room and the professor attempts to herd every one of them past the finish line of a passing grade. (Then they mostly forget almost everything they've learned.) It's an intensive approach with a very low failure rate.
MOOCs will always have a very high failure rate. But that's OK, as long as the cost of trying is low. Don't have time for class right now? Drop out and come back when you have more time. Didn't master Taylor Polynomials this time around? Do the course again.
As I'll talk about in my forthcoming book, failure is often the best way to learn. More tries and more failures are almost always better than fewer tries and a lower failure rate. Letting people try a bunch of stuff, and fail at a lot of it, and then try again, is what makes the U.S. so innovative. We should welcome the ability to try this approach in education.
And it's not just cost that makes software a particularly effective way to harness the learning power of failure. Software is very good at targeting exactly where a student is going wrong. Unlike a lecturer, or a teaching assistant, software can identify exactly what fundamental concepts a student hasn't grasped, and let them practice over and over again until they master that concept. And practice, of course, makes perfect.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
As charter schools continue to proliferate across the country, a new study finds that they are offering benefits for students with disabilities.In a report out this week, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University compared the performance of students at charters with that of students attending traditional public schools in 25 states, the District of Columbia and in New York City. The analysis is an update to a similar report issued in 2009.
Overall, the study finds that charters are improving, particularly when it comes to often-underserved groups like poor and minority students and those with disabilities.
To assess students in special education, researchers compared those attending charters to students at traditional public schools by matching children who started out testing at the same level in order to mitigate the influence of their disability. Then, they looked at standardized test results from the same students years later to determine which schools they fared better in.
While gains in reading were similar for the two groups, the report found that special education students at charters saw greater advances in math, equivalent to 14 extra days of learning."The results reveal that the charter school sector is getting better on average and that charter schools are benefiting low-income, disadvantaged and special education students," said Margaret Raymond, director of the Stanford center that produced the analysis.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
When my mother-in-law recently gotan iPad for her elementary school classroom, her initial response to us was 'Really? How fast are they going to break that thing?!"
While not all kids are going to break your classroom technology, they're perhaps less likely than an adult to be careful with it. In the past we've looked at a few different options for protecting your classroom tablets, but we haven't ever really looked at how often they're actually damaged, and what damage is occurring. The handy infographic from Volume Cases below takes a look at classroom tablet damage, big concerns for schools deploying iPads, and its pretty interesting! Keep reading to learn more.Broken Tablet Facts
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A recent statement by the American Historical Association is generating heated debate about the rights and best interests of junior scholars, the market dynamics for scholarly monographs, and the competing needs of publishers, libraries, authors, and readers.In its statement, the AHA "strongly encourage(s) graduate programs and university libraries to adopt a policy that allows the embargoing of completed history PhD dissertations in digital form for as many as six years."
The Association goes on to explain:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The long enrollment boom that swelled American colleges -- and helped drive up their prices -- is over, with grim implications for many schools.
College enrollment fell 2 percent in 2012-13, the first significant decline since the 1990s, but nearly all of that drop hit for-profit and community colleges; now, signs point to 2013-14 being the year when traditional four-year, nonprofit colleges begin a contraction that will last for several years. The college-age population is dropping after more than a decade of sharp growth, and many adults who opted out of a forbidding job market and went back to school during the recession have been drawn back to work by the economic recovery.Hardest hit are likely to be colleges that do not rank among the wealthiest or most prestigious, and are heavily dependent on tuition revenue, raising questions about their financial health -- even their survival.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The integration of technology in learning is not new. In the 1980s, many schools had fancy calculators, Macintosh computers, and were even teaching students basic coding.
This kind of integration often happened at the lesson or activity level, meaning that it was often surface-level, tacked-on, and perhaps a bit superficial.The power of technology is difficult to fully leverage without curriculum-level integration. This means choosing tools, platforms, and policies based on standards, assessment, and instruction. A side benefit to this approach is the possibility of teacher collaboration and "same-pageness."
The following technology integration matrix we spotted over on zzwriter.com's excellent blog takes a look at this idea of embedding technology at the curriculum level. Across the top are the levels-similar to our "4 Stages:The Integration of Technology in Learning," while on the left side are descriptors of what each level might look like in the classroom.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Osceola --Their home is miles from anything that could charitably be called a city. They grew up not on a golf course, but on a lake in northwestern Wisconsin, the kind of tranquil place where people vacation to get away from it all, where the call of a loon carries across the sparkling water on a quiet midsummer morning.It's a beautiful place, to be sure. But it's kind of, um, in the middle of, uh...
"Nowhere?" Casey Danielson says, and the rest of the Danielson family laughs with her. "Yes, it is. It's in the middle of nowhere."
It's almost inconceivable that not one, not two, but three exceptional young golfers could come from a place so far removed from the best courses and top-flight competition, not to mention a year-round golf season or an airport.
But this is where Lindsay, Charlie and Casey Danielson grew up. This is home.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Match Education organization has developed a reputation over the past 12 years for operating several high-quality charter schools throughout the Boston area. Now the organization is garnering national attention for its approach to training future teachers. It all began in 2008, when Match officials opened a two-year teacher training program for graduate students, known as Match Teacher Residency (MTR). The MTR program only recently graduated its fifth group of students, but it already has a reputation among school leaders for producing the best and most effective first-year teachers in the nation.
"Their teachers are the best from any graduate school of education in America," says Scott Given, CEO of Unlocking Potential, an organization dedicated to turning around failing schools. "When we have teacher resumes from the grad schools at Harvard, Stanford and Match, we move fastest to consider the Match candidate. It's not even a close call."
Other education leaders apparently share Given's enthusiasm for Match-trained teachers. According to Match officials, all MTR graduates get hired by a high-performing school (usually a charter school) immediately after they complete the program. School leaders seek out MTR graduates not only because they're well-prepared for the classroom, but because they're likely to stay there. Of the 110 individuals who have completed the MTR program, 90 percent of them are still in the classroom. That's a stunning accomplishment - especially in light of new National Council on Teacher Quality analysis that concludes most teacher colleges constitute "an industry of mediocrity" that cranks out thousands of graduates unprepared for the classroom.
The traditional approach to teacher training
So how is Match succeeding in producing effective teachers when so many other programs are failing? To understand that, it's necessary to understand how the typical teacher prep program is designed. The problems begin with the selection process. Most university-based schools of education will accept almost anyone as a student, as long as they meet modest academic requirements and have a valid student loan account.
Once enrolled, the typical teachers-to-be spend the first couple of semesters reading books and writing papers about the various theories behind classroom management, instructional techniques and discipline. They also spend an alarming amount of time learning how to bring left wing social justice causes into the classroom. After that, they serve part of a semester as a practicum in an actual classroom. This practice mostly involves observing and journaling about how a professional educator handles a classroom. If they're lucky, the future teachers will eventually be asked to help out with various tasks, such as grading papers or helping struggling students.
It's only during their last semester that the future teachers are allowed to actually lead a classroom on their own. During those few months, the student teachers get to practice the various theories they've been learning about in class. Once they pass their student teaching experience - as determined by feedback from their supervising teacher and observations from their professors - they'll receive their teaching certificate. As a result of their limited hands-on training, most of these beginning teachers will stumble and fumble their way through their first years on the job. Nearly half of them will become so frustrated and overwhelmed that they'll walk away from the profession within five years.
'The only program that kicks people out'
Compare that to Match Education's approach. Like other leaders of elite organizations, Match officials are extremely selective of whom they let into their program. Match Teacher Residency applicants are carefully screened to ensure they possess the academic skills and mental toughness necessary to become successful, "no excuses" teachers. Despite attracting interest from some of the nation's top college graduates, Match officials invite less than 10 percent of all applicants to join the MTR program.
Immediately upon entering the program, the future teachers (called "residents") serve as tutors at one of Match Education's Boston-area charter schools. Four days a week, the trainees work closely with a small group of struggling students. On Fridays and Saturdays during that first year, the residents also take graduate-level classes in which they're provided with very specific ways on how to best manage a classroom, teach math and English, and use student data to improve their teaching. These classes also help to advance Match's vision of social justice, which is to help disadvantaged students flourish academically.
Match residents also participate in weekly teaching simulations. The Match website explains this unique practice: "Residents take turns teaching short lessons to one another, with a (professor) watching. As one resident teaches, the others act as students. They answer questions (sometimes correctly, sometimes not), try to pay attention (but sometimes fail), sometimes misbehave intentionally, and do other things that 'real students' tend to do." After each six-minute practice session, the resident receives very specific feedback from the professor and their peers about areas in which they need to improve. Residents participate in 80 of these practice sessions.
Halfway through their first year, MTR students' skills are put to the test in one final high-stakes classroom teaching simulation. If a resident demonstrates a basic level of competence in managing a classroom and instructing students, he or she is allowed to move on to the student teaching phase of the program. And if a resident doesn't meet expectations? "This is the only program that kicks people out for not having adequate skills," says Scott McCue, MTR's chief operating officer, "though it's never been more than 10 percent who are asked to leave." Another 20 percent may leave the program, for various reasons.
The majority of Match residents move on to student teaching, which lasts from January through May of that first year, and resumes in July for a special summer school session. Each student teacher is observed on a daily basis by their MTR instructor. By the end of their student teaching and the simulations, Match trainees have received hundreds of hours of experience in the classroom - and a full-time job offer from a high-performing, high-needs urban school.
In a promotional video, one MTR graduate explains how her extensive training prepared her to handle whatever comes her way. "Because of that, I know there is nothing that can go wrong in a classroom that can throw me off my guard," the unidentified teacher says. "I'm like, 'Seen that, done that. What's next? Bring it on.'"
'Obsessively data-driven'
Landing a paid, full-time teaching position doesn't mean residents are finished with the MTR program. Before MTR students are awarded their Master's Degree in Effective Teaching from Match, they must first demonstrate their effectiveness over the course of a full school year. To determine this, Match Education officials rely heavily on multiple forms of data - from student growth (as measured through test scores), feedback from student surveys, and performance scores given by school principals.
"We are obsessively data-driven," McCue says. According to McCue, the biggest source of data comes from "blind evaluations" conducted by third-party observers. The observers visit multiple classrooms in a school and rate each teacher's performance. The evaluations are considered "blind" because the observer doesn't know which teachers are from Match and which aren't. Once an MTR-trainee passes all the quality checkpoints, he or she receives a degree - and their employer receives an educator who can be counted on to produce strong academic results from students.
'Everything is replicable'
The Match Teacher Residency is undeniably intense, but the program's rigorous demands serve a greater purpose - namely, to close the achievement gap that exists between America's white and minority students. The Match website notes that "MTR graduates are expected to teach for two years in a school that serves a majority of high-poverty students." Graduates can choose to work in a traditional public school setting, but Match officials purposely gear the training "for a specific type of urban charter school that tends to offer a very different experience for teachers and students than the surrounding district schools." "Because of that, we strongly believe that our graduates will be most effective in these types of charter schools," the website reads.
But could the Match approach be adopted by traditional teacher colleges? Kate Walsh, president of National Center on Teacher Quality, thinks so. "Everything is replicable to some degree," Walsh tells EAGnews. She especially likes Match's practice of having future teachers "ease into the profession" by serving as tutors. "Those teachers are learning in a responsible way how to enter a classroom," Walsh says.
Match's "how-to" approach to teacher training won't appeal to those who believe teaching is an art, not a science. McCue understands that criticism, but firmly believes "there's more science behind becoming a really effective first-year teacher" than art. "But we're not experts on becoming a master, 10-year teacher. Maybe there's more art to that," McCue says. "Our baseline is that nobody is especially good at this job when they start. But with a data-driven approach, teachers can get real good, real fast."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Peter Cookson, Jr., via a kind reader's email
ES: What are your thoughts about evaluating teachers by their students' standardized test scores? What's missing from the public debate?Related: Wisconsin adopts its first teacher content knowledge licensing requirement - for elementary English candidates, from Massachusetts (MTEL).LD-H: Teacher-bashing infuriates me. The commitment of individuals who go into teaching in this country is extraordinary. And many teachers are highly able. We do have a wide range of access to knowledge for teachers, just like we have a wide range of access to knowledge for students. That means that teachers are left with one hand tied behind their backs if they aren't given the knowledge and the skills they need.
Evaluation has to begin at the very beginning of the career. Finland's rise to the top of the international rankings is typically attributed by the Finns to the deep training of teachers in a highly professionalized master's degree program. [In Finland education] students have strong content background, and they study teaching methods while they spend a year in a model school, pursuing a clinically supported internship. In addition, there is a lot of attention to learning how to teach special education students and to personalize teaching for all students. The idea is if you can teach kids who struggle to learn, then you can teach anyone. It really pays off. Finally, teachers learn how to use and conduct research, and [each writes] a thesis in which he or she researches an educational issue as part of the master's degree.
In Finland there is very little formal evaluation that happens after teachers get into the profession because the bar is so high at the beginning, and there are so many supports to get better. There are some analysts who have claimed, "Oh, if you fire the bottom 10 percent of teachers every year, you'll get educational outcomes like those in Finland." In fact, that is not how Finland gets high educational outcomes. You can't fire your way to Finland. You actually have to build the capacity of teachers.
We ought to be having a conversation about performance assessments for entering the field. [American Federation of Teachers President] Randi Weingarten has called for a "bar exam" for teachers. I've been involved in building teacher performance assessments in which beginning teachers demonstrate that they can plan a curriculum, teach it, produce and evaluate student learning. We find that these assessments improve teaching and improve the quality of teacher education.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Whenever policymakers argue over ways to lower the budget deficit, one of the most popular ideas on both sides of the aisle is "means testing" programs like Medicare or Social Security. Instead of cutting everybody's benefits, the idea is to reduce them for the rich and middle classes while leaving them intact for the poor.In theory, means-tested programs should be more efficient and progressive because they don't spend money on those who can pay their own way. But one concern that dogs these proposals is that the programs will lose support and funding as soon as budgets get tight. As the saying often goes: "Programs for the poor are poor programs."
Over the last several years, we've witnessed a high-profile example of that principle in action. Inadvertently, America's higher education system has become a massive lab experiment, the results of which suggest that means testing social programs can ultimately hurt the very people it is meant to protect.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Stephen Foley and Vivianne Rodrigues
Local governments across the US face potential reviews of their credit ratings and higher funding costs if a financial restructuring proposal for Detroit is endorsed by a bankruptcy judge.Rating agencies and institutional investors in municipal bonds say they will reconsider their views on so-called "general obligation" (GO) bonds, if Detroit is allowed to treat the owners of these securities as unsecured creditors.
The largest city bankruptcy in US history is being watched closely by people across the $3.7tn municipal bond market, for fear it could upturn long-held assumptions about the relative safety of GO bonds.
Fitch, the credit rating agency, warned it could re-evaluate its approach to GO bonds, depending on the outcome of Detroit's restructuring, and Moody's and Standard & Poor's both said they were monitoring the case closely.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Only 35 percent of U.S. 8th graders were identified as proficient in math by the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). According to the most recent calculations available, the United States stands at the 32nd rank in math among nations in the industrialized world. In reading, the U.S. ranks 17th in the world (see "Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?" features, Fall 2011).The low performance of U.S. students has been attributed to low expectations set by states under the 2002 federal law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which expects all students to reach full proficiency by 2014. In this, the fifth in a series of Education Next reports, we compare the proficiency standards set by each state to those set by NAEP, which has established its proficiency bar at levels comparable to those of international student assessments.
Most states have set their proficiency bars at much lower levels, perhaps because it causes less embarrassment when more students can make it across the proficiency bar, or because it was the easiest way for states to comply with the NCLB requirement to bring all students up to full proficiency.
Unhappy with the low level and wide variation in state standards, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, with the financial backing of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the political support of the U.S. Department of Education (ED), formed a consortium in 2009 that invited each state to join in an effort to set Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Those states that take that step and institute other education reforms improve their chances of receiving an ED waiver of onerous NCLB regulations. That waiver, which has been granted to 37 states and the District of Columbia, provides a strong incentive to participate in CCSS. (Virginia is the only state to receive a waiver without adopting the standards.)
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
You may have heard that lawmakers in Washington struck a deal last week to preserve the current low student-loan rates for at least another year. You may not have heard that for fiscal year 2013 the federal government booked $32 million in revenues--profits, if it were a private entity--for every $100 million in loans for students. The year before, it booked revenues of $4.4 billion on its $233 billion mortgage-insurance program for low-income families.These high returns make it appear that Uncle Sam is an unusually skilled lender. In reality, they are a testament to the fantasy world of government accounting.
The federal government books all future interest paid by a borrower as income in the year the loan is made--and does the same for all current and future costs associated with servicing the loans. The phony accounting problem arises because Congress forces the federal government to underestimate the default rate for its loans, as well as the cost of administering them.
These underestimates make it look like the loans are profitable for taxpayers. Instead, the government will ultimately lend more money to borrowers than borrowers will repay.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Student college loan default rates have nearly doubled in recent years. The three-year default rate exceeds 13 percent nationally. Tracking and reporting default rates is a crucial means of monitoring how well higher education dollars are spent. Yet, the way default data is gathered, measured, and reported by the federal government clouds institutional accountability. Limitations in the data--from not including which types of students are more likely to default on their loans to which majors have more defaults--make it even more difficult for prospective students and their parents to make the best decisions about college loans.In Debt and In the Dark: It's Time for Better Information on Student Loan Defaults by Education Sector Research Director Andrew Gillen examines default rates at American colleges and demonstrates how using input-adjusted rates can indicate if schools are doing better--or worse--than expected in preparing their students for success.
By combining federal data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and the Student Financial Aid database, Gillen illustrates through a series of charts, how adjusting for just two risk factors affects the range of default rates among colleges with similar students and provides a fuller picture of how well certain schools are preparing students for life after college. Gillen also finds that pairing a school's default rate with its graduation rate gives an even clearer understanding of college outcomes. These changes would be an immediate improvement to an existing higher education accountability system.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
15mb mp3 audio.
Superintendent Cheatham's slides follow (4MB PDF version). I hope that the prominence of Madison's disastrous reading scores - slide 1 - indicates that this is job one for our $15,000ish/student organization.
A few of the Superintendent's words merit a bit of analysis:
1. "What will be different this time?" That rhetoric is appropriate for our Madison schools. I compiled a number of notes and links on this subject, here.
2. "Ready to partner with local businesses and other organizations". Great idea. The substance of this would certainly be a change after the Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school debacle (Urban League) and, some years ago, the rejection of Promega's kind offer to partner on Madison Middle Schools 2000.
3. Mentions "all Madison schools are diverse". I don't buy that. The range of student climate across all schools is significant, from Van Hise and Franklin to LakeView, Mendota and Sandburg. Madison school data by income summary. I have long been astonished that this wide variation continues. Note that Madison's reading problems are not limited to African-American students.
4. Mentioned Long Beach and Boston as urban districts that have narrowed the achievement gap. Both districts offer a variety of school governance models, which is quite different than Madison's long-time "one size fits all approach".
5. Dave Baskerville (www.wisconsin2.org) asked a question about benchmarking Madison students vs. the world, rather than Green Bay and Milwaukee. Superintendent Cheatham responded positively to that inquiry. Interestingly, the Long Beach schools prominently display their status as a "top 5 school system worldwide".
6. "Some teachers and principals have not been reviewed for as long as 7 years". This points to the crux of hard decision making. Presumably, we are at this point because such reviews make no difference given rolling administrator contracts and a strong union umbrella (or floor depending on your point of view). Thus, my last point (below) about getting on with the hard decisions which focus the organization on job number one: reading.
Pat Schneider and Matthew DeFour summarize the Superintendent's press release and appearance.
Finally, I found it a bit curious that the Superintendent is supporting spending (and related property tax growth) for current programs in light of the larger strategy discussed today along with the recent "expert review". The review stated that the "Madison School District has resources to close achievement gap"
This would be a great time to eliminate some programs such as the partially implemented Infinite Campus system.
Superintendent Cheatham's plan indicates that choices will be made so that staff and resources can focus on where they are most needed. I wholeheartedly agree. There is no point in waiting and wasting more time and money. Delay will only increase the cost of her "strategy tax".
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"This [film] is about patient and dedicated teaching, about learning to look and visualize in order to design, about the importance of drawing. It is one designer's personal experience of issues that face all designers, expressed with sympathy and encouragement, and illustrated with examples of Inge [Druckrey]'s own work and that of grateful generations of her students. There are simple phrases that give insights into complex matters, for example that letterforms are 'memories of motion.' Above all, it is characteristic of Inge that in this examination of basic principles the word 'beautiful' is used several times."Matthew Carter
Type Designer, 2010 MacArthur Fellow
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Sandra Stotsky, via a kind reader's email:
The part of public education that has received the least attention for reform is the most important: whom our education schools admit and how they are prepared to be teachers, administrators, education researchers, and education policy makers. Although there is very little high quality research on these topics, useful information for reforming education schools came from the massive review undertaken by the National Mathematics Advisory Panel for its report in 2008.It found no relationship between student achievement and traditional teacher education programs, certification status, and mentoring and induction programs. That means that teachers who have completed a traditional teacher preparation program, hold a teaching license, and have participated in an induction program get no higher student performance on average than other teachers.
Researchers have found no relationship between student achievement and master's degree programs in education, most of which are for those already holding a teaching license from an undergraduate program.
In addition, the Panel found almost no evidence that professional development programs increase student achievement, whether or not they increase teachers' knowledge of the subject they teach. Nor is student achievement related to whether prospective teachers graduate from a traditional teacher education program or an alternative program.However, the Panel did find teachers' knowledge of the subject they teach significantly related to student achievement. In other words, the more academically competent the teacher is, the more students learn. That finding wouldn't surprise anyone who thinks content matters.
There may be other characteristics of an effective teacher, but so far no credible body of research has told us what they are. Part of the problem lies with educational research itself. Over 16,000 potentially relevant studies were located by Abt Associates for the Panel's consideration. But Abt judged only a tiny number worthy of review.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The disappointing results from San Jose State's experiment with online courses shouldn't be interpreted to mean that such courses can't help students. But the classes the university offered in collaboration with online provider Udacity were practically a model of how to do online education badly: rushed into existence and sloppily overseen. No one was even aware that some students who had signed up for the classes lacked reliable access to computers. The one thing the college did well was monitor the results of the three pilot courses and call a timeout when failure rates proved unacceptably high.It's hard to draw conclusions about one of the three courses because it enrolled a mix of students from varied backgrounds, while the comparable classes held on campus enrolled regular San Jose State students. But that wasn't the case for the other two courses, and overall, the results of this much-ballyhooed venture were startlingly bad: At least 74% of students passed the campus-based courses, while no more than 51% passed any of the Udacity courses.
Online courses can have tangible benefits. They overcome the limitations of brick and mortar; theoretically, at least, there is no limit to the number of seats. And they are a boon for working students who need flexibility in their schedules. But a rush to offer them, which Gov. Jerry Brown has been pressing for, would mean higher rates of failure, costing students time and money they can ill afford.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Scott Aikin admits that he's "a very conservative pedagogue." That's why the author and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University says that, this fall, he's asking his students to keep their laptops at home. Instead, he wants their full attention for his main method of teaching: lecturing.
"I call it 'the chalk and talk.' I have a piece of chalk and I talk. I fill the board with notes and sometimes diagram things or map out an argument. Students are allowed to stop and ask questions or challenge at any time, and I'll make good on answers. That's it. Students only need pens and paper for the class (if not their books, too)," he said.Aikin's method appears beyond retro -- some would even call it obsolete -- but Aikin says that's fine with him. He finds being the "sage on the stage" to be most effective. "The most content-full and involved classes from my college (and even graduate) days were primarily lecture courses," he said. "Everything I do as a lecturer now I've cribbed from those I thought effective in front of a class."
Studies show lecturing to be an effective tool for transferring information: for example, a 2011 study of classroom teaching methods performed by Guido Schwerdt of Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance and Amelie C. Wuppermann at the University of Mainz, Germany, found that larger amounts of class time lecturing increased junior high math and science students' test scores over time spent on problem-solving activities. But the majority of higher education seems to be moving in the opposite direction, toward project-based and student-led work, especially for time spent in class.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
What does it mean to be gifted in the United States?A national survey in 2011 found that the predominant method of assessment, by far, is the administration of IQ tests and standardized academic tests. At least 34 states, including California, consider such tests an indication of giftedness; they are mandated by at least 16 states. In contrast, only nine states require the use of tests that measure "creativity" and even fewer require the assessment of leadership, motivation or a talent for the performing arts. Although no state permits a single IQ score to determine gifted eligibility, 18 states set strict cutoff scores, and testing is typically a one-shot deal: You're either gifted or you're not, for the rest of your life.
On every count, these policies profoundly limit the intellectual and innovative possibilities of all students.
I can attest to just how limiting the process is. As a child, I was diagnosed with an auditory disorder that made it difficult for me to process speech in real time. I repeated third grade. Then, after an anxiety-ridden IQ testing session in fourth grade, I was sent to a school for students with learning disabilities. By the time I reentered public school in sixth grade, the label "special ed" was hard to overcome, despite my yearning for more intellectual challenges. If it weren't for a couple of teachers (thank you Mrs. Jeuell and Mrs. Acton!) who considered the kid rather than the system's preconceptions, I might never have earned a doctorate at Yale.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Javier Hernandez, via a kind reader's email
Now Mr. Vallas, a veteran of big-city education battles, faces the once-unimaginable prospect that he will be driven out of town by summer's end. A retired judge filed a lawsuit arguing that his lack of an education degree makes him unfit for the office, despite his years of experience running other school districts. Last month, a superior court judge agreed, and now Mr. Vallas has appealed the case to the Connecticut Supreme Court.Much more on Paul Vallas, here, including a recent Madison appearance.The battle in Bridgeport highlights the divisiveness of change in American education. Critics of the existing system are pushing centralized control, weaker teacher tenure protections and expanded charter schools, and some have made installing superintendents with backgrounds outside of education a priority, causing rifts in many districts.
Arne Duncan, the federal education secretary, said the opposition to Mr. Vallas was "beyond ludicrous." He said too many school districts were afraid of innovation, clinging to "archaic ideas."
"This, to me, is just another painfully obvious, crystal-clear example of people caught in an old paradigm," Mr. Duncan said in an interview. "This is the tip of the iceberg."
Mr. Vallas was hired in late 2011 to much fanfare: a nationally known advocate of change in education, with stints in Philadelphia, Chicago and New Orleans on his résumé, coming to the aid of a modest school district mired in budget cuts.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
James Feyrer, Dimitra Politi, David N. Weil:
Iodine deficiency is the leading cause of preventable mental retardation in the world today. The condition, which was common in the developed world until the introduction of iodized salt in the 1920s, is connected to low iodine levels in the soil and water. We examine the impact of salt iodization on cognitive outcomes in the US by taking advantage of this natural geographic variation. Salt was iodized over a very short period of time beginning in 1924. We use military data collected during WWI and WWII to compare outcomes of cohorts born before and after iodization, in localities that were naturally poor and rich in iodine. We find that for the one quarter of the population most deficient in iodine this intervention raised IQ by approximately one standard deviation. Our results can explain roughly one decade's worth of the upwardtrend in IQ in the US (the Flynn Effect). We also document a large increase in thyroid related deaths following the countrywide adoption of iodized salt, which affected mostly older individuals in localities with high prevalence of iodine deficiency.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Cheatham said Madison schools have already implemented a variety of initiatives to increase student achievement but have not seen "measurable improvements."Much more on the Madison School District's planned spending & property tax increases via the 2013-2014 budget, here."It isn't for lack of working very hard and doing a lot of things at once," she said. "I feel pretty confident the reason that hasn't occurred is because of the lack of long-term vision."
Cheatham recommended the board focus on strengthening existing programs and infrastructure, which would not require new expenditures.
"I want to be more strategic and thoughtful about this than how we did it in the past," she added.
Related: Analysis: Madison School District has resources to close achievement gap.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
There is not an ounce of fat on the wiry frame of Abdul Wahid, and no wonder.After he finishes his morning work shift, he walks 10 miles down mountain trails in northern Afghanistan to the first road, where he catches a bus for the last couple of miles to the teacher training institute in Salang. He walks back up the mountain another 10 miles to get home, arriving well after dark, just in time to rest up for his day job.
In his determination to formally qualify as a teacher, Mr. Wahid, 33, exemplifies many of the gains for Afghan education in recent years. "It's worth it, because this is my future," he said.
But he also personifies how far the efforts here have yet to go. Mr. Wahid's day job is being the principal of the high school in his village, Unamak. Though he has only a high school diploma, he is the best educated teacher that his 800 students have.
It is widely accepted that demand among Afghans for better schooling -- and the actual opportunity to attend, particularly for girls -- is at its highest point in decades. For Western officials seeking to show a positive legacy from a dozen years of war and heavy investment in Afghanistan, improvements in education have provided welcome news.
But for those who are working to make it happen -- local Afghan officials, aid workers, teachers and students -- there are concerns that much of the promise of improvement is going unfulfilled, and major problems are going unsolved.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A small, crowded building set quite unpretentiously (for an American high school), [is] in a neighborhood once almost entirely Jewish, now almost entirely black....This is not, however, a slum school. No place in America is positively good for a black, but [this Midwestern city] seems to be about the least bad. The parents of many of these students make a lower-middle-class income or better, the atmosphere in Green's halls is as free as it is in Scarsdale's, and the attitude toward education seems to have no more than the usual degree of suspicion. Still, these children are black, part of an actively repressed minority group. As seen on a very brief visit, Green would seem to be considerable of an accomplishment. One history class provided evidence that students here are learning more than just social studies: when the teacher made reference to "The Mar-see-yay," a mutter of "Mar-say-yez" rose from around the borders of the room.The teacher in this American History class is a hawk-nosed, lean crew-cut young man named [Leon Pierson] ... a teacher with a personal devotion to history. He balances American History around the Civil War for teaching purposes, but he does so out of respect, not contempt, for his black students. He begins the class by handing out ''a very short reading list--on which there will be no comments." Then he writes four names on the board:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah and Kim Geiger:
Citing a $1 billion budget deficit, Chicago Public Schools will lay off more than 2,000 employees, more than 1,000 of them teachers, the district said Thursday night.About half of the 1,036 teachers being let go are tenured. The latest layoffs, which also include 1,077 school staff members, are in addition to 855 employees -- including 420 teachers -- who were laid off last month as a result of the district's decision to close 49 elementary schools and a high school program.
CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll said the district was "scraping the bottom" of reserves to provide financial relief and had made cuts in other spending before making layoffs.
"We're not going to be able to cut our way out of this crisis," Carroll said. "Our revenues are simply not keeping in line with our spending increases."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Gates talked a lot about the issue throughout the Q&A session, and his hypothesis is simple: Education in the United States is broken -- it has the highest higher-education dropout rate among rich countries -- and MOOCs can help fix it. In fact, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested a lot of money into the education field (to the chagrin of some experts), including strong support of Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC, startups such as the Khan Academy.Gates acknlowedged during the session that some of his work might have unintended, negative consequences, but not this one. "In the education space," he responded to a question from the audience, "I frankly don't see that much of a downside."
Online courses can give students access to new areas of study that can align their skills with high-paying jobs. They can even help physical institutions personalize student learning through gathering data about attendance, engagement, real-time understanding of the subject matter and other things. They can give those few elite minds responsible for such great inventions even easier access to new knowledge.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Wisconsin Association of School Boards, via a kind reader's email:
The 2013-15 state budget act provides for state categorical aid payments to each district of $75 per pupil in the first year and $150 per pupil in 2014-15 (reflecting $75 from the first year + an additional $75) and each year thereafter. ("Categorical aid" in this case simply means that it is received outside the revenue cap (as distinguished from general aid, which is under the revenue cap).Much more on the Madison School District's planned spending & property tax increases via the 2013-2014 budget, here.This per-pupil aid may be spent irrespective of the district's revenue limit and can be used for any purpose. (Unlike most other categorical aid, it is not tied to any specific student population or program.) This aid will be received by all districts and is likely to be welcomed by high per-pupil property wealth districts that receive little general aid.
In addition, the 2013-15 state budget act provides for a $75 per-pupil increase in the revenue limit in each year. These increases add on top of one another (so $75 gets added to the base in the first year and another $75 on top gets added of that in the second year--for a total of $130 million in new revenue limit authority statewide). Note: The budget act makes no provision for a revenue limit adjustment in 2015-16 or thereafter.
Together, it is argued that the revenue limit adjustment and the per-pupil categorical aid will provide districts with an additional $150 per pupil in each year of the biennium. (While this $150 figure doesn't equate to the inflationary adjustment contemplated by the WASB resolutions, it compares quite favorably with the $0 per-pupil "budget freeze" proposed in the budget as originally introduced.) Half of this increase ($75 per pupil) comes from an increase in revenue limits, while the remainder ($75 in the first year, and that $75 plus an additional $75 in the second year) comes from the new categorical aid that will benefit all school districts.
(Technically, the increase in spendable resources for most districts is actually $100 per pupil in the first year because the $50 per-pupil payment received by districts that levied to the max in 2012-13 was one-time money and goes away. For the 27 or so districts that didn't qualify for the state matching money, the increase in additional resources over 2012-13 resources actually IS $150 per pupil. See Legislative Fiscal Bureau memo on this subject.)
Significantly, the per-pupil categorical aid that is provided to every district is permanent and will continue in 2014-15 and each school year thereafter. It is funded through a sum sufficient GPR appropriation, making it the first sum sufficient appropriation for public school districts since the state abandoned the statutory commitment to two-thirds funding in the 2003-05 state budget bill. Because this is a sum sufficient appropriation, the payments to individual school districts won't be affected (e.g., pro-rated) by changes in statewide membership. The per-pupil amount is, in effect, guaranteed.) And unlike the $50 per-pupil categorical aid that was provided in 2012-13 to 397 school districts, there is no requirement that a district levy a certain amount in order to qualify for this categorical aid.
The calculation is also straightforward--each district aid is determined by using its three-year rolling average membership to calculate the number of pupils in each district times $75 per pupil. Thus, the $75 per student categorical aid payment in the coming year will be calculated on a current-year basis (using the current year membership count plus the two previous years). As a result, the DPI will have to wait until each district has completed its third Friday in September count in order to complete the calculation. School boards and school administrators who have to hold their annual meeting and get the levy approved by district electors by Oct. 31 should be able to calculate their district's allotment.
Finally, the $75 per-pupil payment won't be made by the state until the fourth Monday in March, so it isn't likely to solve districts' biggest cash flow issues, but will provide a needed boost.
Related: Analysis: Madison School District has resources to close achievement gap.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
San Jose State University is suspending courses it has been offering through Udacity that involved both high school and San Jose State students, due to low course-passing rates as compared to traditional classes, and plans to start things up again in the spring. How do you feel about this?udacity
We felt we got these kids, they worked really hard, and they stayed with it, but they didn't get the skills they needed to be proficient. We asked them why, and they said they needed more time. Literally, this is a truly joint decision; I'm totally behind it because I feel the objective must be to give students a great education.How has online learning changed since you started Udacity?
We've evolved the MOOC concept into one that really helps people throughout the course to complete the course. The most recent completion rates in pilots we've been running have been 85 percent, as opposed to 5 percent or 4 percent, which is common in MOOC-land.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Bay Ridge is geographically close to the hipster Brooklyn neighbourhoods of Park Slope and Williamsburg but could not be more culturally different. It is a world away from the financial district in Manhattan, the epicentre of the September 11 2001 attacks. But Brooklyn is also home to the largest group of people in the US who trace their lineage back to the Arab world, according to census data. And while the heightened sense of a threat from Islamic terrorism that existed post-attacks may have gone, it has given way to a persistent, low-level paranoia that pervades the everyday lives of the million-plus Muslim Arab Americans living here and throughout the country.Islamophobia in the US is becoming entrenched, according to some Muslim leaders. "We're living in one of the most hostile civic environments for the Muslim community," says Faiza Ali, a community organiser at the Arab American Association in Bay Ridge. "And it's gotten worse since 9/11."
Hate-crime statistics collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation showed a sharp spike in violence against Muslims after the 2001 attacks, which levelled out until 2009, when it started ticking up again. There are always problems following events carried out by Muslims, such as the Boston Marathon bombings in March.
The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reports that in 2011, 21 per cent of the religion-based complaints it received were from Muslims - although they comprise less than 1 per cent of the population.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
E-reader use is on the rise, and the textbook market is shifting toward customizable digital products. Are students ditching print in favor of electronic alternatives for their academic reading? A forthcoming small study from the City University of New York asked that question and found that, like previous generations, at least some Millennials still prefer reading long texts and academic selections in print.The study, "Student Reading Practices in Print and Electronic Media," to be published in September 2014 in the journal College & Research Libraries, tracked the reading habits of 17 CUNY students through diary entries, interviews, and discussion groups over the course of two weeks. The students were mostly juniors, seniors, and graduate students, and most were younger than 25.
The research found that they almost always used e-book readers, mobile devices, and tablet computers for nonacademic reading but relied on paper printouts for academic reading.
The study's author, Nancy M. Foasberg, a humanities librarian at CUNY's Queens College, acknowledged the difficulties in generalizing from such a small sample. But the takeaway is that "the students in the study really wanted to use print to read for serious academic purposes," Ms. Foasberg said. They reported that computers and e-books were "fine for less serious work," but when they "really wanted to get work done, they gravitated to print."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The last word Watson Dollar spoke before autism erased his ability to do so was "lights."The chubby cheeked toddler lay in his father's arms as anesthesia, administered for an ear-tube surgery, dimmed his consciousness. Head lolling back, body going limp, Watson gazed at the fluorescent lamps above him, uttering the one-syllable noun.
Then he closed his eyes and never spoke again. That was 20 years ago.
In the two months between Halloween and Christmas of 1992, Watson had lost almost of all of his 150-word vocabulary along with an interest in the world.
His parents initially failed to notice the change, chalking up the subtle signs to stubbornness or fatigue or the ever-changing nature of a developing child.
By New Year's, though, the difference was both inescapable and worrisome.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Most parents with children in public schools do not support recent changes in education policy, from closing low-performing schools to shifting public dollars to charter schools to private school vouchers, according to a new poll to be released Monday by the American Federation of Teachers.The poll, conducted by Democratic polling firm Hart Research Associates, surveyed 1,000 parents this month and found that most would rather see their neighborhood schools strengthened and given more resources than have options to enroll their children elsewhere.
AFT President Randi Weingarten is expected to highlight the poll's findings during a speech Monday at the union's annual meeting in Washington. The AFT is the nation's second-largest teachers union and represents school employees in most of the major urban school districts.
In the speech, Weingarten will call for a reinvestment in public schools and say that education reform hasn't worked and isn't what parents want. "Decades of top-down edicts, mass school closures, privatization and test fixation with sanctions, instead of support, haven't moved the needle -- not in the right direction, at least," Weingarten says in remarks from the speech provided to The Washington Post. "You've heard their refrain: competition, closings, choice. Underlying that is a belief that disruption is good and stability is bad."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
ties and states are sinking under the burden of debt brought about by public service union contracts. How did it get this way and what can be done about it?Video.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
It can be difficult to learn mathematics on your own from textbooks, and I often wish universities videotaped their mathematics courses and distributed them for free online. Fortunately, some universities do that (albeit to a very limited extent), and I hope we can compile here a list of all the mathematics courses one can view in their entirety online.Please only post videos of entire courses; that is, a speaker giving one lecture introducing a subject to the audience should be off-limits, but a sequence of, say, 30 hour-long videos, each of which is a lecture delivered in a class would be very much on-topic.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
On top of it all, the most challenging piece for me was how underprepared I actually was. I graduated from high school in the top 10% of my class. But as a freshman at DePauw, I realized I was living the educational inequity that exists in our country.I'll never forget Intro to Philosophy. Some of my classmates would spend 45 minutes studying for a test and get A's, while I would spend hours at the library studying every night, and still wound up with a C+ in that class. I started to lose confidence. Self-doubt began to haunt me.
But with the support and deep belief of my parents and my mentor, Joe Disque, I overcame it. In fact, I conquered it. I came out the other side with a newfound sense of social responsibility.
And that led me to Teach For America. In 1998 I joined the corps in Phoenix where I taught for 3 years. Getting to know my kids and their families inspired me to make this my life's work.
Later--I saw alumni friends create a new normal in founding and leading schools where I grew up. These schools expected that 100% of their mostly first generation college students would go to and expected to get through college within 6 years. This inspired me, and I have never turned back.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Harvard political scientist Marshall Ganz's book, "Why David Sometimes Wins," uses the Biblical David vs. Goliath story as a metaphor about the battle for social justice. Once in a while, writes Ganz, a long-time union organizer, the have-nots conquer the haves, but they have to be more clever and resourceful.I recently saw a documentary film, "Go Public: A Day in the Life of an American School District," that is like the slingshot in the ongoing war over public education. This scrappy documentary celebrates public schools without ignoring its problems. It is an antidote to misleading films like "Waiting for Superman" and "Won't Back Down," which view traditional public schools as failures and charter schools and corporate-oriented "privatization" as the solution to what ails public education.
Not surprisingly, "Waiting for Superman" and "Won't Back Down" were funded and promoted by the same right-wing billionaires and corporate foundations that have been waging war against public schools. Those two films are part of the propaganda and political arsenal assembled by what Diane Ravitch calls the "Billionaires Boys Club." By contrast, "Go Public" has no ideological axe to grind other than to present a balanced exploration into the lives of the teachers, students, parents, and others who populate a typical urban public school system.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I saw this recently on SlashDot - No US College In Top 10 For ACM International Programming Contest 2013 Now the ACM International Programming Contest is sort of a big deal. In the first fifteen or so years US teams won first place every year. Since 1997 though a US team has not taken first place. In Microsoft's Imagine Cup competitions there is no US winner in any of the 15 or so categories this year. In fact US results in programming and software development competitions have been pretty poor (one might say embarrassing) for a while. One has to ask why?I don't think it is because they US doesn't have students who can compete. I think we do. I think many of the best and brightest choose not to compete. Why? Well I don't think they see enough value in the competitions to take time from other things that they value more. If you are a top student in a top US university you probably already think your value is obvious. And realistically it is. Top companies (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.) are recruiting on your campus. You are already doing enough to get their attention. On the other hand if you are in a university in a small eastern European or Asian country that no one has heard of outside the area an an international contest victory may be just the edge you need to get noticed.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
There is not an ounce of fat on the wiry frame of Abdul Wahid, and no wonder.After he finishes his morning work shift, he walks 10 miles down mountain trails in northern Afghanistan to the first road, where he catches a bus for the last couple of miles to the teacher training institute in Salang. He walks back up the mountain another 10 miles to get home, arriving well after dark, just in time to rest up for his day job.
In his determination to formally qualify as a teacher, Mr. Wahid, 33, exemplifies many of the gains for Afghan education in recent years. "It's worth it, because this is my future," he said.
But he also personifies how far the efforts here have yet to go. Mr. Wahid's day job is being the principal of the high school in his village, Unamak. Though he has only a high school diploma, he is the best educated teacher that his 800 students have.
It is widely accepted that demand among Afghans for better schooling -- and the actual opportunity to attend, particularly for girls -- is at its highest point in decades. For Western officials seeking to show a positive legacy from a dozen years of war and heavy investment in Afghanistan, improvements in education have provided welcome news.
But for those who are working to make it happen -- local Afghan officials, aid workers, teachers and students -- there are concerns that much of the promise of improvement is going unfulfilled, and major problems are going unsolved.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Charter schools are among those supporting a tense Board of Education decision this week that prevents state grades for public schools from dropping more than one letter.But some of them worry the move might add to the confusion parents and others already have about Florida's A through F grading system - and erode public confidence in it.
"I think it becomes confusing to parents when the state says it wants to move forward with higher standards and wants them to be more rigorous, and then makes a safety net'' when those standards aren't met, said Cynthia Adversa, principal of Indian River Charter High School in Vero Beach, which is a member of the Florida Consortium of Public Charter Schools.
Teachers and students worked hard to meet those expectations, said Daviem Dina Miller, who heads Somerset Academy in Davie. So when some schools that didn't hit the mark still benefit from a higher grade, "I think a lot of parents would question that.''
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In a rare move that has Mills High School in an uproar, the College Board and Educational Testing Service have invalidated the Advanced Placement test results of as many as 224 students, citing "seating irregularities" when the 11 exams were taken in May.Students are now demanding that the College Board reinstate the test scores, which have not been disclosed, rather than readminister the tests next month. They claim their scores may suffer in retaking the exams, and some graduating seniors say the delay is disrupting their college enrollment.
Incoming senior Gavin Wong learned of the problem Wednesday, when his family received a letter from Mills about the cancellation. The school said that, despite the seating problem, the scores "were not invalidated as a result of student misconduct," according to a copy of the letter provided by Wong.
"Students aren't to blame," said Wong, 17, "but we are being punished harshly."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
PLUS loans are experiencing yet another scandal. The ultimate source of this particular one is the way the federal government calculates student loan default rates for college accountability. Colleges are punished if their student loan default rates go too high. But the government's default formula only includes Stafford loans. PLUS (both Parent and Grad) loans and Perkins loans are ignored in the calculation. This is a gaping loophole, and some colleges appear to have been exploiting it. As Rachel Fishman of New America explains:"... there's evidence that some colleges and universities might be steering students away from other, better federal student loans and toward Parent PLUS to avoid penalties associated with high student loan default rates."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A second-grade teacher notices that one of her students lacks fluency when reading aloud. The first thing the teacher should do to help this student is assess whether the student also has difficulties with:Many notes and links on Wisconsin's adoption of Massachusetts (MTEL) elementary English teacher content knowledge standards. UW-Madison Professor Mark Seidenberg's recommended Wisconsin's adoption of MTEL.A. predicting
B. inferring
C. metacognition
D. decoding
Don't worry if you're not into metacognition. The correct answer is decoding -- at least according to the people who put together the test teachers must pass in Massachusetts if they are going to teach children to read.
The Massachusetts test is about to become the Wisconsin test, a step that advocates see as important to increasing the quality of reading instruction statewide and, in the long term, raising the overall reading abilities of Wisconsin students. As for those who aren't advocates (including some who are professors in schools of education), they are going along, sometimes with a more dubious attitude to what this will prove.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction officially launched the era of the new test for reading licenses with a memo sent last week to heads of all teacher preparation programs in the state. The memo spelled out the details of implementing a law passed in 2011 that called for Wisconsin to use the Massachusetts test. The memo included setting the passing score, which, after a short phase-in period, will match what is regarded as the demanding Massachusetts standard.
In a nutshell, after Jan. 31, 2014, anyone who wants to get a license that allows them to teach reading in Wisconsin will have to pass this test, with 100 multiple choice questions and two essay questions, aimed at making sure they are adequately prepared to do so. (Those currently licensed will not need to pass the test.)
Why Massachusetts? Because in the 1990s, Massachusetts launched initiatives, including requiring students to pass a high school graduation test, requiring teachers to pass licensure tests specific to the subjects they teach, and increasing spending on education, especially in schools serving low-income children.
At that point, Wisconsin and Massachusetts were pretty much tied, and down the list of states a bit, when it came to how students were doing. Within a few years, scores in Massachusetts rose significantly. The state has led the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math achievement for a decade. Wisconsin scores have stayed flat.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
If you are in school today the technologies you will use as an adult tomorrow have not been invented yet. Therefore, the life skill you need most is not the mastery of specific technologies, but mastery of the technium as a whole -- how technology in general works. I like to think of this ability to deal with any type of new technology as techno-literacy. To be at ease with the flux of technology in modern-day life you'll need to speak the language of the technium, and to master the the following principles:Anything you buy, you must maintain. Each tool you use requires time to learn how to use, to install, to upgrade, or to fix. A purchase is just the beginning. You can expect to devote as much energy/money/time in maintaining a technology as you did in acquiring it.
Technologies improve so fast you should postpone getting anything until 5 minutes before you need it. Get comfortable with the fact that anything you buy is already obsolete. Therefore acquire at the last possible moment.
You will be newbie forever. Get good at the beginner mode, learning new programs, asking dumb questions, making stupid mistakes, soliticting help, and helping others with what you learn (the best way to learn yourself).
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The 50 states and the District and Columbia reported $604.3 billion in revenues collected for public elementary and secondary education in fiscal year 2011 (FY 11) (table 1). State and local governments provided $528.8 billion, or 87.5 percent of all revenues; and the federal government contributed $75.5 billion or 12.5 percent of all revenues (derived from table 1 and figure 1).Adjusting FY 10 data for inflation, total revenues decreased by 0.7 percent (from $608.4 to $604.3 billion), local revenues decreased by 1.8 percent (from $266.8 to $262.0 billion), state revenues increased by 1.0 percent (from $264.1 to $266.8 billion), and federal revenues decreased by 2.6 percent (from $77.5 to $75.5 billion) for FY 11 compared to FY 10 (derived from table 1 and table C-1, after adjusting for inflation).1
Current expenditures totaled $527.2 billion in FY 11 (table 2). Expenditures for instruction amounted to $322.5 billion, total support services accounted for $183.0 billion, food services were $20.4 billion, and enterprise operations accounted for $1.3 billion. Adjusting FY 10 data for inflation, current expenditures decreased 1.5 percent (from $535.3 to $527.2 billion) for FY 11 compared to FY 10 (derived from table 2 and table C-2, after adjusting for inflation).1
Current expenditures per pupil for public elementary and secondary education were $10,658 on a national level in FY 11 (table 3). Current expenditures per pupil ranged from $6,326 in Utah to $20,793 in the District of Columbia. Expenditures per pupil were next highest in New York ($18,834); New Jersey ($16,855); Alaska ($16,663); Connecticut ($16,224); and Wyoming ($15,815).
Adjusting for inflation, per pupil state and local revenues increased by 0.2 percent on a national basis from FY 10 to FY 11, while per pupil current state and local expenditures decreased by 1.6 percent (table 4). Adjusting for inflation, per pupil state and local revenues decreased by 1 percent or more in 28 states and increased by 1 percent or more in 14 states from FY 10 to FY 11. Per pupil current expenditures decreased by 1 percent or more in 30 states and increased by 1 percent or more in 9 states from FY 10 to FY 11.
Adjusting for inflation, current expenditures per pupil steadily climbed at least 1 percent per year between FY 96 and FY 08. However, the increases in current expenditures per pupil became smaller (less than 1 percent) from FY 08 to FY 09 and from FY 09 to FY 10; and then negative (i.e. a decrease of more than 1 percent) between FY 10 and FY 11 (derived from table 5 and figure 2).
In FY 11, instruction and instruction-related expenditures totaled $347.4 billion, or 65.9 percent, of all current expenditures for public elementary and secondary education; student support services were 29.3 billion, or 5.6 percent; administration costs were 56.3 billion, or 10.7 percent; and operations were 94.2 billion, or 17.9 percent (figure 3 and table 6).
1 FY 10 data were adjusted to FY 11 by utilizing the direct multiplier in the Consumer Price Index provided by the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and adjusted to a school year basis (July through June).
See Digest of Education Statistics, Advance Release of Selected 2012 Tables, Table 34. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_034.asp, downloaded May 29, 2013. For example, FY10 federal revenue was adjusted by multiplying 75,997,858,024 by 1.02007982097954 =77,523,881,408.In FY 11, states reported $322.5 billion in current instruction expenditures, which included $212.8 billion, or 66.0 percent, for salaries; and $75.2 billion, or 23.3 percent, in employee benefits for teachers and teacher aides (figure 4 and derived from table 7).
Total expenditures for public elementary and secondary education were $604.2 billion in FY 11, including $527.2 billion in current expenditures, $41.0 billion in facilities acquisition and construction, $3.4 billion in land and existing structures, $6.5 billion in equipment, $8.2 billion for other programs, and $17.9 billion in interest on debt (table 8).
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Madison area is adding five new after-school sites to the already existing six sites throughout the city thanks to a federal 21st Century Community Learning Center grant, according to a release.The CLC grant program will be supporting after-school activities for students at 107 new sites throughout Wisconsin for the 2013-14 school year, according to the release.
The 30 new grants and 77 continuing grants total $7.8 million, according to the release.
Those 107 new sites, along with 113 existing after-school program sites are sharing $16 million in federal CLC grant money, according to the release.
The new Madison area after-school sites include Lowell Elementary School, O'Keefe Middle School, Black Hawk Middle School, Leopold Elementary School and Sandburg Elementary School.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Authorities in the eastern Indian state of Bihar have ordered headteachers to taste all school lunches before they are served after 23 schoolchildren died eating a lunch contaminated with pesticide.
Amarjeet Sinha, the top official in the local education department, told reporters that cooking oil used at the school in Chapra District, 40 miles from the Bihar state capital of Patna, had been stored in or near a container previous filled with pesticide.Sinha said notices published on Thursday morning in local newspapers ordering headteachers to taste food and to ensure safe storage of ingredients would "dispel any fear in [children's] minds that the foods are unsafe."
Children across Bihar, one of the poorest states in India, have been refusing to eat free school lunches since the incident on Tuesday.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A look at the 55-year history of federal student loans:
___Americans got a shock from the sky in October 1957.
The first artificial satellite was passing overhead. And it wasn't just man-made, it was Soviet-made.
Beach ball-sized Sputnik touched off a space race and stoked big fears that American students might not be up to the challenges of the Cold War.
Calls to improve science and technical education led President Dwight Eisenhower to establish a low-interest college loan program through the National Defense Education Act of 1958. The loan dollars came directly from the government.
___
Then came Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty."
Student loans got a major boost in 1965 as part of the president's Great Society initiatives. The Higher Education Act expanded loans as well as grants to help needy students, contributing to the era's college boom. It also changed the way the federal loan program was financed. Instead of using government money directly, the loans would be made by bankers. But the government guaranteed that if students defaulted, the U.S. government would cover the tab.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
IOWA CITY, IOWA--The greater a student's academic achievement, the farther away from home that student is likely to attend college, according to a new research report from ACT. The findings of the report, entitled College Choice Report--Part 2: Enrollment Patterns, point to an opportunity to better inform lower-achieving students of the choices available to them.The ACT research shows that 2012 U.S. graduates who took the ACT®college readiness assessment attended college a median distance of 51 miles from their home. That median distance, however, increases dramatically as ACT composite scores go higher.
For students with an ACT composite score of 28 to 36--the upper scoring range on the 1 to 36 scale--the median distance from home to college was more than 113 miles; for students with a score of 33 or higher, the median distance was 170 miles. In contrast, students who earned an ACT composite score below 24 attended college a median distance of less than 50 miles from home.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Detroit's filing of the biggest municipal bankruptcy in US historycaps three decades of the city's steady decline, characterized by crime, shrinkage of auto manufacturing industry, and a population all too eager to leave for the more hospitable suburbs.
Detroit's bankruptcy is, primarily, a lesson in how cities and states cannot avoid their pension responsibilities without a backlash of biblical proportions. In 2006, Detroit, like many other cities and states, was facing a $1.5bn gap in its pension payments to its public employees. As Quartz noted:The city converted them into debt called "certificates of participation", or COPs, which it sold through a legally separate financial vehicle at a floating interest rate. Then it entered into a swap with UBS that converted those to fixed rates. This swap became very expensive when rates dropped after the financial crisis. A very similar arrangement led to the Jefferson County bankruptcy, and a massive scandal that sent several financiers to jail.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Madison School District won an historic concession from its teachers union over the last two years -- the ability to require that teachers pay part of their health insurance premiums.Madison's expensive approach to healthcare benefits are not a new subject.It came as the district was quickly extending union contracts before a law eliminating most collective bargaining rights took effect, and again while that law was held up in court.
But now as the district goes about crafting a 2013-14 budget that -- among other cost-savings measures -- reduces maintenance spending, freezes equipment budgets and includes no money for new efforts to close the district's achievement gap, it doesn't appear there's much interest in implementing the concession.
The budget proposal from new Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham doesn't subject teachers to health insurance premiums, and that's fine with School Board President Ed Hughes.
"Because of our recent transitions, this was not the budget to take up significant changes to our structure of salary and benefits," he said in an email. "I and other board members are looking forward to an in-depth review of salary and benefit levels as part of next year's budget, when we'll have the benefit of input from Jen Cheatham and (assistant superintendent for business services) Mike Barry, as well as from our affected teachers and staff. I'm sure that health insurance contributions will be part of that discussion."
"Recent transitions" didn't keep Cheatham from proposing changes to the district's salary schedules, though.
Much more on the Madison School District's 2013-2014 plans for spending and property tax increases, here.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A gift for spatial reasoning -- the kind that may inspire an imaginative child to dismantle a clock or the family refrigerator -- may be a greater predictor of future creativity or innovation than math or verbal skills, particularly in math, science and related fields, according to a study published Monday in the journal Psychological Science.The study looked at the professional success of people who, as 13-year-olds, had taken both the SAT, because they had been flagged as particularly gifted, as well as the Differential Aptitude Test. That exam measures spatial relations skills, the ability to visualize and manipulate two-and three-dimensional objects. While math and verbal scores proved to be an accurate predictor of the students' later accomplishments, adding spatial ability scores significantly increased the accuracy.
The researchers, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, said their findings make a strong case for rewriting standardized tests like the SAT and ACT to focus more on spatial ability, to help identify children who excel in this area and foster their talents.
"Evidence has been mounting over several decades that spatial ability gives us something that we don't capture with traditional measures used in educational selection," said David Lubinski, the lead author of the study and a psychologist at Vanderbilt. "We could be losing some modern-day Edisons and Fords."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
American higher education suffers from an identity crisis that threatens its long-term viability.As costs have surged and free online courses have proliferated, colleges and universities have elevated image over substance and clung to an antiquated structure that has left them vulnerable in an era of rapid change. Until they focus seriously on improving their core function - student learning - they risk foundering in a sea of mixed messages.
On the one hand, administrators explain the immense long-term value of a degree and the immediate payoff in job opportunities and higher salary. On the other hand, they elevate sports teams to godlike status, pay coaches many times morethan they do professors, reward volume of research over innovative teaching, and compete for students by promoting what Jose Bowen calls the "campus spa."
Overcoming this identity crisis requires an understanding of what I argue are the three main components of higher education: promise, process and product. Colleges and universities have long promised a path to broader thinking, an entree to a leadership class, and a means to bolster a democratic society.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
With less than four weeks until New Jersey's primary election for U.S. Senate, the latest Monmouth University poll shows that 49 percent of likely voters support Cory Booker, a lead that Monmouth pollster Patrick Murray calls "impregnable." Fellow Democrats Frank Pallone, Rush Holt, and Sheila Oliver garner anywhere from an anemic 12 percent to a moribund 3 percent. Rush Holt comes in at 8 percent.U.S. Congressman Holt's middle-of-the-losers status is rankling his new consultant Bob Braun, who this week unleashed a tirade at N.J.'s primary teachers' union, NJEA. Braun, a 50-year veteran of the Star-Ledger and faithful labor union lackey, is appalled that traditional public school lobbyists have failed to endorse any candidate, let alone Holt. NJEA typically issues endorsements for U.S. Senate candidates - in 2008 it endorsed the late Frank Lautenberg (whose open seat is in contention) and in 2012 it endorsed Bob Menendez.
For Braun, NJEA's uncharacteristic passivity this election cycle is indefensible because Booker is a proponent of school vouchers, a controversial plan that would allow parents to use state money for private and parochial school tuition. NJEA hates vouchers and Braun bridles at the union's failure to interfere with Booker's coronation. He attributes NJEA's silence to cowardice:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
All young children in Madison public schools would have greater access to the arts under a program being launched in the city this fall by the Kennedy Center.The Washington, D.C.-based Kennedy Center -- best known as a national showcase and landmark hub of the arts -- has selected Madison as the 12th U.S. city for its "Any Given Child" program. The initiative is designed to create a long-range arts education plan to reach every public school student in grades K-8.
"The (Madison) district has specific goals about closing the achievement gap, and we know that the arts can help achieve that," said Ray Gargano, director of programming and community engagement for the Overture Center for the Arts, which is coordinating the local side of Any Given Child.
In the first year of the multi-year program, two representatives from the Kennedy Center will assist a committee of about 35 local citizens to audit the arts resources in every Madison elementary and middle school, said Darrell Ayers, vice-president of education for the Kennedy Center.
That information will be used to create a long-term plan to make sure healthy arts programs are happening in every school for every child, not just some.
"The next two or three years (following the audit), we stay with the community to assure that the work is going to be completed," Ayers said. "We're not bringing money, but we're certainly bringing expertise. We've done this in a number of communities and been very successful."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
As an African-American male born to a teenage mother, my future was bleak, but I had an extended family of teachers, mentors and coaches whose high expectations and support helped me grow from a young boy with an uncertain future to a young man with a college degree.Although, I found a viable pathway, I remained agitated that we can predict a child's life trajectory based primarily on their zip code. Teach For America (TFA), an organization on a mission to ensure an excellent education for all children by putting talented college graduates into teachingroles, seemed like the perfect fit, so I headed south to teach 8th Grade science in the Mississippi Delta just three days after graduating from Harvard University.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Last year when American Paradigm Schools took over Philadelphia's infamous, failing John Paul Jones Middle School, they did something a lot of people would find inconceivable. The school was known as "Jones Jail" for its reputation of violence and disorder, and because the building physically resembled a youth correctional facility. Situated in the Kensington section of the city, it drew students from the heart of a desperately poor hub of injection drug users and street level prostitution where gun violence rates are off the charts. But rather than beef up the already heavy security to ensure safety and restore order, American Paradigm stripped it away. During renovations, they removed the metal detectors and barred windows.The police predicted chaos. But instead, new numbers seem to show that in a single year, the number of serious incidents fell by 90%.
The school says it wasn't just the humanizing physical makeover of the facility that helped. Memphis Street Academy also credits the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), a noncoercive, nonviolent conflict resolution regimen originally used in prison settings that was later adapted to violent schools. AVP, when tailored to school settings, emphasizes student empowerment, relationship building and anger management over institutional control and surveillance. There are no aggressive security guards in schools using the AVP model; instead they have engagement coaches, who provide support, encouragement, and a sense of safety.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A major challenge facing students as they pursue a postsecondary degree is a lack of academic preparedness for college-level coursework, and, in particular, college-level math. This paper reviews the research on the effectiveness of strategies that seek to improve the math preparedness and success of high school students entering college. These include assessing students' math skills in high school using college placement exams; providing math bridges, boot camps and brush-ups before students start college; reforming developmental math sequences; and improving instruction in developmental and college-level math courses.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
On what one might call the "vulnerability index" -- how higher education institutions shake out in terms of their financial viability in the short- to mid-term -- the universities represented in a session titled "Remaining Nimble in the Face of External Challenges" at the annual meeting of college business officers here Tuesday are some of the lucky ones.Related: Madison School Board President Ed Hughes.Unlike some smaller and less-differentiated private and public colleges and universities, public flagship universities like the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois and selective (and highly visible) private institutions like the University of Notre Dame are not only going to survive whatever turmoil higher education faces in the next decade or two -- at least -- they're likely to thrive, too.
But that doesn't mean they can stand pat in the face of the many pressures they (like other colleges and universities) are facing: reduced state appropriations for public institutions, public pressure to control (if not lower) tuition, escalating health care and other costs, and many more. So before a room of 200-plus finance administrators at the National Association of College and University Business Officers, leading officials at Berkeley, Illinois and Notre Dame described how they have been "managing through uncertainty," as Patrice DeCorrevont, national head of higher education banking at JPMorgan Chase, described the environment in which they and everyone else in higher education have been operating.
Two Madison school board seats will be on the spring 2014 ballot. Ed Hughes and Marj Passman presently occupy those seats. Learn more at the City of Madison Clerk's website.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In a threadbare hospital here, 5-year-old Rashmi Kumari is fighting a powerful poison. "She is a brilliant student," said her uncle as he tried to distract her by asking her to recite poems.Rashmi is also the only child in her household left alive.
Her cousins, Anshu and Kushboo, died after eating a school lunch now believed to have been contaminated with a pesticide compound, according to a hospital official. The disaster has left at least 23 children dead as of Thursday morning and spotlights the shortcomings in a government school-lunch program intended to feed India's millions of malnourished students.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
City of Madison, via a kind reader's email:
Mayor Paul Soglin joined U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, other mayors and school superintendents in Washington, DC, today to discuss partnership opportunities between cities and the U.S. Department of Education to foster effective approaches to education reform.Related:Participating city leaders are part of a new Mayors' Education Reform Task Force co-chaired by National League of Cities (NLC) First Vice President Chris Coleman, Mayor of Saint Paul, MN, and NLC Second Vice President Ralph Becker, Mayor of Salt Lake City, UT. Mayors Coleman and Becker formed the task force in March 2013 to explore how cities can and should be involved in local education reform efforts.
During today's meeting, task force members highlighted the growing commitment by municipal officials across the country to promoting educational achievement.
"Mayors and elected officials can bring together all the stakeholders in the education conversation in their cities," said Mayor Soglin. "The perspectives from mayors of cities large to small are valuable to local and national policymakers. I'm glad we had an opportunity to talk with the Secretary and his staff about the role mayors can play in education transformation."
Local leaders shared examples of city-school partnerships they have formed in their communities in areas such as school improvement, early learning, afterschool programming, and postsecondary success.
"The trajectory of learning begins at birth and extends over a lifetime," said Mayor Becker, who was unable to attend the meeting. "Cities now experience an unprecedented level of collaboration and discussion in formulating specific plans for postsecondary access and success and productive out-of-school time learning."
The meeting with Secretary Duncan provided mayors with an opportunity to discuss how lessons learned at the city level can inform federal education policy. Among the key issues of concern identified by the task force are:
"In this global economy, cities and towns depend on an educated workforce and schools are depending on us. We need to work together to ensure that our children graduate high school ready for postsecondary education and career success," said NLC President Marie Lopez Rogers, Mayor of Avondale, AZ. "As city leaders, we have an important message that must be heard and we must be at the table in guiding federal and local education reform policies."
- Finding a "third way" in education reform that balances a commitment to accountability with a spirit of collaboration among school administrators, teachers, and cities;
- Transforming schools into centers of community that support parent engagement and provide wraparound services to children and families;
- Building on successful "cradle-to-career" models to develop a strong educational pipeline;
- Securing adequate and equitable funding for local education initiatives; and
- Promoting college access and completion.
In addition to Mayors Soglin, Coleman and Becker participants in today's meeting included: Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson of Gary, Indiana; Mayor Edna Branch Jackson of Savannah, Georgia; Mayor Dwight Jones of Richmond, Virginia; Mayor Pedro Segarra of Hartford, Connecticut; Riverside (Calif.) Unified School District Superintendent Rick Miller; Gary Community School Corporations Superintendent Cheryl Pruitt; and New York City Deputy Chief Academic Officer Josh Thomases.
The National League of Cities (NLC) is dedicated to helping city leaders build better communities. NLC is a resource and advocate for 19,000 cities, towns and villages, representing more than 218 million Americans.
The recent "expert review" concluded that the "Madison School District has resources to close achievement gap".
We have seen the results of an ongoing "same service" approach to school spending. There are no indications that this is changing.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Something about this very simple list struck a chord with many educators. Author Bill Ferriter explains: "Kids AREN'T motivated by technology. Instead, they're motivated by opportunities to make a difference in the world; they are motivated by opportunities to ask and answer their own questions; and they are motivated by opportunities to learn together with like-minded peers."
Do you agree?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Kids lose their school IDs but they don't often lose their eyeballs.Wow.That's one of the reasons why a growing number of schools are replacing traditional identification cards with iris scanners. By the fall, several schools -- ranging from elementary schools to colleges -- will be rolling out various iris scanning security methods.
Winthrop University in South Carolina is testing out iris scanning technology during freshman orientation this summer. Students had their eyes scanned as they received their ID cards in June.
"Iris scanning has a very high level of accuracy, and you don't have to touch anything, said James Hammond, head of Winthrop University's Information Technology department. "It can be hands free security."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Ted Sherman and Christopher Baxter:
Officials said the report, which will be made public by comptroller Matthew Boxer, details fraud in the National School Lunch Program in New Jersey school districts, including by public employees and public officials.The investigation comes in the wake of a series of stories by The Star-Ledger into lunch program abuses in Elizabeth, where the president of the school board was indicted after the newspaper found her children were receiving subsidized meals despite a family income far exceeding federal eligibility limits set by the federal government.
The state attorney general's office said it launched its investigation into the Elizabeth program after The Star-Ledger reported that the children of Marie L. Munn, then serving as board president, were enrolled in the program. At the time, her financial disclosure statements showed she was employed as a human resources administrator for a nonprofit organization and her husband, who was employed by the New York Times, was also the owner and head coach of a semi-pro football team.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
New Jersey's political races for U.S. Senate and Governor have dominated local media, despite the lack of meaningful competition for shoo-ins Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and Governor Chris Christie.The latest Quinnipiac poll shows that 52 percent of voters support Booker; U.S. Congressmen Frank Pallone and Rush Holt each garner less than 10 percent of the electorate, and laggard Sheila Oliver barely musters 3 percent.
In the gubernatorial race, Christie is running about 40 points ahead of N.J. Sen. Barbara Buono.
Lock or not, N.J.'s public education system is a big talking point for all candidates. In fact, the current electoral discussions get to the heart of a puzzle for this blue state's Democratic leadership: in the realm of education reform, what does it mean to be a New Jersey Democrat?
If you ask Cory Booker, a "Democratic" agenda includes charter school expansion, data-driven teaching evaluations, top-down accountability, focus on poor urban school districts, and vouchers. But if you ask Barbara Buono for her prescription for improving public education, a "Democratic" agenda, antithetical to Booker's, includes restrictions on charter school growth, protection for teachers from the vagaries of data, and local control.
This stark contradiction in agenda between two of the state's most prominent Democrats says less about national trends and more about the paralysis of N.J. party leaders. While the national Democratic Party has integrated education reform tenets into its platform on public school improvement - indeed, except for the vouchers Booker's agenda mirrors President Obama's -- N.J.'s elected Democrats are stuck in a time warp.
One way to think about this is in the context of the GOP's national problem, post the 2012 presidential election. Republicans, it's often noted, are trapped in a shrinking tent that not only appears too small for the 47 percent (remember Mitt Romney's infamous comments about Americans who rely on some sort of governmental support?) but is too diminished for immigrants and the LGBTQ community.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Hello everyone! I've been away for a while, but for a good reason. Last Friday, my wife gave birth to two beautiful boys. They're asleep at the moment, and my wife has gone off to have a nap, the house is clean, so I'm clear to do some blogging.Now, a few months ago, I was talking about having my genome sequenced by a US genetic-testing firm. They've got a great site, they seem to have loads of added-value features, and they're reasonably priced, even once you factor in postage to the UK. The companies in this country seem pretty lacklustre, so although I normally like to support UK business, I thought I'd give this US company a chance. So then my boys were conceived, and supposed to be non-identical, but on Friday they were born, declared identical, and the placenta(s) were disposed of before our regular consultant had a chance to prove that this later diagnosis was wrong.
Enter the genetic tests. I needed to know whether they were mono- or di-zygotic. "Aha!" I thought, "genome sequencing will be perfect for this!". But then I was struck with another thought. The image of Edward Snowden loomed into my mind, and I began to mull over the consequences of handing my children's genome(s) to a US firm. Essentially, any information held on them by a US company could be passed over to the US government. The PRISM scheme, and laws associated with it, essentially allow all manner of information to be requested by US agencies, and the firm receiving the request are legally prevented from disclosing the fact the the request took place to the person whose data has been grabbed. How far this will stretch in future is unclear, and this applies to any US-based informatics firm. The same applies to any other genetics company for informatics organisation, of whatever sort.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
If Americans are judging the colleges they choose a, they may be better off not choosing a college at all. It turns out that college graduates are significantly less engaged in their jobs than everyone else. And this finding is true across all professions, age ranges, and income levels. College graduates are less engaged than technical/vocational school grads, high school grads, and even high school dropouts. This finding alone is about as devastating as it gets for higher education, but it's actually worse than you think.The key driver of college graduates being less engaged is that they are much less likely than everyone else to say they have an opportunity to "do what they do best every day." In other words, something about college isn't working -- it appears it doesn't do a good enough job of bringing students closer to figuring out what they are best at. The implications of this are so profound that it will literally change everything in higher education. From rethinking what its ultimate purpose should be, to the very basics of how we teach, coach, mentor, and develop learners.
College -- based on recent economic analyses -- does produce higher earnings over a lifetime. But it does not always lead to a "good job" - one in which people are engaged in their work and doing what they do best. At least, not compared to everyone else who doesn't go to college. The magnitude of this failure can't be over-exaggerated, especially considering what Gallup knows about human development and wellbeing -- where nothing is more fundamental than doing what you're best at every day.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A solid digital workflow system addresses many of these questions. But before exploring the myriad systems out there, figure out what you already have in place, and what you really want the system to do.Ask yourself the following questions before your start evaluating options - the answer will help narrow your choices:
Do I need a webpage for my class that has all resources, assignments, class info, my info, messaging, etc?
Do I simply need an organized way to exchange work back and forth with students?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
New Jersey's political races for U.S. Senate and Governor have dominated local media, despite the lack of meaningful competition for shoo-ins Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and Governor Chris Christie.
The latest Quinnipiac poll shows that 52 percent of voters support Booker; U.S. Congressmen Frank Pallone and Rush Holt each garner less than 10 percent of the electorate, and laggard Sheila Oliver barely musters 3 percent.
In the gubernatorial race, Christie is running about 40 points ahead of N.J. Sen. Barbara Buono.Lock or not, N.J.'s public education system is a big talking point for all candidates. In fact, the current electoral discussions get to the heart of a puzzle for this blue state's Democratic leadership: in the realm of education reform, what does it mean to be a New Jersey Democrat?
If you ask Cory Booker, a "Democratic" agenda includes charter school expansion, data-driven teaching evaluations, top-down accountability, focus on poor urban school districts, and vouchers. But if you ask Barbara Buono for her prescription for improving public education, a "Democratic" agenda, antithetical to Booker's, includes restrictions on charter school growth, protection for teachers from the vagaries of data, and local control.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
William Damon, via a kind reader's email:
William Damon was interviewed about his book, "Failing Liberty." In the book, Prof. Damon argues that we are not properly preparing our young people to become responsible citizens. This interview was recorded at the Hoover Institution on the campus of Stanford University.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Chances are you have had contact with Scholastic Publishing at some point in your life: You might have read their magazines in school, or bought a book at one of their book fairs, or perhaps you've read Harry Potter or The Hunger Games? From its humble beginning as publisher of a magazine for high schoolers, Scholastic has become a $2 billion business and one of the biggest children's book publishers in the world.Scholastic is a leader in the school book fair business -- which is in keeping with the company's origins. Nearly 100 years ago, the company started out by building its business in schools.
"If you think of Scholastic, it's a relationship company with teachers and parent and kids," says Dick Robinson, Scholastic's chairman and CEO. "And it succeeded by going on from generation to generation."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The 6th Circuit ruled several weeks ago that the German homeschooling-and-evangelical-Christian family is not eligible for refugee status and should be deported. The Romeikes appealed for a rehearing en banc. The DOJ responded on the 26th of June. At this point, the parties are waiting to see if the 6th Circuit will grant the rehearing. If they do not, the Romeikes' next step will be to appeal directly to SCOTUS.
Now I've had a peek at the two latest briefs. They aren't long or complicated. Basically, the Petitioners said the 6th Circuit panel did not follow precedent for evaluating asylum claims, and further that the panel's new rule is flawed and the decision erroneous.The United States responded first with the obligatory standard of proof argument that every party not bearing heightened scrutiny uses in the hopes of winning without getting to the merits of the case. Then they basically said nuh-uh, they did too decide correctly.
The arguments are mainly legal, but the DOJ also disagrees on a crucial point of fact: whether the German government uses its compulsory attendance law in order to prevent Christians from homeschooling their children for religious reasons.
Appellate courts give deference to trial-level findings of fact. Since this was an administrative case, the trial level wasn't in a federal district court, but rather before an administrative judge, who granted the Romeikes' request for asylum. In order to rule in their favor, the judge must have made factual findings in favor of the Romeikes. Yet, the only reference to findings of fact is in a DOJ reference to the "Board." How that relates to the administrative judge's decision, I do not know.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Some Texas high school students who failed state standardized exams this spring were given a reprieve under the comprehensive education bill that Gov. Rick Perry signed in early June.Under current law, they would have had to take 15 state standardized exams to graduate. With the changes in House Bill 5 that begin in the coming school year, they will need to pass only 5. Shortly after Perry signed the bill, which cleared both chambers of the Legislature unanimously, the Texas Education Agency announced that current high school students would not have to retake exams they had failed in any of the six subjects that the new law removed from the state's testing requirements. They are algebra II, chemistry, English III, geometry, physics and world history.
But as educators welcome the relief that the legislation brought from what were widely considered onerous state testing requirements, some school districts are now looking ahead at another part of the law, which will take effect in the 2014-15 school year and broadly expand the courses that will count toward a diploma.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Olga Khazan, via a kind reader's email:
It's hard not to get jealous when I talk to my extended family.Much more on Finland's schools, here.
My cousin's husband gets 36 vacation days per year, not including holidays. If he wants, he can leave his job for a brief hiatus and come back to a guaranteed position months later.Tuition at his daughter's university is free, though she took out a small loan for living expenses. Its interest rate is 1 percent.
My cousin is a recent immigrant, and while she was learning the language and training for jobs, the state gave her 700 euros a month to live on.
They had another kid six years ago, and though they both work, they'll collect 100 euros a month from the government until the day she turns 17.
They of course live in Finland, home to saunas, quirky metal bands, and people who have for decades opted for equality and security over keeping more of their paychecks.
Inarguably one of the world's most generous -- and successful -- welfare states, the country has a lower infant mortality rate, better school scores, and a far lower poverty rate than the United States, and it's the second-happiest country on earth (the U.S. doesn't break the top 10). According to the OECD, Finns on average give an 8.8 score to their overall life satisfaction. Americans are at 7.5.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
At this point, I think I've said all I need to about the doubling of interest rates on subsidized federal student loans. Basically, the doubling won't have a big impact one way or another, but putting a little more payment burden on the students consuming higher education is probably a good thing. Why? Because cheap aid encourages students to demand stuff they otherwise wouldn't, and enables colleges to raise their prices at excessive rates.That said, since the nation will likely be talking about student aid for a while longer, now is probably a good time to reprint - and expand - the list of empirical studies that have, in one way or another, found that schools in large part capture aid money rather than becoming more affordable. The list probably isn't exhaustive, and there are many limitations that make it impossible to prove that aid fuels inflation, but combined with the logic that you'll willingly pay more if you have someone else's money, these studies show that there is very good reason to conclude that aid is counterproductive:
John D. Singell, Jr., and Joe A. Stone, "For Whom the Pell Tolls: The Response of University Tuition to Federal Grants-in-Aid," Economics of Education Review 26, no. 3 (2006): 285-95.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Matt McDonald, Laura Crawford, Tucker Warren, Russ Grote.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists." ― Eric HofferYesterday, the University of Washington finally mailed me my diploma. A Bachelor of Science in Applied Computational Math and Science: Discrete Math and Algorithms. I learned a lot of things in college. I learned how to take tests and how to pinpoint exactly what useless crap a particular final needed me to memorize. I learned that math is an incredibly beautiful thing that has been butchered so badly I hated it all the way until my second year of college. I learned that creativity is useless and all problems have one specific right answer you can find in the back of a textbook somewhere, because that's all I was ever graded on. I learned that getting into the CSE major is more about fighting an enormous, broken bureaucratic mess than actually being good at computer science. But most of all, I learned that our educational system is so obsessed with itself it can't even recognize it's own shortcomings.
The first accelerated program I was accepted into was the Gifted program in middle school. I went from getting As in everything to failing every single one of my core classes. Determined to prove myself, I managed to recover my grades to Bs and Cs by the end of 7th grade, and by the end of 8th grade I was back up to As and Bs. I didn't do this by getting smarter, I did it by getting better at following directions. I got better at taking tests. I became adept at figuring out precisely what the teacher wanted me to do, and then doing only that, so I could maximize both my free time and my grades. By the time I reached high school, I would always meticulously go over the project requirements, systematically satisfying each bullet point in order to maximize my score. During tests, I not only skipped over difficult questions, I would actively seek out hints in the later questions to help me narrow down possible answers. My ability to squeeze out high grades had more to do with my aptitude at filling in the right bubbles on a piece of paper then actually understanding the material.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
You've probably heard the baleful reports. The number of college students majoring in the humanities is plummeting, according to a big study released last month by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The news has provoked a flood of high-minded essays deploring the development as a symptom and portent of American decline.But there is another way to look at this supposed revelation (the number of humanities majors has actually been falling since the 1970s).
The bright side is this: The destruction of the humanities by the humanities is, finally, coming to a halt. No more will literature, as part of an academic curriculum, extinguish the incandescence of literature. No longer will the reading of, say, "King Lear" or D.H. Lawrence's "Women in Love" result in the flattening of these transfiguring encounters into just two more elements in an undergraduate career--the onerous stuff of multiple-choice quizzes, exam essays and homework assignments.
The disheartening fact is that for every college professor who made Shakespeare or Lawrence come alive for the lucky few--the British scholar Frank Kermode kindled Shakespeare into an eternal flame in my head--there were countless others who made the reading of literary masterpieces seem like two hours in the periodontist's chair. In their numbing hands, the term "humanities" became code for "and you don't even have to show up to get an A."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
One of the mantras of the Big Data revolution is that causation no longer matters. It's enough, the theory goes, to seek correlations in our copious data, deciphering "what" is happening and not bothering with "why." But not only is this problematic for a business looking for optimal retail pricing strategies, it's dramatically more so for those charged with crafting public policy.For governments and other public institutions, it turns out that understanding causation matters a great deal.
Causation Loses Its Sex Appeal
The "forget-causation-seek-correlation" Big Data crowd has been around for years and its most sophisticated proponents are Kenneth Cukier (The Economist) and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (Oxford University). In their excellent Big Data, the authors argue: "In a big-data world ... we won't have to be fixated on causality; instead we can discover patterns and correlations in the data that offer us novel and invaluable insights. Big data is about what, not why."
The idea is that given enough data, algorithms can appreciate correlations between seemingly disparate data sets without bothering to understand those correlations. It is enough to see that a rise in the purchase of Pop-Tarts at Wal-Mart highly correlates with hurricane warnings. Wal-Mart needn't understand why: it just needs to stock Pop-Tarts in a visible area of the store whenever hurricane warnings are issued.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Blogging, Parenting, Political Correctness 9 June 2013 Comments: 11I want to talk a little more about my decision to fundraise for the Tampa Bay HEAT.
My decision is based on something bigger than the gratitude I feel for this organization. I am fundraising for the HEAT's dream of a full service school building because I see a tremendous need for it.
As I have encountered various homeschool groups in the last two years, I have noticed a pattern. Each group tends to have a particular focus: academics, informal fellowship, or sports. Of course, these goals overlap, but most groups give priority to one category over the others.
Without question, the hardest need to satisfy when homeschooling is participation in team sports. "Tebow" laws are great but not a complete answer to the question of how we provide team sports to the homeschooling community at large.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In the literary world, forests have often been the symbol of menace.The school forest is a gem.Think of how many times someone has uttered "we're not out of the woods yet."
But a forest is a great place to begin one's outdoors education and apply science, math, reading and writing.
And the Madison Metropolitan School District is playing a role.
Several retired MMSD teachers recently spoke of alerting newer teachers to take advantage of the opportunity to introduce children to the Madison School Forest, a 307-acre woods the district owns southwest of Verona in Wisconsin's Driftless Area. It is also known as the Jackson School Forest after naturalist Joseph "Bud" Jackson.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Diane Kern and Lynne Derbyshire:
Next spring, thousands of Rhode Island high school students may be denied a diploma, not because of poor grades, but because of low scores on New England Common Assessment Program tests. The current state Board of Education's plan to use the standardized test to help grant or deny high school diplomas will certainly fail, not educate, our bright and capable students.It is not right or wise to use high-stakes testing to keep college and career-ready students from graduating high school. Research also does not support using NECAP, or other high-stakes tests for that matter, as a high-school graduation requirement.
There are many flaws in the current board policy and the state Department of Education's five-year strategic plan, now ending its third year. We'll raise two here.
The foremost issue is the Rhode Island public school funding formula, which currently denies students access to an equitable quality public education. As our neighbors in Massachusetts did 10 years ago, we should have frontloaded the resolution of this serious problem.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Colorado State University-Global Campus was in the news last fall as the first college to offer credit for a MOOC course. No one has yet taken up CSU-Global on its offer, though keep in mind it was a single course in computer science.But offering credit for a MOOC is not the only uncommon practice at CSU-Global:
CSU-Global is a public university that is entirely online - no labs, football stadium, dorms, etc.
It doesn't receive any state appropriations. After some state startup capital, CSU-Global operates without state funding and administrators say it is financially sustainable. (The average per-student state appropriation for a four-year public university is around $8,000.)
CSU-Global relies entirely on adjunct professors; no tenured faculty.
It has a very small administration--72 full-time employees for 8,500 students.
To enroll in CSU-Global, students already must have 12 credit hours from another university.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A test for six antibodies in an expectant mom's blood may predict with more than 99% certainty which children are at highest risk of developing autism.In a study published in Translational Psychiatry, researchers report that 23% of all cases of autism may result from the presence of maternal antibodies that interfere with fetal brain development during pregnancy. The work builds on a 2008 study from the same scientists that first described the group of antibodies in mothers-to-be. The latest paper describes the specific antibodies and provides more detail on what they do.
"It's very exciting," says Alycia Halladay, Senior Director of Environmental and Clinical Sciences for Autism Speaks, who was not associated with the research.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Politicians, including Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, want voters in November to approve a massive, historic and permanent billion-dollar-a-year tax increase that will raise income tax rates of middle-class wage earners from 4.63 percent to as high as 5.9 percent. It could be a hard sell, to say the least, but politicians tell us it's all for the children. It's an education tax, they insist.Related: Madison's planned spending and property tax increase for 2013-2014.The progressive tax, which would do away with Colorado's fair and enviable flat tax, would cost almost $600 each year for a family living on $100,000. For someone earning $45,000, the cost would be $166.50.
Most decent human beings care about children and value education, so perhaps they'll think a giant wallop to Colorado's economy, along with a hit to household budgets, makes good sense. Anything for the children.
Just make sure the politicians prove it. Make sure this money will go for education before even considering a vote in favor of something that will tax Colorado incomes at a rate higher than is paid in more progressive states, such as Michigan, Massachusetts and Illinois. Understand that voting to take an additional $1 billion a year out of Colorado payrolls will be a gift to flourishing states, such as Texas and Wyoming, that charge no income tax and try to lure talent and employers away from Colorado on that basis.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Students perform better in math when their instructors use hand gestures--a simple teaching tool that could pay off in higher-level classes like algebra.The study published in Child Development [1] provides some of the strongest evidence yet that gesturing may have a unique effect on learning. Teachers in the United States tend to use gestures less than teachers in other countries.
Straight from the Source"Gesturing can be a very beneficial tool that is completely free and easily employed in classrooms," says Kimberly Fenn, study co-author and assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University. "And I think it can have long-lasting effects."
Fenn and her colleagues conducted an experiment with 184 second, third, and fourth-graders in Michigan elementary classrooms.
Half of the students were shown videos of an instructor teaching math problems using only speech. The others were shown videos of the instructor teaching the same problems using both speech and gestures.
The problem involved mathematical equivalence (i.e., 4+5+7=__+7), which is known to be critical to later algebraic learning. In the speech-only videos, the instructor simply explains the problem. In the other videos, the instructor uses two hand gestures while speaking, using different hands to refer to the two sides of the equation.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Near the end of The Faraway Nearby--a collage-style memoir that brings together history and myth, science and confession--Rebecca Solnit describes an arctic sled made of frozen meat and bones. It falls to pieces during a sudden heat wave when the dogs devour its newly thawed parts. What's remarkable about the image isn't just its macabre silhouette but the kind of restless thinking it generates. Solnit doesn't deploy the sled as a metaphoric vehicle for any single message; she uses it to consider multiple truths at once: how suddenly a whole can dissolve into its parts, how our hungers compel us to destroy what we need, and how our most precious objects fall apart for reasons we can't predict or forestall.Throughout The Faraway Nearby, Solnit draws analogies between disparate objects and anecdotes in order to make newly available--thawed, edible--those connections she finds between them. She presents these connections as a series of consolations: "Pared back to its bare bones," Solnit writes, "this book is a history of an emergency and the stories that kept me company then." The "emergency" is her mother's dementia, and its urgency reminds us that the associative structure of The Faraway Nearby is less about intellectual virtuosity and more about survival. Solnit finds echoes across registers in order to feel less alone.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I read with interest Madison School Board President Ed Hughes' blog post on local spending, redistributed state tax dollars & property tax increases. Mr. Hughes mentioned Oconomowoc:
Superintendent Cheatham and new Assistant Superintendent for Business Services Mike Barry (recently arrived from the Oconomowoc school district to replace Erik Kass) promise a zero-based approach to budgeting for the 2014-15 school year, so the budgeting process promises to be more lively next year.Mr. Hughes, writing on May 3, 2012: Budget Cuts: We Won't Be as Bold and Innovative as Oconomowoc, and That's Okay..
Alan Borsuk recently followed up on the changes (fewer, but better paid teachers) in Oconomowoc.
Rocketship and Avenues are also worth looking into.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
After months of reports that some Florida public schools are limiting or denying students access to Florida Virtual School, the state's chancellor of public schools is putting districts on notice."School districts may not limit student access to courses offered through the FLVS," Pam Stewart wrote in a recent memo to superintendents. "Since the Florida Legislature passed legislation in 2013 that impacts the funding of school districts and FLVS will receive, it is important that you remember the statutory requirements."
As redefinED has noted, the new funding formula has left fewer state dollars for both districts and FLVS and resulted in an unintended consequence: a dramatic drop in enrollment for Florida Virtual, the nation's largest provider of online classes. Some districts immediately started steering students away from FLVS, while at least a few charter schools told students they would have to pay for FLVS courses.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
This analysis examines default rates at American colleges and demonstrateshow using input-adjusted rates can indicate if schools are doing better--or worse--than expected in preparing their students for success, and how they could immediately improve an existing higher education accountability system.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
On President Obama's recent visit to Ireland, he offered a surprising explanation of the enduring tensions there: "If towns remain divided--if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs--if we can't see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation." Given his use of the word "we," it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is also how the president views religious "schools and buildings" in the United States.Like much of the Democratic Party leadership, Mr. Obama supports allowing families to use public funds to attend the school of their choice, including charter schools, but strongly opposes the inclusion of private religious schools among the options. Opponents of voucher programs that include religious schools often cite "separation of church and state" concerns.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Hands over temples and eyes closed, as if trying to contain the shifting permutations of tactical possibilities, a chess champion calculates twenty moves forward in her game. In the shop windows of Istanbul, there are chess boards for sale to tourists. In the common rooms of state prisons across the United States, inmates play endless rounds over black and white boards. Right now, many of the 7.5 million registered online chess players from 160 countries are sparring with one another from their computers. Researchers in the Brain and Behavioral Sciences Department at UT Dallas ask chess players to quickly memorize and re-identify positions on a chess board, and compare this ability to the capacity for facial pattern recognition.Each chess game holds the promise of resolution by one player's aggressive victory, by the other's blunder, by a draw, or by the clock. The game therefore forms a closed system, with an objective ranking system, onto which researchers can map other, less resolved, quandaries. For some decades, cognitive and social scientists have used chess as a proxy to investigate how the interpersonal aspects of a competitive experience may affect its outcome.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Reader: more and more white people agree that strict, "no excuses" style charter schools provide an ideal learning environment for poor minority kids. As proof of this surging enthusiasm I give you exhibit A: a glowing report about Harlem's Democracy Prep charter school featured in the current issue of the New Yorker, one of America's whitest magazines. (Full disclosure: I am white and also a New Yorker subscriber). Which brings us to today's fiercely urgent question: why are white people so eager to advocate for the sort of schools to which they would never send their own children?Through the Gauntlet
The New Yorker piece, by writer Ian Frazier, is subtitled 'Up Life's Ladder'--but 'gauntlet' might be a more accurate metaphor. Frazier is dazzled by the spectacle of the 44 members of Democracy Prep's first graduating class, on stage at the Apollo Theater in their school-bus-yellow robes, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on hand to fete them. But more than three quarters of Democracy Prep's students--23% each year--never made it onto the stage. If Frazier is aware of the school's attrition rate, among the highest in New York City, he doesn't mention it. Nor does Frazier have anything to say about the school's strict "no excuses" disciplinary policy. Instead, he seems excited by the fact that students at the school are required to take Korean, the only foreign language offered. Best of all, Frazier likes the fact that 100% of the remaining graduates are headed to a four-year college.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
t's midmorning on a Saturday in June when Will Reichardt unlocks the front door of a south side office and grabs the day's supplies: clipboard, school fliers in Spanish and English, some enrollment applications.Related: A majority of the Madison school board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school last year.Just in case.
Then Reichardt drives his minivan to the local laundromats, where he circles dryers and washers and toddlers and parents, asking each family, in Spanish, to consider the opportunities at a new school opening in August called Rocketship.
A newcomer to Milwaukee, Rocketship Education is a nonprofit elementary charter-school network based in San Jose, Calif., that's attracting national attention for its low-cost schools that blend traditional instruction with technological intervention.
Rocketship's first national expansion site is Southside Community Prep, a new school at 3003 W. Cleveland Ave. which will operate under a special charter with the City of Milwaukee. If successful, Rocketship may open up to eight schools serving up to 4,000 children in Milwaukee.
The organization's mission is to eliminate the achievement gap by rapidly replicating schools that perform better and cost less than local options. It intends to grow from 3,800 students in California to 25,000 students in six states by 2018.
In a decade, leaders estimate, they could be educating 200,000 students in 30 cities.
But in Milwaukee, Rocketship is an unknown, and the hurdles to recruiting students in a highly competitive school landscape have it scrambling to enroll at least 300 students by an Aug. 19 start date -- now four weeks away.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Our new study, In Debt and In the Dark: It's Time for Better Information on Student Loan Defaults, made two main points. First, we should improve the way we use default rates to hold colleges accountable by comparing expected to actual default rates rather than having a single cutoff that applies to all colleges (See a short synopsis).The second point was that default rates are a great source of information for prospective students. One of the ways we illustrated this was by finding (to our dismay) the many colleges where default rates were greater than the graduation rates. We warned that these colleges should set of a "red flag" in the minds of students who will need to borrow to attend these colleges. Caution is warranted, as graduation rates are only tracked for first-time, full-time students based on when they begin college whereas default rates are tracked for borrowers based on when they start repaying their loans (and they ignore students' Perkins and GradPLUS loans).
In the report, we looked at these red flag colleges from several angles in Table 1 on page 11 (e.g., the adjusted default rate takes into account the percent of students borrowing). Today, we introduce another angle: geography. The maps below show the locations of red flag colleges in four college towns - Boston, San Francisco, Houston, and Chicago.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Per-pupil spending in Indiana, and growth in same, trailed the national averages in 2010-11. But while spending in the booming Hamilton Southeastern Schools topped out at $7,374, the two highest spending school districts in the state both had rapidly shrinking K-12 enrollment.Madison has long spent more per student than most districts. The most recent 2012-2013 budget, via a kind Donna Williams and Matthew DeFour email is $392,789,303 or $14,496.74 per student (27,095 students, including pre-k).The Indianapolis Public Schools lost 13.3 percent of its students between 2006 and 2011 and was in danger of being overtaken by Fort Wayne as the largest school district in Indiana. Nevertheless, Indianapolis spent $13,908 per pupil, over $4,500 more per pupil than the state average.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Programmers in Bangalore will soon boast Georgia Tech degrees without even having a passport.There are plenty of online courses available from prestigious universities like MIT and Harvard -- most of them free. There are plenty of online degree programs, too -- most of them not free and in fact not even discounted. So this Georgia Tech program, made possible by a $2 million grant from AT&T, is something else. It could be the future of technical education. It could be the beginning of the end for elite U.S university programs. Or it might well be both.
The online classes are all free, by the way, it's just the degree that costs money.
This technical capability has been around for several years but no prestigious U.S. university has made the jump before now because it's too scary. Georgia Tech is launching its program, I believe, to gain first-mover advantage in this new industry, which I suppose is education, maybe training, but more properly something more like brand sharing or status conferral.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
If you plan to help your kids with their homework in the future, better start boning up on your programming skills now. (And you thought new math was hard!)The U.K. Department of Education this week made a radical departure from its current curriculum, announcing plans to begin teaching "rigorous computer science" to all children ages 5 to 14. After studying the current state of instruction, the department concluded that computing in British schools had been "dumbed down" and attempts to teach programming dropped. Children were instead merely being exposed to word processors and spreadsheets, "mostly Word, Excel, and, of course, all running on Windows." They axed the curriculum, saying it was "so harmful, boring, and/or irrelevant it should simply be scrapped."
As the British education minister commented:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
One of the most preposterous expenses that Western New York taxpayers are forced to bear is the cosmetic surgery rider included in some public union contracts, including that of Buffalo teachers, where the cost has become particularly onerous.Facing elimination of nearly half the Buffalo School District's band and orchestra programs, the School Board is targeting superficial anti-wrinkle procedures such as facial peels and microderm abrasions. The cost of such procedures to the district in the 2011-12 school year came to nearly $1.7 million, according to School Board member John B. Licata, who has sponsored a resolution to deny such claims from teachers and administrators.
We sympathize with Licata and the board, which unanimously approved his resolution in late June, but as Philip Rumore, president of the Buffalo Teachers Federation, noted, this is a contractual issue. For reasons that defy understanding, the school district at one time provided that benefit to some teachers and administrators.
As foolish as it was, the cosmetic surgery rider is in the contract. That makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the district simply to decide not to cover certain procedures.
But now, teachers and students are about to pay a steep price for it. Licata believes the savings from his proposal could help preserve the endangered music programs, whose pending termination has stirred anger in the community.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In education today, data, particularly testing data, are everywhere. One of many potentially valuable uses of these data is helping teachers improve instruction - e.g., identifying students' strengths and weaknesses, etc. Of course, this positive impact depends on the quality of the data and how it is presented to educators, among other factors. But there's an even more basic requirement - teachers actually have to use it.In an article published in the latest issue of the journal Education Finance and Policy, economist John Tyler takes a thorough look at teachers' use of an online data system in a mid-sized urban district between 2008 and 2010. A few years prior, this district invested heavily in benchmark formative assessments (four per year) for students in grades 3-8, and an online "dashboard" system to go along with them. The assessments' results are fed into the system in a timely manner. The basic idea is to give these teachers a continual stream of information, past and present, about their students' performance.
Tyler uses weblogs from the district, as well as focus groups with teachers, to examine the extent and nature of teachers' data usage (as well as a few other things, such as the relationship between usage and value-added). What he finds is not particularly heartening. In short, teachers didn't really use the data.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Our great nation is known for the constant pursuit of equality and for "offering every citizen "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." In education, while there is an increasing focus on minority achievement, especially for African American and Hispanic students, few people are acknowledging the growing disparity in gender achievement in the United States.
According to New York Times bestselling author Michael Gurian, for every 100 girls suspended from elementary and secondary school, 250 boys are suspended. For every 100 girls diagnosed with a learning disability, 276 boys are so diagnosed. Also, for every 100 girls expelled from school, 355 boys are expelled.
Similarly, boys are expelled from preschool at five times the rate of girls, and boys are 60% more likely to be held back in kindergarten than girls. More girls than boys take college prep courses in high school and take the SAT. On average, girls get better grades than boys and graduate with high GPA's. Considering these statistics it is not at all surprising that more girls receive college degrees.
In his book, Why Boys Fail, Richard Whitmire reports that the reading skills of the average 17-year-old boy have steadily declined over the last 20 years. According to estimates, if 5% more boys completed high school and matriculated to college, the nation would save $8 billion a year in welfare and criminal justice costs.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I received a kind email from Madison School Board President Ed Hughes earlier today regarding the proposed property tax increase associated with the 2013-2014 District budget.
Ed's email:
Jim --My followup email:Your comparison to the tax rates in Middleton is a bit misleading. The Middleton-Cross Plains school district that has a mill rate that is among the lowest in Dane County. I am attaching a table (.xls file) that shows the mill rates for the Dane County school districts. As you will see, Madison's mill rate is lower than the county average, though higher than Middleton's. (Middleton has property value/student that is about 10% higher than Madison, which helps explain the difference.)
The table also includes the expenses/student figures relied upon by DPI for purposes of calculating general state aid for the 2012-13 school year. You may be surprised to see that Madison's per-student expenditures as measured for these purposes is among the lowest in Dane County. Madison's cost/student expenditures went up in the recently-completed school year, for reasons I explain here: http://tinyurl.com/obd2wty
Hi Ed:
Thanks so much for taking the time to write and sending this along - including your helpful post.
I appreciate and will post this information.
That said, and as you surely know, "mill rate" is just one part of the tax & spending equation:
1. District spending growth driven by new programs, compensation & step increases, infinite campus, student population changes, open enrollment out/in,
2. ongoing "same service" governance, including Fund 80,
3. property tax base changes (see the great recession),
4. exempt properties (an issue in Madison) and
5. growth in other property taxes such as city, county and tech schools.
Homeowners see their "total" property taxes increasing annually, despite declining to flat income. Middleton's 16% positive delta is material and not simply related to the "mill rate".
Further, I continue to be surprised that the budget documents fail to include total spending. How are you evaluating this on a piecemeal basis without the topline number? - a number that seems to change every time a new document is discussed.
Finally, I would not be quite as concerned with the ongoing budget spaghetti if Madison's spending were more typical for many districts along with improved reading results. We seem to be continuing the "same service" approach of spending more than most and delivering sub-par academic results for many students. (Note the recent expert review of the Madison schools Analysis: Madison School District has resources to close achievement gap.)
That is the issue for our community.
Best wishes,
Jim
Related: Middleton-Cross Plains' $91,025,771 2012-2013 approved budget (1.1mb PDF) for 6,577 students, or $13,840.01 per student, roughly 4.7% less than Madison's 2012-2013 spending.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"We were having fun, and in a split second, he was dead."In 2011, 3291 American teenagers were killed in automobile accidents. Car crashes account for more than a third of teenage deaths, by far the largest cause-surpassing the number of teens killed separately by guns, drugs, cancer, homicide, and suicide. Drivers between 16 and 19 years old have a fatal-accident rate more than three times that of those between 30 and 69.
If this were a disease, we'd declare it an epidemic. If kids were being killed by a foreign government, we'd go to war. But since these deaths happen one at a time, nine or so Donovan Tessmers every day, no one seems to care enough to do anything. Not the government, not the insurance companies, not even the parents.
Upper-middle-class American parents spend almost $9000 annually on enrichment activities for their children. But $100-per-hour cello lessons won't make most kids Yo-Yo Ma. The soccer career of the average boy or girl in a $1500-a-season travel league ends with high school. Most teenagers will drive for the rest of their lives.
Yet parents tend to cheap out when it comes to teaching driving to kids. The price of a typical driving course is $300. When Mercedes-Benz started its driving academy in 2009-at $1390, more than four times as expensive as the average American driving class-the company conducted focus groups with its upper-income customers, asking them how they would go about selecting a piano teacher for their kids. The answers were thoughtful, including soliciting referrals from other parents, conducting personal interviews, and observing actual lessons. By contrast, those same parents found driving schools through the Yellow Pages.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The question of student loans is taking on an increasing urgency everywhere but Washington.
Rates on federally subsidized loans doubled to almost 7% on July 1,thanks to Congressional bickering and dithering. The latest attempt to roll back the rates failed to get out of the Senate earlier this week, when sponsoring Democrats failed to break a Republican filibuster against the bill.There's a clear double standard here. If you are a Congressman who needs to fly somewhere, you can rely on your fellow elected officials to bail you out with special legislation designed to exempt air traffic controllers from the impact of sequester within a day or so. If you are a student who needs to know student loan rates so you can actually apply for one before the start of the academic year later this summer ... well, good luck to you. No majority in Congress has your back.
Senator Elizabeth Warren wants to set the rate at 0.75% for the next year, the same rate the Federal Reserve charges banks that borrow money from them on a short-term basis.Others - including many Republicans and President Barack Obama - would like to see a floating rate tied to the ten-year Treasury note.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Today I'm releasing Let's Play: Ancient Greek Geometry. It's a Compass and Straightedge tool/puzzle game written in JavaScript. I've always thought Geometric Construction felt like a puzzle, so to me this pairing was quite natural. Compass and Straight edge is a technique for constructing shapes out of circles, straight lines, and their intersection points. You can read the wikipedia here - but watch out, some of the gifs are spoilers for the game.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Math and science majors are popular until students realize what they're getting themselves into, according to new research.In a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, researchers Ralph Stinebrickner of Berea College and Todd R. Stinebrickner of the University of Western Ontario say that college students are fleeing from math, physics, chemistry and the like after dipping into some classes.
The researchers surveyed 655 students entering Berea College, a private liberal arts college located in Kentucky, in the falls of 2000 and 2001. The students were asked about their beliefs pertaining to majors 12 times during each year they were in school, the first time prior to starting college. The questions covered a variety of topics, including their certainty of graduating with a particular major, their anticipated grade point average and the amount of work they expected to do each day.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A new law aims to offer more online classes to Florida students than ever before, but making sure it works as intended will take lots of time and planning, school officials say.Gov. Rick Scott signed the bill into law July 1, allowing more out-of-state digital learning companies to partner with developing Florida online classes and requiring the Department of Education to research the effects. Now, the state has to figure out how to hold online teachers and curricula accountable.
The goal is to improve education for all Florida students, said Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, one of the bill's sponsors.
"One of the biggest variables in students' lives is the quality of the teacher at the front of their classroom," Brandes said. "If we can somehow standardize the quality of instruction they're receiving, we can remove one of the variables from their educational success. I don't think we're going to get to that point where every student is learning the same thing, but we should be using technology to help our teachers facilitate that process."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Lupe Fiasco is known for his outspoken political attitude. The rapper has been known to rant about his views, and most recently wrote for Kanye West's racially charged track "Black Skinhead". Fiasco got a chance to speak to some recent graduates this weekend at the 2013 Mass Black Male Graduation And Transition To Manhood Ceremony, where he was able to speak about his issues with the American education system.Lupe began his speech with a critique of the U.S. school system. "Congratulations, you have graduated from one of the most terrible, substandard school systems in the entire world. You have just spent the last...12 years receiving one of the worst educations on earth. You are at least four, five steps behind people in other countries that are younger than you," he declared.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
July, 2013 Madison Schools 2013-2014 Budget Presentation (PDF). Notes:
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.
Work will begin on the 2014-15 early this fall. The process will be zero-based, and every line item and FTE will be carefully reviewed to ensure that resources are being used efficiently. The budget development process will also include a review of benefit programs and procurement practices, among other areas.One hopes that programs will indeed be reviewed and efforts focused on the most urgent issues, particularly the District's disastrous reading scores.
Ironically, the recent "expert review" found that Analysis: Madison School District has resources to close achievement gap. If this is the case (and I agree with their conclusion - making changes will be extraordinarily difficult), what are students, taxpayers and citizens getting for the annual tax & spending growth?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Abby Andrietsch and Kole Knueppel, via several kind reader emails:
Charter. Choice. Public.In recent weeks, these words became more politically charged than ever before. They are emblematic of the divisive debate surrounding school funding and policy changes included in the new state budget.
Now, the time for discussion and deliberation is over. The budget is law. It is time for Milwaukee's education stakeholders to move forward and to do so together for the benefit of all our city's children -- no matter what type of school they attend. For the sake of our city's prosperity and quality of life today and in the future, we must turn our collective efforts toward improving the quality of all schools.
Despite decades of effort, too many Milwaukee children still lack access to an effective, high-quality education. In fact, we have the largest racial achievement gap in the country. Without the opportunity to attend an excellent school, students will continue to fall behind, their challenges compounding into insurmountable roadblocks to success in academics and life.
In Milwaukee, there are great Milwaukee Public Schools, choice schools and charter schools. Still, each of these categories contains some of the worst schools in our community. Instead of bickering over how schools are organized, we need more collaboration and sharing of best practices across all three sectors. We need to work together to ensure that every type of school is capable of equipping students for the future.
Since 2010, Schools That Can Milwaukee has partnered with and supported high-quality and high-potential schools across all three sectors to close the Milwaukee achievement gap and ensure all students have the opportunity to learn and succeed. By focusing on kids and quality instead of the differences between school types, STCM is leading an unprecedented cross-sector collaboration of talented leaders from MPS, charter and choice schools serving predominantly low-income students.
Over the past three years, schools supported by STCM have outperformed their Milwaukee peers on the annual standardized Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, and many also have beaten state test score averages. During the 2013-'14 school year, STCM will work with 35 traditional MPS, charter and choice schools, supporting more than 150 school and teacher leaders reaching over 13,000 students. Not only are these leaders coming together with a vision of excellence for their own schools, but also a larger vision of quality for our community and our children.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Barry Garelick, via a kind email
The New York Times recently published a piece called "The Faulty Logic of the Math Wars" by W. Stephen Wilson (a math professor at Johns Hopkins University) and Alice Crary. While the article itself is worth reading, I found the reaction of the readers to be equally fascinating. They revealed the ideological divide that defines this "war". I was reminded of Tom Wolfe's famous description of the reaction of the New Yorker literati to his 1965 article in the New York Herald Tribune that criticized the culture of The New Yorker magazine: "They screamed like weenies over a wood fire."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
That seems to be the case with an Oregon proposal that has generated headlines such as "Plan would make tuition free at Oregon colleges," "Oregon is doing free higher education the right way," and "Oregon looking to eliminate tuition and loans for higher education students."Despite the headlines, the state didn't suddenly abandon all plans to charge tuition. Last week the Oregon legislature took the first steps toward possibly implementing a plan that would allow public college and university students to forgo upfront tuition payments in exchange for paying a portion of their wages back to their alma mater for about 25 years following graduation. While it may mean no money down, it could still add up to large tuition bills.
But the program is a long way from actually being instituted. The bill approved by the legislature, if it is signed by the governor, would only direct the state's Higher Education Coordinating Commission - a relatively new agency created amid broader governance changes in recent years -- to create a pilot program for legislative consideration in 2015. If the governor signs the bill, the commission would work between now and the 2015 legislative session to figure out how to overcome significant logistical barriers to implementation and the pros and cons of implementing such a system.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The so-called quantified self movement is knocking on the nursery door. As adults rush to wrap their wrists with activity trackers and fill their smartphone screens with calorie counters, a number of new companies are trying to court them with gadgets for their most vulnerable appendages: their babies. But is all of that data really useful?The most recent (and buzzworthy) product is a "smart diaper" from New York-based Pixie Scientific that uses camera technology and chemistry to detect when a baby might be suffering from a urinary tract infection, dehydration or other problems. The front of the diaper displays a square with colored boxes that change color when they interact with a protein, bacteria or other urine content that indicates a potential abnormality. To decode the colored patch, parents snap a picture of the diaper with a smartphone app that analyzes the color changes and returns a result.
"I was driving with my wife and daughter one day, when my wife asked if the baby had wet herself," Yaroslav Faybishenko, Pixie's founder, told the New York Times. "I realized she was sitting in data."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The law school at Seton Hall University has put its untenured faculty on legal notice that their contracts may not be renewed for the 2014-15 academic year. The firings of these seven individuals are not certain, depending on the outcome of other steps the administration will try to bring the budget in balance.Paul Caron has more.The situation at Seton Hall is representative of many other non-elite law schools. Firing untenured faculty is a shortsighted approach to managing an academic budget. It encroaches on an important principle of academic freedom, namely that a tenure decision should be based on the merit of the case, not the budget of the department.
As a tax scholar who writes about issues that can hit rich people in the pocketbook, I am sometimes reminded why the institution of tenure, for all its flaws, is worth keeping around.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"Look at you. You're so tan! Sometimes I wish I were a teacher so I could get summers off, too," a friend says to me at an Independence Day barbecue. I decide not to mention that the only reason I have a tan is because I sit outside on my patio while writing - a second job I need during the summers in order to pay our ever-increasing bills.
My husband, also a teacher, has been on a pay freeze for three years, not even receiving the cost-of-living increase most jobs that require a bachelor's degree offer. So, we both take on extra work during the summer on top of the planning and preparation we have for the upcoming school year.My husband and I are not alone. About 62% of teachers have another job outside of teaching in order to make ends meet. Because of this stress, almost half of public school teachers leave the profession within the first five years of their career in order to take other jobs that pay a living wage, or at least pay closer to what their college-educated peers are earning.
It's a popular trope in this day and age to bash teachers. The public's hard-earned money goes to taxes that pay teacher salaries, and when teachers work only 10 months out of the year, why should they get paid more?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Kosta Kuzmanovic's wish is to be a radiologist in Australia. But the path is lined with hurdles for the 17-year-old Roma student from this dusty East European city, which still bears scars from wartime bombings in 1999.As a member of one of Europe's more disenfranchised minority groups, he may face financial, linguistic, bureaucratic and social barriers. If he does make it to an Australian university, it will be because of both his hard work and the Secondary Scholarship Program, run by the Roma Education Fund, a regional organization.
The program makes it possible for him to attend the Novi Sad Medical High School here, which offers counseling and financing for Roma students. "I have an opportunity, why wouldn't I use it?" he said.
The Serbian government does not track how many Roma youth are in school. But the R.E.F. estimates that only one in three Roma students in Serbia even attempts to enroll in high school.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Government researchers continue to show that federal student loans are hazardous to both students and taxpayers. But Senate liberals don't seem to care, as long as the money keeps flowing to their constituents in the nonprofit academic world.As the Senate prepares for Wednesday voting on student-loan subsidies, a coalition that includes congressional Republicans, President Obama and moderate Democrats favors reform that ties the rates on student loans to the 10-year Treasury rate. This protects taxpayers from having to guarantee low fixed rates to students while the government's own borrowing costs rise. And it provides some marginal encouragement to students to consider whether their chosen course of study is worth the money.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A new study from McKinsey & Company reveals that 45 percent of four-year college graduates now work jobs that don't require college degrees.The study also revealed that one-third of college students believe their four-year education insufficiently prepared them for lives as adults.
If you read Campus Reform on a regular basis these findings should come as no surprise to you.
For the past several years, administrators and faculty at many institutions have abandoned the true purpose of college - equipping students with a true education. They have instead focused scarce resources on teaching the doctrines of tolerance, inclusion, and a host of other liberal false idols.
For example, students may now study for four years to receive degrees in subjects such as gender equality, labor studies, and medical marijuana growing.
Leftist faculty are using more traditional degrees as vessels for their leftist ideologies.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Sources:
City of Madison Assessor Reports
Related:
August, 2006 (Deja-vu): Property Taxes Outstrip Income.
Budget Cuts: We Won't Be as Bold and Innovative as Oconomowoc, and That's Okay.
Madison Schools' 2013-2014 Budget Charts, Documents, Links, Background & Missing Numbers.
Madison's long-term disastrous reading results.
The Hated Property Tax: Salience, Tax Rates, and Tax Revolts.
Revenue Potential and Implementation
Challenges (IMF PDF).
Tax Policy Reform and Economic Growth (OECD).
Stagnant School Governance; Tax & Spending Growth and the "NSA's European Adventure".
Analysis: Madison School District has resources to close achievement gap.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Our other team sports -- baseball, basketball, ice hockey, not to mention soccer -- all have strong foreign elements. Football is the all-American game, but, ironically, already middle-class all-American parents -- even fathers who played themselves -- are showing a reluctance to allow their sons to play
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
BOTH relief and tears will greet the results of France's school-leavingbaccalauréat exam on July 5th. With breathtaking efficiency, the entire country's exam papers are corrected and marked within just two weeks. Founded in 1808 by Napoleon, the bac is an entry ticket to university as well as a yearly national ritual, which opens with a gruelling compulsory four-hour philosophy general paper that even scientists have to sit. This year the papers seem particularly revealing of how French youngsters are taught to view the world."What do we owe to the state?" was one essay option in the philosophy exam. In the economics and social science paper, pupils were asked to comment on a wealth-distribution table, showing that 10% of French households owned 48% of the country's wealth, and then told to "demonstrate that social conflict can be a factor behind social cohesion". We still have the mentality of the class struggle, says Nicolas Lecaussin, of the Institute of Fiscal and Economic Research (IREF), a think-tank, and author of a report on economics textbooks.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
It might seem strange that it's an overwhelmingly white, middle-class school district about one-seventh the size of Madison's that is considering a strategy that could narrow the kind of long-standing achievement gap Madison is becoming known for.Related: Budget Cuts: We Won't Be as Bold and Innovative as Oconomowoc, and That's Okay..It's not. Heavily influenced by its host city's brand of establishment liberalism, the Madison School District isn't known for tinkering much with the sacred cow that is traditional public education.
But should that change, school leaders might be wise to take a gander 11 miles south.
The Oregon School District has a task force to look into converting one of its three elementary schools, Netherwood Knoll, to a year-round calendar -- something no other public school in Dane County has.
Spreading the standard 180-day school year out over 11 or 12 months is an intriguing idea given the well-documented "summer learning loss" phenomenon.
Even more to the point, summer learning loss is most apparent among low-income, often minority, students, and recent research has shown that year-round learning can be of most benefit to them.
New Madison superintendent Jennifer Cheatham said through a spokeswoman that year-round school isn't on the district's radar.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
STUDENT loans are based on a simple idea: that a graduate's future flow of earnings will more than cover the costs of doing a degree. But with unemployment rates in parts of the rich world at post-war highs, that may no longer hold true for many people. The consequences will be felt by everybody.
All over the world student indebtedness is causing problems--witness this month's violent protests in Chile (see article). In Britain, according to a recent parliamentary report, rising university fees mean that student debt is likely to treble to £70 billion by 2015. But, partly because higher education there is so expensive, the scale of the problem is far greater in America. When the next official estimates of outstanding student debt there are published, it is expected to be close to $1 trillion, higher than credit-card borrowing (see article). Credit quality in other classes of consumer debt has been improving; delinquency rates on student loans are rising.Many of the anti-Wall Street protesters push the idea of blanket debt forgiveness as a solution. But that is the wrong answer. Higher education is not a guarantee of employment, but it improves the odds immensely. Unemployment rates among university graduates stood at 4.4% on average across OECD countries in 2009. People who did not complete secondary school faced unemployment rates of 11.5%. Much of the debt that students are taking on is provided or guaranteed by the government. Imposing write-offs on all taxpayers to benefit those with the best job prospects is unfair; and ripping up contracts between borrowers and private lenders is usually a bad idea.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
BARACK OBAMA was raised by his grandparents for part of his childhood. He remembers his grandmother as being "tough as nails". Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court judge, was raised by his grandparents because his mother could not make ends meet. He called his grandfather "the greatest man I have ever known". Grandparents have always reared children when need arose. Most have done it well. A few have done it badly--the late comedian Richard Pryor, who was raised by his grandmother in a brothel she owned, was constantly beaten.What is new is that, as the nuclear family frays, grandparents are taking more and more of the strain. Of the 75m children in America, 5.5m live in households headed by grandparents, a number that has risen by almost a million since 2005, according to the Census bureau. Beware stereotypes. Child-rearing grandparents are disproportionately black, but in absolute terms most are white, live above the poverty line and own their own homes. When a parent loses a job or cannot pay the mortgage, many families move in with grandma. Sometimes, however, the parents have disappeared: an estimated 900,000 children are being raised solely by grandparents.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Software programming? Yeah it's an okay way to make a living. But the real money is in teaching.
Or at least that's the recent experience of Scott Allen, a programmer and teacher the tech-y online education platform Pluralsight.com. Allen has earned more than $1.8 million through fees and royalties from Pluralsight over the last five years. He says each monthly royalty check has increased in size over that period -- the smallest increase being 10 percent month-over-month. That far outdid his expectations when he started making educational videos for Pluralsight. "It's amazing," he says.I got pitched this story this morning with the subject line "Online ed's first millionaire teacher." I was drawn to it, because I could imagine the same story being pitched about blogging or online journalism several years ago. There are a lot of parallels between what those two industries are going through, and how each are grappling with the Web's potential for disruption.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
When the world looks back at how the "designer babies" trend began, they will see an innocent start. A Philadelphia couple who had gone through the physical and emotional marathon of trying to have a child turned to intra-uterine insemination and ultimately IVF. Like any rational people, they wanted to do everything to increase their chances that IVF would work. In this case, they sent the embryos to an Oxford lab, which ran a kind of minimal DNA test to see which embryos would be most likely to take.It's hard to deny this Philadelphia couple the chance to be parents. David Levy and Marybeth Scheidts look very wholesome in their family photo holding their son Connor, born in May 2013. They clearly weren't trying to select the embryo with their preferred hair or eye color or other physical or mental traits. In fact, they didn't even have a full DNA analysis done, only a scan of the chromosomes, the structures that hold genes. This isn't Brave New World-esque test tube babies. It's a traditional family - with the best of modern medicine.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
THE sort of people who go through business school, one might think, would have no problem with the idea of education being provided for a profit. But when Thunderbird, a struggling school based in Arizona, announced three months ago that it was planning a partnership with Laureate, an education company, there was uproar among its alumni and students. A petition calling for the deal to be halted has won almost 2,000 signatures. By "selling out", Thunderbird's management is diluting the school's brand and cheapening its degrees, it says.Thunderbird insists that the school itself, founded on a former air-force base after the second world war, will remain a non-profit. The partnership will be used to create foreign campuses, to expand the school's online teaching and courses for executives, and to introduce undergraduate degrees. But a damning report on America's for-profit higher-education firms, issued last year by a Senate committee, helps to explain the suspicions about the deal. It found that such institutions got $32 billion of student aid from the government in the 2009-10 academic year. They charge higher fees than state universities but spend less on teaching. Their drop-out rates are alarming: in 2008-09 the median student lasted just four months.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
As a kid, waking up early used to be really tough. Especially for school. My mom would have to hound me at least 3 times each morning to get out of bed because I hated to wake up for something I didn't really care for. When you grow a little older, things change. Especially as an entrepreneur. Your day becomes filled with different tasks to do and if you're just starting out, you're wearing multiple hats and jumping all over the place. And if you have a family, that's another full time job for you. There's just so many things happening that it's hard to stay focused. So what's the best way to really lock down on important tasks? Join The 5 a.m Club. Simply put, that means wake up at or around 5 a.m in the morning. Let's look at some examples of people that rise early:
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
What do college girls and bottled water have to do with the emerging American police state? Quite a bit, it seems.Public outcry has gone viral over an incident in which a college student was targeted and terrorized by Alcohol Beverage Control agents (ABC) after she purchased sparkling water at a grocery store. The girl and her friends were eventually jailed for daring to evade their accosters, who failed to identify themselves or approach the young women in a non-threatening manner.
What makes this particular incident significant (other than the fact that it took place in my hometown of Charlottesville, Va.) is the degree to which it embodies all that is wrong with law enforcement today, both as it relates to the citizenry and the ongoing undermining of our rule of law. To put it bluntly, due in large part to the militarization of the police and the equipping of a wide range of government agencies with weaponry, we are moving into a culture in which law enforcement officials have developed a sense of entitlement that is at odds with the spirit of our Constitution--in particular, the Fourth Amendment.
The incident took place late in the evening of April 11, 2013. Several University of Virginia college students, including 20-year-old Elizabeth Daly, were leaving the Harris Teeter grocery store parking lot after having purchased a variety of foodstuffs for an Alzheimer's Association sorority charity benefit that evening, including sparkling water, ice cream and cookie dough, when they noticed a man staring at them as they walked to their car in the back of the parking lot.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
This year's The Next Web Conference Europe is already more than two months in the past and we're looking forward to our forthcoming events in São Paulo andNew York City. To fill the gap, let's take a look at a really interesting talk from our Amsterdam event.Juan Lopez-Valcarcel is Chief Digital Officer at education and publishing companyPearson. In his talk, he noted that education is a $4 trillion industry - that's three times bigger than the mobile industry. The opportunities for investors, technology companies, educators and (most importantly) learners are vast.
Lopez-Valcarcel took us through seven trends in the education technology space, from robot-assisted learning to international 'rockstar' teachers and beyond. Take a break for whatever you're doing, grab a coffee and watch...
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Universities and colleges may be competing to build such perks as climbing walls and fancy dormitories, but the "arms race" over residence halls, food services, and fitness centers is having little effect on college applicants' choices, new research shows.Conducted before and after the economic downturn by economists Kevin Rask of Colorado College and Amanda Griffith of Wake Forest University, the research saysstudents are more interested in price and prestige than in amenities.
Families that do and do not qualify for financial aid are equally concerned about cost and reputation, particularly as measured by the U.S. News and World Report rankings, Rask and Griffith found after surveying high-achieving students in various income categories who started college between 2005 and the academic year just ended.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The education secretary Michael Gove's efforts to revolutionise learning in England's schools will see five-year-olds studying fractions and writing computer programs in their first year of school, according to final versions of the new national curriculum published on Monday.
Among the changes are a requirement for 3-D printers to be used in design and technology lessons, after major revisions to the subject's curriculum.According to a Whitehall source: "Three-dimensional printers will become standard in our schools - a technology that is transforming manufacturing and the economy. Combined with the introduction of programming, it is a big step forward from Labour's dumbed-down curriculum."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Some people see computers as little more than gaming consoles and shopping tools. Recently developed electronics, however, have revolutionized education for children with disabilities. If you know a child with disabilities who is struggling, you might want to explore some of these devices.
Technology for Kids With AutismChildren with autism often don't develop typical communication skills. It takes years and years of therapy for some of these children to start using simple language. Just because a child cannot speak does not mean that he or she doesn't have something to say.
That's where revolutionary electronics come in. For years, counselors have used picture cards to communicate with non-verbal children. Now, they can use some of these apps that let autistic kids express practically any thought or feeling. They just load the app on a laptop of your choice so the kids can point and click their way to expression.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In days past, parents in Britain were often uninterested bystanders when it came to decisions about where their children would go to university. Now they are so important that student recruitment advertising is targeting them directly.Online forum and social media network the Student Room has partnered with Mumsnet, the online forum for parents, to allow universities to aim advertising directly at parents and their children at the same time.
A marketing pitch by the Student Room sent to universities reads as follows: "Over the past year we've had the pleasure of talking to many of you about reaching the student market ... but one thing we've been asked for time and again is 'how can we reach the parents?' So we've teamed up with ... Mumsnet, to offer you a brilliant parent targeting solution."
Jason Geall, managing director of the Student Room, said the traffic the site receives from parents has "grown substantially" over the past two years, with figures suggesting that there are more than 16,000 parents active on its forums - a 20 percent increase over the past 12 months. "In the parental market, we are seeing people coming on to the site for monitoring purposes: they are able to assess and understand what is being talked about before helping their children make informed decisions," Geall said.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Senior academic leaders at Howard University have charged that "fiscal mismanagement is doing irreparable harm" to the school in Northwest Washington and urged the dismissal of Howard's chief financial officer, asserting that his actions have put its survival at risk.Howard's Council of Deans alleged that staff cuts at the university have been based on "inaccurate, misleading" data, lamented a decline in research expenditures and contended that a "burdensome" tuition increase has driven away students.
In a letter obtained by The Washington Post, the deans said Howard's external auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, had cited "grave concern about the quality of fiscal decision-making" recently as it terminated its work for the university. Above all, the deans blamed the "fiscal direction" of Robert M. Tarola, an independent contractor who serves as the university's senior vice president for administration, chief financial officer and treasurer.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Cooper Union in the USA was founded to offer 'education equal to the best' while staying 'open and free to all' - but this ideal is under threat from new management. This is the story of the students' battle to keep their institution true to itselfLooking out over Manhatten, the occupiers at Cooper Union seem to have a pretty good setup. With the college president's office now occupied for eight weeks, the protestors have made themselves into the school's alternative administration.
Alumni have made key campaigners plaques for their desks, and the entrance to the space, formerly a reception area, now shows a proportion of the artwork and installations that the campaign has inspired. The message that education is a public good, and that it should be available to all regardless of finances, rings loud and true.
Cooper Union, founded in 1859 by Peter Cooper, was created to ensure that 'education equal to the best' was, and is, 'open and free to all'. The university at present provides a full tuition scholarship to all its students, ensuring that at least in principle, the opportunity to study in the institution is not hindered by race, class or wealth. This ideal is core to both the campaign currently taking place, and also the beliefs of all those who I met during my time in New York.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Dig, dig, dig. Break and build. Such are the simple, hallmark mechanics behind one of the world's most popular indie games, Minecraft, which has sold an estimated 20 million copies across different platforms and consoles since its alpha release in 2009.That includes copies at more than 1,400 schools across six continents, shared Joel Levin, the "Minecraft Teacher" who many accredit for bringing the game into the classroom. Levin, who teaches computer science at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in New York City, is the co-creator of MinecraftEDU, the official version of the game specifically tailored for teachers and students. His popular blog serves as a nexus of the Minecraft educator community.
"I see myself more as a gardener," Levin humbly stated in an interview at the recent 2013 Games for Change Festival."
And the garden that he's nurtured has blossomed into a collection of colorful worlds, projects and contraptions of every imaginable scope and scale. Perhaps the grandest is the World of Humanities, made up of ancient cities and landmarks filled with additional readings, missions and quests for students. Its creator, Eric Walker, a teacher at the American School in Kuwait, has poured 600--and counting--hours into the project.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I was just reminded by Kathy Geier on FB and Twitter that when she was a student at Hunter College in the early 1990s, she took a comparative literature course with Philip Roth. According to Kathy, Roth had no TAs, designed the course himself, graded all the papers (and there was a lot of writing), and was paid reasonably.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The job of a scientist is to predict the future and get there first. We do this by looking for patterns in subtle clues; organizing the fragments thoughtfully to project their likely trajectory. It is this process that moves me to write this essay; in essence an epitaph from the future.I am more optimistic than Fields. continuing the practices of the past does not guarantee similar future results. there are certainly opportunities to re-think our spending priorities. Locally, we could and should eliminate programs such as the expensive and partially implemented Infinite Campus system, among others.
After giving a guest lecture at a departmental seminar in one of the nation's leading medical schools a few weeks ago, I met with a group of eager graduate students and postdoctoral fellows over a lunch of sandwiches and chips as is customary for visiting speakers. I enjoy these sessions immensely as we go around the table and listen to each of the enthusiastic budding scientists share in turn their current research project with passion. This was an exceptionally bright and highly motivated group, but before any of us took a bite of lunch the meeting went off script. No one shared their research. Instead the group confessed fear. Uncertainty and bewilderment for the life choices they had made began to spill out.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Seventy-five 10th graders, who in other schools might ordinarily be texting, flirting, laughing, razzing each other, maybe even giving teachers a hard time, enter Laurie Friedman-Adler's music classroom at Brooklyn College Academy (BCA) on Coney Island Avenue ready to play--and work. Members of the World Music Ensemble, they spend four days a week learning to play Indian tablas, Japanese taiko drums, African djembes, Native American flutes, Senagalese balaphones, Australian dijerydos, a banjo, a shofar, a harmonium and an Appalachian hammer dulcimer.These are among the 150 instruments that Friedman-Adler, a professional clarinetist, has collected on travels around the world, and they are the tools for this remarkable orchestra and opportunity for musical development. Every year since 2003, Friedman-Adler and her students have spent a year working on a piece that she composes for a concert in June, melding together all these instruments.
While the World Music Ensemble would be remarkable if it existed in Great Neck, Scarsdale or Montclair, N.J., it is even more so here in New York City since, thanks to a variety of factors, arts and music programs are struggling in the schools, according to arts education advocates.
A combination of forces--budget cuts, the pressure on schools to focus on standardized tests, the elimination of dedicated funds for the arts, the replacement of large high schools with smaller schools with more limited budgets--have worked together to crowd the arts out of many schools. The trend makes a program like Friedman-Adler's doubly amazing.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
With a recently leaked poll, the first contours of the 2014 race for governor are coming into view.Democrats have contended for months that they see Gov. Scott Walker as vulnerable, but they have not offered a candidate to run against him. But last month a poll was conducted testing the viability of Mary Burke, a former state commerce secretary and former Trek Bicycle Corp. executive.
The poll was conducted around the same time an unknown person registered five Burke-themed Internet addresses, such as BurkeForWisconsin.com and BurkeForGovernor.com. None of the websites are active.
Burke, who was elected to the Madison School Board last year, has not responded to interview requests since the poll surfaced in June. Mike Tate, the chairman of the state Democratic Party, issued a statement at the time saying Democrats were conducting polls for "several potential strong challengers" to Walker.
Democrats are hungry for a victory after Walker became the first governor in the nation's history to survive a recall election last year. Republicans are equally motivated to keep him in office after having to elect him twice for one term.
Democratic strategists said Burke is seriously considering a run but has not made a final decision. They noted others could run, but they hoped to have just one candidate to avoid a Democratic primary.
Democrats said they liked Burke's background in business and economic development -- as well as the personal funds she could bring to the race -- while Republicans pointed to her ties to former Gov. Jim Doyle and other issues as matters they could exploit.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
With a record number of school districts sinking into a deficit, and two districts possibly on their way to being dissolved, state Superintendent Mike Flanagan is urging drastic action -- such as converting Michigan's nearly 550 districts, 56 intermediate districts and nearly 280 charter schools into countywide school districts.If that can't be done right away, he said, the state should give more power to intermediate school districts so operations such as transportation and food services can be consolidated.
Flanagan predicted that countywide districts or his hybrid option could save millions -- money he said could be used to teach students. But little, if any, research supports his position, a fact that's drawing concern from educators and others.
Don Wotruba, deputy director of the Michigan Association of School Boards, said his organization is open to discussing the idea. But, he said, a one-size-fits-all mandate isn't the way to go.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Kim Fitzer's daughter, Trinity, was attending kindergarten at Northwest Catholic School in Milwaukee with a voucher from the state for the 2011-12 school year. But Trinity, then 6, had gastrointestinal problems and anxiety -- conditions that Fitzer said the private school was ill-equipped to address.Much more on the Wisconsin Center for Investigative JournalismFitzer said the school repeatedly called her to pick up Trinity, saying she was "out of control." After Trinity knocked papers to the floor and kicked a teacher who tried to restrain her, Fitzer was told the girl was no longer welcome at the school.
Northwest Catholic Principal Michelle Paris said in an email statement that "every decision was made in the very best interest of the child with mutual agreement of our school leadership and the parent."
But Fitzer said it was not her decision, and she "didn't have an option."
Trinity transferred to a Milwaukee public school, where she has received special education services that address her anxiety as a disability.
Under the state's parental choice program, Northwest Catholic received a $6,442 voucher for Trinity's enrollment in the private school, but the public school got no extra money for taking her through the end of the school year. Critics of school choice, and a pending federal lawsuit, charge that students with disabilities, such as Trinity, are being underserved by publicly funded vouchers meant to give low-income students in Milwaukee and Racine the chance of a private education.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Governments are paying increasing attention to international comparisons as they search for effective policies that enhance individuals' social and economic prospects, provide incentives for greater efficiency in schooling, and help to mobilise resources to meet rising demands. As part of its response, the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills devotes a major effort to the development and analysis of the quantitative, internationally comparable indicators that it publishes annually in Education at a Glance. These indicators enable educational policy makers and practitioners alike to see their education systems in light of other countries' performance and, together with the OECD country policy reviews, are designed to support and review the efforts that governments are making towards policy reform.Related: www.wisconsin2.orgEducation at a Glance addresses the needs of a range of users, from governments seeking to learn policy lessons to academics requiring data for further analysis to the general public wanting to monitor how its country's schools are progressing in producing world-class students. The publication examines the quality of learning outcomes, the policy levers and contextual factors that shape these outcomes, and the broader private and social returns that accrue to investments in education.
Education at a Glance is the product of a long-standing, collaborative effort between OECD governments, the experts and institutions working within the framework of the OECD Indicators of Education Systems (INES) programme and the OECD Secretariat.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
We spent five months at Harper High School in Chicago, where last year alone 29 current and recent students were shot. 29. We went to get a sense of what it means to live in the midst of all this gun violence, how teens and adults navigate a world of funerals and Homecoming dances. We found so many incredible and surprising stories, this show is a two-parter; you can listen to Part Two here.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Our educators now stand ready to commit the same mistakes with the Common Core State Standards. Distressed teachers are saying that they are being compelled to engage in the same superficial, content-indifferent activities, given new labels like "text complexity" and "reading strategies." In short, educators are preparing to apply the same skills-based notions about reading that have failed for several decades.
A British schoolteacher, Daisy Christodoulou, has just published a short, pungent e-book called Seven Myths about Education. It's a must-read for anyone in a position to influence our low-performing public school system. The book's focus is on British education, but it deserves to be nominated as a "best book of 2013″ on American education, because there's not a farthing's worth of difference in how the British and American educational systems are being hindered by a slogan-monopoly of high-sounding ideas--brilliantly deconstructed in this book.Ms. Christodoulou has unusual credentials. She's an experienced classroom teacher. She currently directs a non-profit educational foundation in London, and she is a scholar of impressive powers who has mastered the relevant research literature in educational history and cognitive psychology. Her writing is clear and effective. Speaking as a teacher to teachers, she may be able to change their minds. As an expert scholar and writer, she also has a good chance of enlightening administrators, legislators, and concerned citizens.
Ms. Christodoulou believes that such enlightenment is the great practical need these days, because the chief barriers to effective school reform are not the usual accused: bad teacher unions, low teacher quality, burdensome government dictates. Many a charter school in the U.S. has been able to bypass those barriers without being able to produce better results than the regular public schools they were meant to replace. No wonder. Many of these failed charter schools were conceived under the very myths that Ms. Christodoulou exposes. It wasn't the teacher unions after all! Ms. Christodoulou argues convincingly that what has chiefly held back school achievement and equity in the English-speaking world for the past half century is a set of seductive but mistaken ideas.
She's right straight down the line. Take the issue of teacher quality. The author gives evidence from her own experience of the ways in which potentially effective teachers have been made ineffective because they are dutifully following the ideas instilled in them by their training institutes. These colleges of education have not only perpetuated wrong ideas about skills and knowledge, but in their scorn for "mere facts" have also deprived these potentially good teachers of the knowledge they need to be effective teachers of subject matter. Teachers who are only moderately talented teacher can be highly effective if they follow sound teaching principles and a sound curriculum within a school environment where knowledge builds cumulatively from year to year.
Here are Ms Christodoulou's seven myths:
1 - Facts prevent understanding
2 - Teacher-led instruction is passive
3 - The 21st century fundamentally changes everything
4 - You can always just look it up
5 - We should teach transferable skills
6 - Projects and activities are the best way to learn
7 - Teaching knowledge is indoctrinationEach chapter follows the following straightforward and highly effective pattern. The "myth" is set forth through full, direct quotations from recognized authorities. There's no slanting of the evidence or the rhetoric. Then, the author describes concretely from direct experience how the idea has actually worked out in practice. And finally, she presents a clear account of the relevant research in cognitive psychology which overwhelmingly debunks the myth. Ms. Christodoulou writes: "For every myth I have identified, I have found concrete and robust examples of how this myth has influenced classroom practice across England. Only then do I go on to show why it is a myth and why it is so damaging."
This straightforward organization turns out to be highly absorbing and engaging. Ms. Christodoulou is a strong writer, and for all her scientific punctilio, a passionate one. She is learned in educational history, showing how "21st-century" ideas that invoke Google and the internet are actually re-bottled versions of the late 19th-century ideas which came to dominate British and American schools by the mid-20th century. What educators purvey as brave such as "critical-thinking skills" and "you can always look it up" are actually shopworn and discredited by cognitive science. That's the characteristic turn of her chapters, done especially effectively in her conclusion when she discusses the high-sounding education-school theme of hegemony:
I discussed the way that many educational theorists used the concept of hegemony to explain the way that certain ideas and practices become accepted by people within an institution. Hegemony is a useful concept. I would argue that the myths I have discussed here are hegemonic within the education system. It is hard to have a discussion about education without sooner or later hitting one of these myths. As theorists of hegemony realise, the most powerful thing about hegemonic ideas is that they seem to be natural common sense. They are just a normal part of everyday life. This makes them exceptionally difficult to challenge, because it does not seem as if there is anything there to challenge. However, as the theorists of hegemony also realised, hegemonic ideas depend on certain unseen processes. One tactic is the suppression of all evidence that contradicts them. I trained as a teacher, taught for three years, attended numerous in-service training days, wrote several essays about education and followed educational policy closely without ever even encountering any of the evidence about knowledge I speak of here, let alone actually hearing anyone advocate it....For three years I struggled to improve my pupils' education without ever knowing that I could be using hugely more effective methods. I would spend entire lessons quietly observing my pupils chatting away in groups about complete misconceptions and I would think that the problem in the lesson was that I had been too prescriptive. We need to reform the main teacher training and inspection agencies so that they stop promoting completely discredited ideas and give more space to theories with much greater scientific backing.The book has great relevance to our current moment, when a majority of states have signed up to follow new "Common Core Standards," comparable in scope to the recent experiment named "No Child Left Behind," which is widely deemed a failure. If we wish to avoid another one, we will need to heed this book's message. The failure of NCLB wasn't in the law's key provisions that adequate yearly progress in math and reading should occur among all groups, including low-performing ones. The result has been some improvement in math, especially in the early grades, but stasis in most reading scores. In addition, the emphasis on reading tests has caused a neglect of history, civics, science, and the arts.
Ms. Christodoulou's book indirectly explains these tragic, unintended consequences of NCLB, especially the poor results in reading. It was primarily the way that educators responded to the accountability provisions of NCLB that induced the failure. American educators, dutifully following the seven myths, regard reading as a skill that could be employed without relevant knowledge; in preparation for the tests, they spent many wasted school days on ad hoc content and instruction in "strategies." If educators had been less captivated by anti-knowledge myths, they could have met the requirements of NCLB, and made adequate yearly progress for all groups. The failure was not in the law but in the myths.
Our educators now stand ready to commit the same mistakes with the Common Core State Standards. Distressed teachers are saying that they are being compelled to engage in the same superficial, content-indifferent activities, given new labels like "text complexity" and "reading strategies." In short, educators are preparing to apply the same skills-based notions about reading that have failed for several decades.Of course! They are boxed in by what Ms. Christodoulou calls a "hegemonic" thought system. If our hardworking teachers and principals had known what to do for NCLB-- if they had been uninfected by the seven myths--they would have long ago done what is necessary to raise the competencies of all students, and there would not have been a need for NCLB. If the Common Core standards fail as NCLB did, it will not be because the standards themselves are defective. It will be because our schools are completely dominated by the seven myths analyzed by Daisy Christodoulou. This splendid, disinfecting book needs to be distributed gratis to every teacher, administrator, and college of education professor in the U.S. It's available at Amazon for $9.99 or for free if you have Amazon Prime.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I recall my son, Ian, as a 4-year-old, pondering which 'work' to do that day, on the way to school: food work? sewing work? Or Drawing? Well, why might you choose one or the other today? I asked. And he proceeded to do a cute think-aloud with little furrowed brow, about the pros and cons (based on recent choices and skill deficits).Fast forward: grown-up Ian has lost 2 room-mates as he begins senior year in college this coming fall. Why did they leave? They were unable to handle the complete freedom to set their schedule and honor their obligations.
What is wanted in education is a curriculum and assessment system that builds in, by design, a gradual release of teacher responsibility across the long-term scope and sequence. Traditional curriculum design runs completely counter to this idea, of course: the work gets harder and harder but the student has practically no executive control over the intellectual agenda up until graduation.
Making matters worse, a number of people have wrongly interpreted the Gradual Release model to say that the last step is called "Independent Practice." This is utterly misguided. Independent practice is still scaffolded, prompted, and simplified activity in which the student knows full well what single move we want them to use. There is no strategic thinking or executive control needed. The acid test of autonomy therefore, arrives when students confront a genuine challenge requiring thought, and no advice about strategy or technique is provided or hinted at.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Posted on Craigslist, St. Louis
The truth is usually a tough thing to accept, so I understand if this is flagged. It would be a cowardly thing to do, but I understand it. Some people just ignore unpleasant truths. However, if you think ignoring the problem, or trying to censor the truth, will help our black children improve, you're dreaming. This is important, so I'm happy to repost - indefinitely if necessary. I find it interesting that NO ONE has had the intellect to refute anything in the essay. They can only attempt to censor it, as if doing so somehow makes it invalid. Weak minds, weak minds.Until recently I taught at a predominantly black high school in a southeastern state.
The mainstream press gives a hint of what conditions are like in black schools, but only a hint. Expressions journalists use like "chaotic" or "poor learning environment" or "lack of discipline" do not capture what really happens. There is nothing like the day-to-day experience of teaching black children and that is what I will try to convey.
Most whites simply do not know what black people are like in large numbers, and the first encounter can be a shock.
One of the most immediately striking things about my students was that they were loud. They had little conception of ordinary decorum. It was not unusual for five blacks to be screaming at me at once. Instead of calming down and waiting for a lull in the din to make their point -- something that occurs to even the dimmest white students -- blacks just tried to yell over each other.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
An abundance of research shows that teacher quality is the single most important determinant of student learning. It's also the conclusion of a report by the National Council on Teacher Quality -- part of a project funded by major U.S. foundations.Related: NCTQ 4-3-2-1 Star-Rating of University Teacher Preparation Programs in the USA: "the evaluations provide clear and convincing evidence, based on a four-star rating system, that a vast majority of teacher preparation programs do not give aspiring teachers.... Much more on the NCTQ teacher preparation report, here.Unfortunately, the same report found that colleges and their schools of education do a poor job of training teachers and preparing them for real-life challenges in the classroom.
"We don't know how to prepare teachers," says Arthur Levine, former president of Columbia University Teachers College. "We can't decide whether it's a craft or a profession." Mr. Levine blames low admission standards, less-than-relevant academic work and an out-of-touch faculty in schools of education -- some of whom haven't set foot in a school for years.
Part of the problem is that the teaching profession does not attract, in general, the nation's most talented students. Less than one in four of U.S. teachers graduated in the top third of their high school class, the report states, compared to 100 percent in Singapore and Finland.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
ines helped spearhead the legal challenge against Act 10, which curtailed collective bargaining for most public sector workers. In a case involving Madison Teachers Inc. and Public Employees Local 61 in Milwaukee, a Dane County circuit judge struck down portions of the law.The case now goes to the state Supreme Court.Much more on Act 10, here.In another case involving Pines and Madison Teachers Inc., a Dane County judge struck down a portion of a law that gave Walker the power to veto rules written by the state schools superintendent. The case is now before the 4th District Court of Appeals in Madison.
Pines, representing the League of Women Voters, successfully argued in front of a Dane County judge that the state's voter ID law violated the Wisconsin Constitution. The decision was overturned by the 4th District Court of Appeals, and the league has petitioned the Supreme Court to review the ruling. The voter ID measure remains on hold because of a ruling in a separate case.
"I believe that my law firm -- because of the position we're in and because of the work we've done -- has disrupted the (Walker) agenda by using appropriate means and calling on the third equal branch of government (the court) to stop the majoritarian and authoritarian impulses of this Legislature," he says.
The outcome of the cases is far from certain. But one thing is clear: Pines will keep up the fight.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Madison School District's recent rhetoric around annual property tax increases (after a significant increase in redistributed state tax dollars last year and a "return to normal" this year) is, to the ongoing observer, unsurprising. We appear to be in the Rainwater era "same service" approach to everything, from million$ spent on a partially implemented Infinite Campus to long-term disastrous reading scores.
Steve Coll's 5 July 2013 New Yorker column nails it:
The most likely explanation is that President Obama never carefully discussed or specifically approved the E.U. bugging, and that no cabinet-level body ever reviewed, on the President's behalf, the operation's potential costs in the event of exposure. America's post-September 11th national-security state has become so well financed, so divided into secret compartments, so technically capable, so self-perpetuating, and so captured by profit-seeking contractors bidding on the next big idea about big-data mining that intelligence leaders seem to have lost their facility to think independently. Who is deciding what spying projects matter most and why?Much more on annual local property tax increases, here:
The Madison School Board should limit the school property tax hike to the rate of inflation next year, even if that means scaling back a proposed 1.5 percent across-the-board salary increase for school district employees, says member Mary Burke.I appreciate Schneider's worthwhile questions, including a discussion of "program reviews":"I think in an environment where we've seen real wages in Dane County decrease, and a lot of people are on fixed incomes, we have to work as hard as possible to limit any increase to the inflation rate," Burke said Tuesday in an interview.
...
But School Board discussions have focused around reducing the proposed salary hike, and cutting back on facility maintenance to pare down the $392 million proposed budget enough to bring the property tax increase to 4 or 5 percent, board President Ed Hughes told me.
The district under state law could increase its levy by as much as $18,385,847 or 9 percent. Keeping the increase to around the rate of inflation would mean an increase of less 2 percent.
...
Board member TJ Mertz can't vote on salaries because his wife is a teacher's aide with the school district, he told me, but he has long been outspoken in his belief in good pay for teachers to ensure the best academic achievement for students.
"As a citizen, I understand our staff needs to be compensated," he said, adding that teachers have taken losses in take-home pay since they were required to begin making contributions to their pensions in 2011. "If the state won't invest in our children, it has to come from the property tax," he said.
Mertz said he would prefer a tax increase steeper than the 4 percent or 5 percent the board as a whole is focusing on. "I firmly believe the most important thing we can do is invest in our students; the question should not be what property tax levy can we afford," he said.
Several School Board members interviewed for this story stressed that the 2013-2014 budget will be a transitional one, before a broad re-evaluation of spending planned by Cheatham can be conducted.Yet, it would be useful to ask if in fact programs will be reviewed and those found wanting eliminated. The previous Superintendent, Dan Nerad, discussed program reviews as well.
Madison Schools' 2013-2014 Budget Charts, Documents, Links, Background & Missing Numbers.
The Madison School Board seat currently occupied by Mr. Hughes (Seat 7, and Seat 6 - presently Marj Passman) will be on the Spring, 2014 ballot (candidate information is available at the Madison City Clerk's website).
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"Any changes in education--such as the single-sex classes or the calendar--have to work with what's in the community. We have to stop a single curriculum where we're teaching everyone to be an engineer in college. We have to adjust our curriculum so that it meets the needs of every student. But those are decisions that the community and the individual schools should be making."
Lee maintains that statewide efforts to improve education should be focused on how to keep quality teachers in the state. He says the quality of education we deliver, with diversified curriculums, using digital learning tools, and reaching every student, will follow suit.
"Education in West Virginia is at a real crisis point. We have to have reform that is educator-lead and educator-driven. Teachers are the expert in public education. They know the direction that we need in the classroom."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Dixon School of the Arts, in Pensacola, is no longer a charter school. Dixon opened three years ago, but has received failing grades from the state. More failing grades were expected this year, and that would have forced its closure by the state. So, the board of directors announced today it will become a private school, and K through 6th grade enrollment will be limited.As Amber Southard reports,the move means the school is no longer eligible for full funding from the state, and no longer subject to the same rules as public schools. "The students that attend the new private school will have to follow a code of conduct that will allow the teaching of church in the classroom." Board members say becoming a private school will allow them to teach religion and try to get families more involved in the students education. Lutimothy May "We can use those values as core values to teach our children about their self worth and how to operate in a world that is diverse."
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
In an awesome attempt to help its students learn English, a school in Brazil named Red Balloon challenged a group of eight to 13-year-olds to play "grammar cops" for their favorite celebrities on Twitter. The kids picked out grammatically incorrect tweets from big-name stars like Justin Bieber and Paris Hilton and responded directly with their edits. The results were, unsurprisingly, hilarious and wonderful.Check out a sampling, below, and watch the video above to learn more about the creative school project.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
For years, it was lost in the wreckage from the crash of the politically incorrect "tracking" of students. But now, the worthy concept of "ability grouping" is making a comeback. A June 9 New York Times article on its resurgence is good news, but in the current public school system the much-needed ability grouping by subject is especially costly, with a very a limited upside. If parents had more freedom to choose within a system that could easily diversify its instructional offerings in response to families' interests and needs, the power and attractiveness of the concept would be much greater.Related: English 10.Unlike tracking, which assumes an across-the-board, one-dimensional level of student ability - i.e., students are uniformly brilliant, average, or slow - ability grouping by subject recognizes children have strengths and weaknesses. Strengths probably correlate with interest/talent, so in a system of genuine school choices, parents recognizing those interest/talents would tend to enroll their children in schools specializing in those particular areas. They'd be in classrooms with children who are similarly passionate and able to progress at similar, fast rates. And, likewise, for necessary subject matter in which they are not as adept, again, they'd be in a room and school building full of kids more similar to them. Stigma gone; no self-esteem threat.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Is grammar necessary? It's an old question, and if a glance is taken, quite casually, at the textbooks on the market nowadays, there would be a unanimous verdict: Grammar is necessary.Our textbooks are full of grammar, our readers are full of grammar. Thus, grammar is necessary. Case closed. Grammar is necessary.
Even the passive voice, it's necessary, despite those who would try to live without it. I mean, try being born without the passive voice. Which phrase feels more comfortable to you?
1. I was born in (year). - Passive Voice
or
2. My mother gave birth to me in (year). - Active Voice
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Cleveland school district's improvement plan for 13 schools this upcoming school year will bring major changes for some and smaller, but substantial, ones for others.Cleveland spent $15,072 per student during the 2012-2013 budget year, similar to Madison's spending.
Teachers will receive special training at all 13 schools, some of which will get new principals and see significant staff changes. And a few of the schools will have outside agencies come in to give the schools new styles and approaches.All together, the district is spending more than $2 million this upcoming year on staff training and outside help to try to improve these schools, which the district has labeled "Investment Schools."
"We're looking to have 13 different plans for 13 unique needs," said Eric Gordon, the district's chief executive officer.
More changes are in the works. After the district met with staff, parents and community leaders at each of the schools in May, schools will host additional meetings over the summer to refine the plans.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A quote variously attributed to Richard Feynman and Albert Einstein has it that ''If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't really understand it.'' Most of us have encountered this in our lives: you think you really know something and understand it, and then you try to teach it and realize that you never understood it in the first place.Computers are the children of the human race's mind, and as they become intimately involved in new aspects of our lives, we keep stumbling into semantic minefields, where commonly understood terms turn out to have no single, well-agreed-upon meaning across all parts of society. These conflicts all have a quiet drama, because on the definition of these ''commonly understood'' terms turns questions of social control with profound implications for our human lives.
Take names. When Google rolled out its Facebook-a-like service Google Plus in 2011, it stirred up controversy by declaring that it would adopt Facebook's ''real name'' policy, meaning that its users would be expected to use their real, legal names in their online interactions. Google offered a lot of explanations for this policy - mostly revolving around reducing cruel behavior and spamming - and opponents of the idea offered their own arguments in response. Some pointed out that they were widely known by a name other than the one on their legal documents; others wanted the ability to socialize without making their real identities visible to violent stalkers; refugees from oppressive regimes raised the spectre of retaliation against their in-country relatives if they participated in visible online debates under their real names.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
The Department of Public Instruction (DPI)'s July 1 estimate of state aid for the 2013-14 school year shows Sun Prairie getting 10.98% MORE aid than last year.The most current budget estimates projected we'd receive a 10% increase over last year.
The net effect is that the district is receiving $3.8M more than last year, and $382K more than projected.
Let the spending begin!
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Sarah Yatsko, Elizabeth Cooley Nelson, Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email:
The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has been monitoring, supporting, and analyzing the cross-sector collaborative work undertaken in 16 District-Charter Compact cities. CRPE tracks progress on agreements and reports on local political, legal, and financial barriers to collaboration, and also facilitates networking and problem-solving among participants. Using data and documents from interviews with district and charter leaders, this interim report details the first two years of Compact work and finds evidence that these cities have made mixed progress on a number of fronts, such as facilities sharing, equitable funding for charter schools, more high-performing schools, and improved access to high-quality special education. But challenges like leadership transitions, local anti-charter politics, and key leaders' unwillingness to prioritize time and resources for implementation have thwarted efforts in some cities. The report includes key Compact agreements and measurements of progress for each city, plus a checklist for district and charter leaders considering a collaboration Compact.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Plenty of schools use iPads. But what if the entire education experience were offered via tablet computer? That is what several new schools in the Netherlands plan to do. There will be no blackboards or schedules. Is this the end of the classroom?Think different. It was more than an advertising slogan. It was a manifesto, and with it, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs upended the computer industry, the music industry and the world of mobile phones. The digital visionary's next plan was to bring radical change to schools and textbook publishers, but he died of cancer before he could do it.
Some of the ideas that may have occurred to Jobs are now on display in the Netherlands. Eleven "Steve Jobs schools" will open in August, with Amsterdam among the cities that will be hosting such a facility. Some 1,000 children aged four to 12 will attend the schools, without notebooks, books or backpacks. Each of them, however, will have his or her own iPad.
There will be no blackboards, chalk or classrooms, homeroom teachers, formal classes, lesson plans, seating charts, pens, teachers teaching from the front of the room, schedules, parent-teacher meetings, grades, recess bells, fixed school days and school vacations. If a child would rather play on his or her iPad instead of learning, it'll be okay. And the children will choose what they wish to learn based on what they happen to be curious about.
Preparations are already underway in Breda, a town near Rotterdam where one of the schools is to be located. Gertjan Kleinpaste, the 53-year-old principal of the facility, is aware that his iPad school on Schorsmolenstraat could soon become a destination for envious -- but also outraged -- reformist educators from all over the world.
And there is still plenty of work to do on the pleasant, light-filled building, a former daycare center. The yard is littered with knee-deep piles of leaves. Walls urgently need a fresh coat of paint. Even the lease hasn't been completely settled yet. But everything will be finished by Aug. 13, Kleinpaste says optimistically, although he looks as though the stress is getting to him.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"If the students are performing at or better than they were in the schools they came from, then that would be a compelling case to offer more choices like that to more families across the state," Walker said. "If the majority are not performing better, you could make a pretty compelling argument not to."Much more on vouchers, here.Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said work on an accountability bill is wrapping up and he hopes it will begin circulating for sponsors by the end of this month. He hopes hearings will be held in late summer and early fall with a bill sent to the governor by the end of the year.
"I hope that everyone comes away happy that this is the right thing to do," Olsen said. "The voucher people want a bill like this because they're only as good as their weakest school."
Olsen said the bill will not only apply the report card system to schools participating in the voucher program, it will also make changes to the report card for public schools.
The report card released last fall didn't measure high school student growth, because it was based on one test taken in 10th grade. The state budget the governor signed Sunday expands high school testing to grades nine and 11. The accountability bill will ensure future report cards include those tests, Olsen said.
Democrats have been skeptical that Republicans will follow through on holding private voucher schools accountable. Earlier this year Senate Minority Leader Chris Larson, D-Milwaukee, compared talk of a bill to Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown.
In February, Walker told the State Journal editorial board that he hoped to sign a voucher school accountability bill before the budget was approved. That didn't happen, but Walker said there was push back from the Legislature.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
An article on the plight of adjunct professors in higher education, "Labor of Love or Cheap Labor? The Plight of Adjunct Professors," was brought to my attention by its author, Celine James. Ms. James kindly asked me for my thoughts about her article. I thought Pileus readers might be interested in what I sent her. Here it is in full:Dear Celine,
I have had a chance to read your article. I empathize with the plight of adjunct instructors that you describe. It is, or can be, a terribly difficult life. I am afraid, however, that I cannot endorse the solution you suggest, namely unionization.Higher education is operated like a medieval guild, with special protections for the lucky few who make it in and special benefits to them that come at the expense of all those who were not lucky enough to get in. The problem is the rigidity in the labor market that this creates: once a person is in, he or she cannot be fired, regardless of performance, for life.That is a great deal for those who get in, and it explains why so many try so desperately hard to get in, but it is a model for maintaining an unjust, and slowly dying, status quo rather than responding to changing economic realities we actually face.
The solution would be not to extend the guild system to a slightly larger cohort, but, rather, to abandon it altogether. In other words, we should abolish the tenure system. In a world with thousands of institutions of higher education, along with now an almost unlimited upper bound of educational opportunities online, there can be no justification for the economically stifling and restricting system of guild benefits for a privileged elite.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I published Part 1 about how my ideas about school reform have changed over the past half-century. Here is Part 2.
***************************************************************************I used to think that structural reforms (e.g., creating non-graded schools; new district and school site governance structures; novel technologies; small high schools with block schedules, advisories, and student learning communities) would lead to better classroom instruction.And now I think that, at best, such structural reforms may be necessary first steps toward improving instruction but are (and have been) seldom sufficient to alter traditional teaching practices.
In teaching nearly 15 years, I had concluded that policies creating new structures (see above examples) would alter common teaching practices which, in turn, would get students to learn more, faster, and better.
I revised that conclusion, albeit in slow motion, as I looked around at how my fellow teachers taught and began to examine my own classroom practices. I reconsidered the supposed power of structures in changing teaching practices after I left the classroom and began years of researching how teachers have taught following the rainfall of progressive reforms on the nation's classrooms in the early 20th century and similar showers of standards-based, accountability-driven reforms in the early 21st century.[i]
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Going to college can seem like a choice between impossibly high payments while in school or a crushing debt load for years afterward, but one state is experimenting with a third way.This week, the Oregon Legislature approved a plan that could allow students to attend state colleges without paying tuition or taking out traditional loans. Instead, they would commit a small percentage of their future incomes to repaying the state; those who earn very little would pay very little.
The proposal faces a series of procedural and practical hurdles and will not go into effect for at least a few years, but it could point to a new direction in the long-running debate over how to cope with the rising cost of higher education. While the approach has been used in Australia, national education groups say they do not know of any university in the United States trying it.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Last week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave a speech to the Society of News Editors that Education Week called "The strongest defense yet of Common Core Standards."
In it, he said that the Common Core - educational standards that are being adopted by most states - "has become a rallying cry for fringe groups," that opposition has been "misguided" and "misinformed" and that legislation in state houses across the country aimed at stopping the standards is "based on false information."While it is true that some criticism of the Common Core has been over the top, it is also true that the Common Core does not have to be a malign conspiracy to be problematic.
Even if you believe that the standards are a "boon" for schools, as the Washington Post's and USA Today's editorial boards do, it is important to recognize that the Common Core's ultimate success will hinge on its implementation. As such, several issues loom large.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
IVF treatments that require the direct injection of sperm into the egg are associated with a small increased risk of intellectual disability in the resulting children, according to a study.Scientists also found that standard IVF treatment posed no increased risk of children developing intellectual disabilities or autism.
IVF is considered generally safe. About 4% of IVF children have physical or mental problems at birth, compared with 3% of those conceived naturally.
In the latest study, the largest so far into links between reproductive treatments and neurodevelopment, scientists examined how IVF might affect the incidence of autism and intellectual disability.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Next, by grade: In 1978, 28 percent of NAEP-LTT test takers were in 7th grade or lower, compared with 39 percent in 2012. Although standards and curriculum are different today, it's worth noting that the 13-year old sample has changed as far as where they are in the K-12 system.Third, there is the difference in parental education. The proportion of the 2012 sample with parents who completed college is over twice as high (54 percent) as in 1978 (26 percent). Conversely, the percentage of 13-year olds with parents who have a high school diploma or less is half its 1978 level. Again, some of this change is recent - for example, the proportion with a high school diploma or less was 27 percent in 1999, compared with 20 percent in 2012.
In short, the student population, and thus the NAEP samples, are changing, over the short- and longer terms. Any concurrent changes in testing performance may just as easily be due to these and many other shifts in the characteristics of the test takers- including unobservable factors that cannot be gleaned from breakdowns by subgroup - as to any change in school performance. This most certainly does not mean that schooling quality is unimportant, only that raw NAEP scores by themselves do not measure it very well, and they're not supposed to.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Not all adjuncts at CUNY are being paid at subsistence level:
David H. Petraeus will earn a $150,000 salary when he joins the City University of New York's Macaulay Honors College this fall as a visiting professor of public policy, according to documents obtained by the Web site Gawker through a public-records request.Shall we make the obvious comparison? I think we shall:
CUNY adjuncts usually earn less than $3,000 per course.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
IN A small school on the South Side of Chicago, 40 children between the ages of five and six sit quietly learning in a classroom. In front of each of them is a computer running software called Reading Eggs. Some are reading a short story, others building sentences with words they are learning. The least advanced are capturing all the upper- and lower-case Bs that fly past in the sky. As they complete each task they move through a cartoon map that shows how far they have progressed in reading and writing. Along the way they collect eggs which they can use to buy objects in the game, such as items to furnish their avatar's apartment. Now and then a child will be taken aside for scheduled reading periods with one of the two monitoring teachers.Related: Madison's long-tem disastrous reading resultsa
The director of North Kenwood-Oakland school says this sort of teaching, blending software with human intervention, helps her pupils learn faster. It also allows teachers at this school--which, like other charter schools, is publicly funded but has some freedom to teach as it likes--to spend more time teaching and less time marking written work and leading pupils through dull drills of words and numbers. On top of that the school gains an accurate, continuous record of each child's performance through the data its various programs collect and analyse.As well as evidence from these schools, the effectiveness of particular bits of software has been studied. The Department of Education spent four years evaluating literacy programs; it concluded that Read 180, a program to help students who have fallen behind in reading, was good at combating adult illiteracy. A randomised control trial of Cognitive Tutor, which helps teachers identify weaknesses and strengths in maths, among 400 15-year-olds in Oklahoma found that children using the program reached the same level of proficiency as the control group in 12% less time.
Meanwhile, the Khan Academy, a creator of online tutorials widely used as a form of home tutoring, is beginning to provide hard evidence for why it is considered one of edtech's rising stars. At Oakland Unity, in tough inner-city Oakland, test scores for 16-17-year-olds in algebra and geometry have risen significantly in the two years since Khan courses were introduced. These courses are now being adopted by the Los Altos school district, also in California, which is already one of the best-performing in America. Khan Academy pinpoints the way in which edtech can turn conventional education on its head: in its "flipped classroom" pupils are no longer given lectures in the classroom and set problems as homework, but watch instructional videos at home and work on problems in class, where teachers and peers can help them.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Getting teachers who make a differenceTeachers matter ...
One point of broad agreement in education is that teachers matter greatly. Students of certain teachers simply do better in a way that has a marked effect on social and economic outcomes. For example, a recent study drawing on data covering about 2.5 million US children found that, after correcting for other factors, pupils assigned to teachers identified as delivering better educational results "are more likely to attend college, attend higher-ranked colleges, earn higher salaries, live in higher [socio-economic status] neighbourhoods, and save more for retirement. They are also less likely to have children as teenagers."[6] Professor Schwartz believes that "the single most important input variable [in education] is the quality of teaching." However, teacher quality, notes William Ratteree - until recently, education sector specialist at the International Labour Organisation - "is a mix of factors which are difficult to pin down."
Much of the research in this area has focused on what education systems can do to ensure that they find teachers who add value. Even here, though, says Professor Hanushek, "the rules tend to be country-specific." McKinsey's 2010 report, How the World's Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better, argues that the best interventions even depend on the current state of the school system. In McKinsey's view, systems currently marked by "fair" levels of performance should focus on teacher accountability, while "good" systems are likely to benefit more from enhancing the status of the teaching profession.
... But what matters for getting good teachers?
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Neal McCluskey, Williamson Evers and Sandra Stotsky:
The Common Core -- effectively national math and English curriculum standards coming soon to a school near you -- is supposed to be a new, higher bar that will take the United States from the academic doldrums to international dominance.So why is there so much unhappiness about it? There didn't seem to be much just three years ago. Back then, state school boards and governors were sprinting to adopt the Core. In practically the blink of an eye, 45 states had signed on.
But states weren't leaping because they couldn't resist the Core's academic magnetism. They were leaping because it was the Great Recession -- and the Obama administration was dangling a $4.35 billion Race to the Top carrot in front of them. Big points in that federal program were awarded for adopting the Core, so, with little public debate, most did.
Major displeasure has come only recently, because only recently has implementation hit the district level. And that means moms, dads and other citizens have recently gotten a crash course in the Core.
Their opposition has been sudden and potent -- with several states now considering legislation to either slow or end implementation, and Indiana, Pennsylvania and Michigan having officially paused it.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Ten U.S. states have public pension liabilities that are at least as big as their annual revenues, according to aMoody's Investors Service report released on Thursday that found the Illinois pension bill was equal to 241 percent of its revenues.The rating agency took a new approach to determining the health of public retirement systems by weighing each plan's net pension liability - the difference between the projected benefit payments and the assets set aside to cover those payments - against state revenue.
The typical discussion about how much money public pensions have is incomplete, said the author of the Moody's report, senior analyst Marcia Van Wagner. By comparing those amounts to states' revenues, though, the rating agency can get a better sense of states' abilities to pay for the obligations, she said.
For many of the states that ability is very limited. In nearly half, the pension liability is equal to half the state's annual revenue.
After Illinois, Connecticut had the highest pension burden in the country, with a pension liability equal to 189.7 percent of revenues. That was followed by Kentucky, at 140.9 percent; New Jersey, 137.2 percent; Hawaii, 132.5 percent; and Louisiana, s 130.2 percent. Colorado's net pension liability was slightly more than revenues at 117.5 percent and Maryland's slightly less at 99.5 percent.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
On 4 August 2005, the police department of Memphis, Tennessee, made so many arrests over a three-hour period that it ran out of vehicles to transport the detainees to jail. Three days later, 1,200 people had been arrested across the city - a new police department record. Operation Blue Crush was hailed a huge success.
Larry Godwin, the city's new police director, quickly rolled out the scheme and by 2011 crime across the city had fallen by 24%. When it was revealed Blue Crush faced budget cuts earlier this year, there was public outcry. "Crush" policing is now perceived to be so successful that it has reportedly been mimicked across the globe, including in countries such as Poland and Israel. In 2010, it was reported that two police forces in the UK were using it, but their identities were not revealed.Crush stands for "Criminal Reduction Utilising Statistical History". Translated, it means predictive policing. Or, more accurately, police officers guided by algorithms. A team of criminologists and data scientists at the University of Memphis first developed the technique using IBM predictive analytics software. Put simply, they compiled crime statistics from across the city over time and overlaid it with other datasets - social housing maps, outside temperatures etc - then instructed algorithms to search for correlations in the data to identify crime "hot spots". The police then flooded those areas with highly targeted patrols.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
New York City socialite Michelle Heinemann and her investment banker husband, Jon, are suing the Cathedral School of St. John the Divine after they were charged $50,000 for a finger painting, the NY Post reports.Ms Heinemann worked with her son's kindergarten class to create a finger painting that could be sold at the school's fundraiser charity auction in March this year.
The painting consisted of traced-and-cut-out paper hands of their son, Hudson and his 17 classmates.
After they were told paintings typically sell at fundraisers for up to $1200, the couple agreed they would place the winning bid at $3000 as they could not attend the event, their lawsuit filed in the Manhattan Supreme Court said.
However, the school's director of advancement had a first-grade teacher, Ms Bryant, drove up the bid to "the outrageous sum of $50,000", the suit alleges.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
I. Reading (Sources)
Score: (1-6) Reader One 6 Reader Two 5Reader One:
Yours is a mature and demanding subject. Your work is both convincing and authoritative, and your research is first class. From Jean Bethke Elshtain onward you cover all the bases in the field of ethics. Your use of primary source material is outstanding. There are flashes of genuine distinction in all you do. Congratulations.Reader Two:
This paper is based on the author's reading of an impressive number and quality of sources, 63 (!) of them altogether. ey include writings by Augustine, Aquinas, Grotius, and Kant, articles in scholarly journals, and monographs on the subject, such as Michael Doyle's examination of Kant's "democratic peace thesis" and, especially, Jean Bethke Elshtain's scholarship. e bibliography is not in alphabetical order, as it should be.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Emma, first of all tell us about what you are currently, doing, studying, and the like.I am graduating from high school this week and heading to New York University in the fall. Having gone through the grueling college admissions process and four years of high school, I am dedicating my summer to surfing, reading, and hanging out on the beaches of Santa Cruz...
2) Now, I understand that you were published a while ago in The Concord Review. What was your topic and when did this occur?My paper on the Broderick-Terry Duel was published in the Spring 2013 Issue of The Concord Review. The Broderick-Terry Duel was a pistol duel in 1859 between U.S. Senator David Broderick and California Supreme Court Justice David Terry. The duel was the culmination of a decade of dramatic and divisive politics in California between the pro and anti-slavery democrats. Broderick's legacy has been imprinted in history, for his death in the duel reversed the pro-slavery Democrats' victory in the 1859 statewide elections and ensured that California would remain firmly in the Union.
3) What prompted you to write a major research paper on the topic of your choice?I was inspired by Colonel Edward Baker's eulogy for his friend, U.S. Senator David Broderick. One of the finest orators of his time, Baker wrote eloquently about how Broderick stood up to a pro-slavery president as well as the California and national legislatures, and repeatedly, won against all odds. He spoke of Broderick's conviction and courage, his fight against the pro-slavery movement in California, and of how his unwillingness to cave to injustice ultimately cost him his life. Over one hundred years later, Baker's words still had the power to move me to tears and compel me to research Broderick's story and the context of his time.
4) Who helped you? Parents, teachers, principals?My father is a constant source of information and support. My earliest childhood memories are playing with my doll while watching Ken Burns' Civil War documentary with my father. As I have grown older, we continue to share a love of history.
5) I understand you have some concerns about the current emphasis on Science, Technology, Electronics and Math. Tell us about your concern?As was recently stated in The Concord Review's blog, "The Emerson Prizes lost their funding last year...Intel still has $680,000 in prizes for High School work..." I can attest to the contrast in reception of academic achievement in STEM fields versus the Humanities, even at the small, academically-focused, independent school (The College Preparatory School in Oakland, California) that I attend. This year, one of my classmates received an Intel Award and teachers continually publicly recognize and celebrate her achievement in school assemblies and newsletters, which is entirely appropriate because she did extraordinary work.
However, I told several of my teachers about my paper being published in The Concord Review, an internationally recognized academic journal, and while they congratulated me, neither my published paper, nor my Emerson Prize, was acknowledged in a public forum until the last day of school, as a brief afterthought.
I understand that STEM is currently receiving a lot of attention in the national news because it is closely tied to our economic expansion and workforce. I recall a statistic from the U.S. Department of Labor stated that 5% of the American workforce is employed in a STEM related field while 50% of our economic expansion relies on STEM related professions. Clearly, there is a great demand for talent in STEM fields and we are looking to the next generation of brilliant young minds to fill the gap. However, it is essential that students with an aptitude for the humanities be encouraged as well, for man does not live by science alone.
How bland would life be without literature, history, poetry, and music? How will society advance, if we do not understand who we are and where we have been? We need young people who are gifted in English, History, or Language for our economy, too. Our nation needs teachers, writers, law makers, orators, translators, researchers, etc. We need brilliant minds--period, and academic excellence and achievement should be celebrated and nurtured across all fields.
6) Some people talk about "life changing events." Do you see getting your paper published as a life changing event?Being published in The Concord Review was one of the happiest moments of my life. The research that I put into the paper will stay with me forever, for through the course of my writing, Senator Broderick became my personal hero. His character and the life that he led have inspired me to live my life with principle and integrity. Serendipitously, by having my paper published, I met another hero, Mr. Fitzhugh, the founder and editor of The Concord Review.
Although I am only acquainted with him through email correspondence, I greatly admire that he has dedicated his life to advocating for youths and youth education. I follow his blog and posts on The Concord Review's Facebook page, and although his posts are usually serious, they can also be really funny and sassy.
7) What kind of writing are you doing now?Poems, love letters, creepy Facebook statuses...In all seriousness, I am hoping to write for NYU's student newspaper in the fall.
8) What have I neglected to ask?How is learning to write a history research paper relevant and useful to high school students?
In my opinion, writing a history research paper encompasses all of the skills of the humanities discipline--reading, writing, critical thinking, researching, and understanding a subject within its historical context. These abilities teach and reinforce essential skills for any student's academic and professional career. Being able to think critically about an event or issue within its context is vital to understanding and solving any kind of problem, and in the modern age of the internet, it is crucial that everyone know how to research and identify credible sources. Furthermore, knowing how to methodically organize and support one's ideas is key to being able to communicate or argue a point and understanding someone else's argument.
Outside of the classroom, these skills have enabled me to give back to my community. Currently, I am on the Board of the Oakland Fund for Children and Youth, which guides the allocation of $12-20 million towards programs that serve impoverished and at-risk children and their families. Although I am the youngest on the commission, my vote has equal power, so I take my responsibility seriously. I prepare for each meeting by reading and analyzing briefs, data, and long government documents in order to understand the issues at hand as well as the greater community context.
It is not easy reading, and I have learned that many local and national policy and funding issues are complex and interconnected; but, by treating each meeting's agenda as a subject to be researched, I am able to contribute to the Board's discussions at public hearings and make funding recommendations.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
It's treacherous to predict future trends based on the recent past in education labor policy, but the uproar over school closings and layoffs in Chicago may soon be replicated in other areas of the state as staffing levels are reduced to match student enrollment.In the early 2000s Chicago was like most large urban districts in the U.S. in that it hired K-12 teachers faster than the school population grew. But when enrollment fell - and it did by 3.6 percent between 2006 and 2011 - and money got tight, the staffing couldn't be sustained. So Chicago teacher levels were reduced by 14.4 percent in that same time frame. That trend is continuing today.
A look at the rest of the state's largest districts suggest others may follow suit. Rockford, Schaumburg and Palatine all had enrollment declines but grew their teacher workforce by 8 percent or more. In fact, 17 of the 25 largest districts increased staffing beyond enrollment, or didn't reduce staffing to match enrollment losses.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Madison's aid amount is about the same as it was in 2010-11. The district received a $15 million boost in aid last year mostly because 4-year-old kindergarten enrollment added about 2,000 students.Much more in the 2013-2014 budget, here.The Madison School Board taxed the maximum amount allowed last year, resulting in a 1.75 percent property tax increase. That amount was low compared to previous years because of the state aid increase. The additional funds allowed the district to spend more on building maintenance and a plan to raise low-income and minority student achievement.
Property tax increase coming
Cheatham said she hopes to propose a lower property tax increase than 6.8 percent when she introduces her budget on July 15. A group of local and national experts recently advised the district that it should reallocate more funding from the administration into classrooms. Cheatham expects to do a deeper review of district finances for the 2014-15 budget.
"I would not be reluctant to ask the taxpayers of Madison to support us with additional funding moving forward if I knew that we were spending every dollar in the best possible way to support the students in our school district," Cheatham said. "I'll know that next budget cycle."
To reduce the budget, Cheatham said she doesn't expect any major changes that will affect classroom learning.
Instead she could cut a 1.5 percent proposed increase in the employee salary schedule, reduce maintenance spending or make some previously recommended reductions in administrative positions.
Madison spends significantly more per student than most districts. Property taxes were increased 9% just a few years ago.
Finally the ongoing tax increases may play a role in Madison School Board member Mary Burke's rumored race for Governor.
Madison's long term disastrous reading scores.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Can we make ourselves happier? According to studies from all over the globe collated by the World Happiness Database in Rotterdam, we can. But the path to happiness may not be where we are looking for it.Prof Ruut Veenhoven, Director of the Database and Emeritus professor of social conditions for human happiness at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, says his own study found a slight negative correlation between the number of times people in a study spontaneously mentioned "goals" and their happiness.
"Though it is generally assumed that you need goals to lead a happy life, evidence is mixed. The reason seems to be that unhappy people are more aware of their goals, because they seek to change their life for the better."
Although there is some positive correlation between seeing meaning in life and being happy, studies suggest this is not a necessary condition for happiness. In fact, studies suggest leading an active life has the strongest correlation with happiness.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
A popular article by Verlyn Klinkenborg last week in The New York Times Sunday Review lamented the decline of English majors at top colleges and universities. Mr. Klinkenborg is worried about the "technical narrowness" of some college programs and the "rush to make education pay off"- which, he writes, "presupposes that only the most immediately applicable skills are worth acquiring."I am sympathetic to certain parts of Mr. Klinkenborg's hypothesis: for instance, the potential value of writing skills even for students who major in scientific or technical fields, and the risks that specialization can pose to young minds that are still in their formative stages.
But Mr. Klinkenborg also neglects an important fact: more American students are attending college than ever before. He is correct to say that the distribution of majors has become more career-focused, but these degrees may be going to students who would not have gone to college at all in prior generations.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
If ever you start to fret about being replaced by a robot in some Terminator-style apocalypse, look up a YouTube video entitled "PR2 Autonomously Pairing Socks". The two-minute clip from a University of California, Berkeley research project in 2011 shows a robot identifying the two matching pairs from five socks. After carefully flattening the socks to inspect their shape and pattern, it checks they're not inside out, then couples them.It's an impressive feat of robot engineering, of course. But for some it will be quite comforting that this task, dispatched in seconds by us humans, takes the $280,000 Willow Garage PR2 robot fully half an hour. On a cost-benefit basis alone, robot armies are unlikely to be marshalled against us in the near future.
Yet robots are about to invade our homes - and they're coming not for our laundry but for our children. Rather than androids with arms, clunky thumbs and screens for eyes, they're arriving as toy cars, balls and babysitters - and costing not $200,000 but $200. You might call them robots in disguise.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
'The Heart of the Matter," the just-released report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, deserves praise for affirming the importance of the humanities and social sciences to the prosperity and security of liberal democracy in America. Regrettably, however, the report's failure to address the true nature of the crisis facing liberal education may cause more harm than good.In 2010, leading congressional Democrats and Republicans sent letters to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences asking that it identify actions that could be taken by "federal, state and local governments, universities, foundations, educators, individual benefactors and others" to "maintain national excellence in humanities and social scientific scholarship and education."
In response, the American Academy formed the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, with Duke University President Richard Brodhead and retired Exelon CEO John Rowe as co-chairmen. Among the commission's 51 members are top-tier-university presidents, scholars, lawyers, judges, and business executives, as well as prominent figures from diplomacy, filmmaking, music and journalism.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
"IT IS possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture," observed Thomas Edison in 1913, predicting that books would soon be obsolete in the classroom. In fact the motion picture has had little effect on education. The same, until recently, was true of computers. Ever since the 1970s Silicon Valley's visionaries have been claiming that their industry would change the schoolroom as radically as the office--and they have sold a lot of technology to schools on the back of that. Children use computers to do research, type essays and cheat. But the core of the system has changed little since the Middle Ages: a "sage on a stage" teacher spouting "lessons" to rows of students. Tom Brown and Huckleberry Finn would recognise it in an instant--and shudder.Now at last a revolution is under way (see article). At its heart is the idea of moving from "one-size-fits-all" education to a more personalised approach, with technology allowing each child to be taught at a different speed, in some cases by adaptive computer programs, in others by "superstar" lecturers of one sort or another, while the job of classroom teachers moves from orator to coach: giving individual attention to children identified by the gizmos as needing targeted help. In theory the classroom will be "flipped", so that more basic information is supplied at home via screens, while class time is spent embedding, refining and testing that knowledge (in the same way that homework does now, but more effectively). The promise is of better teaching for millions of children at lower cost--but only if politicians and teachers embrace it.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Michael B. Horn And Meg Evans:
The past several decades have seen technology transform industry after industry. Nearly every sector in America has used new technologies to innovate in ways nearly unimaginable a generation before the change.Spot on. Much more on our "Frederick Taylor" style K-12 system and its' focus on adult employment, here.One sector, however, has remained nearly the same as it was a century ago.
The education system in place in urban school districts around the country was created in the early 1900s to serve a different time with different needs. In 1900, only 17% of all jobs required so-called knowledge workers, whereas over 60% do today.
Back then, the factory-model system that educators adopted created schools that in essence monolithically processed students in batches. By instituting grades and having a teacher focus on just one set of students of the same academic proficiency, the theory went, teachers could teach the same subjects, in the same way and at the same pace to all children in the classroom.
When most students would grow up to work in a factory or an industrial job of some sort, this standardization worked just fine. But now that we ask increasingly more students to master higher order knowledge and skills, this arrangement falls short.
Milwaukee and Wisconsin as a whole have felt this pressure acutely. Between 2011 and 2012, Wisconsin had the biggest six-month decline in manufacturing jobs in the nation after California. According to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel special report, the city's pool of college-educated adults ranks among the lowest of the country's 50 biggest cities. To become an average city among the top 50, Milwaukee would need another 36,000 adults with college degrees. Since 1990, it has added fewer than 1,000 a year.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
There are sometimes days doing this watchdog work that are defeating, sad and frustrating. Today is one those. I'll get to the issue at hand but a few thoughts first.Related: Deja Vu: A Focus on "Adult Employment" or the Impossibility of Governance Change in the Madison Schools.I've said this before - I do truly believe we have some good and decent people working in SPS. There are several up the food chain who are almost great but, like many a bureaucracy, have those whose work either drags them down or mires them in place.
I've also said this before - anyone who works in leadership at SPS who does not read and heed the words in the Moss-Adams report of 2002 is doomed to failure. Or, at least doomed to frustration.
The echo in my head from that brilliant report (and I paraphrase here) -
It does not matter what structural or systemic change you bring to an institution, if the culture of bureaucracy at an institution does not change, nothing changes.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Teaching was once dubbed “the profession that eats its young” and many educators liken their first few years in the classroom to a hazing ritual. The result is an industry that hemorrhages new teachers nearly as fast as it can license them.
One factor feeding the high turnover rate is lack of preparation, according to Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, a national union representing 1.5 million educators.
“Newly minted teachers are tossed the keys to their classrooms ... and left to see if they (and their students) sink or swim,” she wrote in a December 2012 report for the AFT. The report called for higher standards and accountability in teacher training programs.
The 2013 NCTQ Teacher Prep Ratings, released today by U.S. News, are a step in that direction.
[Read U.S. News Editor Brian Kelly's opinion on the NCTQ ratings.]
Part of a broader effort by the National Council on Teacher Quality, the ratings are a subset of the NCTQ Teacher Prep Review, published today by the nonprofit educational research and advocacy group. The review is a 2.5-year effort to gauge the quality of the bachelor’s and master’s degree tracks required to enter the teaching profession.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
10 percent of the schools produce nearly half the college-ready graduates Last week the city announced that 22.2% of students from the high school Class of 2012 met the state's college-ready standard, up from 21.1% for the Class of 2011. What the announcement didn't say was that this already weak college-readiness rate was inflated by a small group of schools that contribute a disproportionate number of students to the city's college-ready percentage. The differences between schools were so great that the city's overall college-readiness rate of 22.2% did not represent the reality for even most city schools. In fact, only a quarter of the city's high schools had a college-ready rate that was 22% or better. Here's one way to look at the numbers: -
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Autism, or the fear of it, chased one Korean mother from her Queens church. "I very carefully told the mom: 'I think your child is a little different. Why don't you take the test for autism?' " said the Rev. Joy Lee of the Korean Presbyterian Church in Flushing. "She told me, 'Oh no, my child will be O.K.' So then she quit. After that, she did not pick up the phone."It crushed another Korean mother -- twice. First, she said, when her son received the diagnosis, and again when friends saw it as a sign that she herself was sick. To cure him, they said, she needed psychotherapy.
Sun Young Ko, of Forest Hills, whose 8-year-old son, Jaewoo Kwak, was given a diagnosis of autism 18 months ago, said her own mother refused to discuss her grandson with relatives or friends. "She's kind of hiding," Ms. Ko said.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
There's a revolution in education taking place, many people have told me about the excellent education people can get through online courses, many of them free, some of them from top schools.It's a disruptive trend. No, it's not.
The top schools won't be disrupted, even most other schools won't be affected by free online education.
Even if you could sit in on any lecture at any top school, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, etc, it wouldn't help you much at all. Students will still be competing to get into those top schools, happy to mortgage their, and their parents' futures, to pay to get into those top schools.
Because it's not about the education you get it's about the contacts you make. It's about joining a privileged group that takes care of its own throughout the rest of your life. The alumni associations and the other relationships you make are worth far more than the cost or even the quality of the education. It's not about knowing your subject, it's about who you know.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Marketplace:. A brief documentary about school lunches.
Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
