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I have a never-ending fascination with the politics of education, principally because I drew the short end of the stick on that count. The district in which I attended school was (is) notoriously bad.
On multiple occasions, I can recall the State taking over the high school due to very poor test scores while also implementing some drastic measures, like removing administrators and scheduling mandatory reading/writing times in unrelated classes like Geometry or Physical Education.I was so deeply affected by my education due to the inherent contradiction between what I experienced and what people told me I was experiencing.
On the one hand, I had teachers and family telling me that those were the best years of my life, that I was doing something noble and important, that I was being paid for attendance in a currency much more valuable than money-experience, knowledge, wisdom.
On the other hand, I spent most of my weekdays bored out of my mind or overly anxious about something of little consequence. I learned to game the system, doing just enough to satisfy whatever was required of me without devoting myself fully to what I ultimately found to be futile and asinine and an incredible waste of time. I never could believe those were the best years of my life. If I'd thought that had been the pinnacle of my existence, I'd have offed myself years ago.
So, that being the case, I have no sympathy for public education. It caused me nothing but trouble while blaming me for its own trouble. I don't mean to say all public education is incompetent and ineffective (though perhaps most of it is). I only mean to give some background on why I'm opposed to the ideas presented in Allison Benedikt's If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You are a Bad Persona.
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For some high school students who want to get a head start on college, scraping together the roughly $160 needed to pay for a dual enrollment class in Tennessee can be a barrier.Much more on dual enrollment here.
Now, a coalition of business and education groups is shining light on the issue in a bid to reduce or eliminate the cost for students to participate in the classes, which count both as college and high school credit.Earlier this year, the coalition led by the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce commissioned a study to look at how to improve the state's dual enrollment program. The study, performed by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University, recommended increasing funding for the program.
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A trio of Northern California students working for their high school newspaper successfully beat back a legal maneuver on Tuesday to ignore their status as reporters and have their confidential materials subpoenaed in a civil lawsuit related to the suicide of their classmate, 15-year-old Audrie Pott, that was filed by the dead teenager's family.The confrontation between a grieving family and school press amplifies a growing issue in the digital era, when the definition of who is or who is not a journalist has been blurred. The withdrawal of this demand, at least for the moment, lays the groundwork for the formal extension of shield laws to high school students.
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Human mental bandwidth is finite. You've probably experienced this before (though maybe not in those terms): When you're lost in concentration trying to solve a problem like a broken computer, you're more likely to neglect other tasks, things like remembering to take the dog for a walk, or picking your kid up from school. This is why people who use cell phones behind the wheel actually perform worse as drivers. It's why air traffic controllers focused on averting a mid-air collision are less likely to pay attention to other planes in the sky.We only have so much cognitive capacity to spread around. It's a scarce resource.
This understanding of the brain's bandwidth could fundamentally change the way we think about poverty. Researchers publishing some groundbreaking findings today in the journal Science have concluded that poverty imposes such a massive cognitive load on the poor that they have little bandwidth left over to do many of the things that might lift them out of poverty - like go to night school, or search for a new job, or even remember to pay bills on time.
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Parents send their children to school with the best of intentions, believing that's what they need to become productive and happy adults. Many have qualms about how well schools are performing, but the conventional wisdom is that these issues can be resolved with more money, better teachers, more challenging curricula and/or more rigorous tests.
But what if the real problem is school itself? The unfortunate fact is that one of our most cherished institutions is, by its very nature, failing our children and our society.School is a place where children are compelled to be, and where their freedom is greatly restricted -- far more restricted than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, we have been compelling our children to spend ever more time in this kind of setting, and there is strong evidence (summarized in my recent book) that this is causing serious psychological damage to many of them. Moreover, the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.
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The organiser of the Hackabi hacking competition is the Matriculation Examination Board of Finland.Competition begins at 0.00 am on 7th August 2013 and ends at 23.59 pm on 1st of September 2013. Dates given are in Finnish summer time (UTC+3). Contestants are given the task of searching for vulnerabilities within the exam operating system. Competition entries have to be confirmed by aworkstation with specifications determined by the Matriculation Examination Board.
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Nicole M. Fortin, Philip Oreopoulos, Shelley Phipps:
Using three decades of data from the "Monitoring the Future" cross-sectional surveys, this paper shows that, from the 1980s to the 2000s, the mode of girls' high school GPA distribution has shifted from "B" to "A", essentially "leaving boys behind" as the mode of boys' GPA distribution stayed at "B". In a reweighted Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition of achievement at each GPA level, we find that gender differences in post-secondary expectations, controlling for school ability, and as early as 8th grade are the most important factor accounting for this trend. Increases in the growing proportion of girls who aim for a post-graduate degree are sufficient to account for the increase over time in the proportion of girls earning "A's". The larger relative share of boys obtaining "C" and C+" can be accounted for by a higher frequency of school misbehavior and a higher proportion of boys aiming for a two-year college degree.
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Michael and Susan Dell Foundation :
To AP or not to AP? That's the question raised by a spate of recent stories questioning the value of Advanced Placement programs.The nut of the these stories is simple: AP is failing kids; the program is over-funded; we've let it grow too fast on too little evidence. Or as education reporter Liz Bowie from the Baltimore Sun frames it, AP's expansion "has not lived up to its promise."Politico's Stephanie Simon is far more blunt: AP expansion has resulted in "a lot of time and money down the drain; research shows that students don't reap any measurable benefit from AP classes unless they do well enough to pass the $89 end-of-course exam."
But have those dollars truly been been "wasted" as Ms. Simon contends? Or have low-income students like Destiny Miller, the dogged Baltimore County high school senior profiled by Ms. Bowie, really been unfairly "targeted" by a voraciously expanding AP program?
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The 2013 Washington Monthly college rankings are out.This is our answer to U.S. News & World Report, which relies on crude and easily manipulated measures of wealth, exclusivity, and prestige (basically how fancy they are) for its rankings. Instead, we rate schools based on what they are doing for the country -- on whether they're improving social mobility, producing research, and promoting public service.
The Washington Monthly's unique methodology yields strikingly different results.
Only two of U.S. News' top ten schools, Stanford and Harvard, make the Washington Monthly's top ten. Yale and Dartmouth don't even crack our top 50
Instead, the University of California - San Diego (our #1 national university for the third year in a row) and the University of Texas - El Paso (unranked byU.S. News but #7 on our list) leave several members of the Ivy League in the dust.
While all the top twenty U.S. News universities are private, 14 of the top twenty Washington Monthly universities are accessible, affordable, high-quality public universities.
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A group of South St. Paul students are taking high school to the next level.Nineteen students at the small high school will begin their senior years in early September with hopes of not just earning a diploma, but of finishing a two-year college degree. They are taking part in a partnership between their school district and Inver Hills Community College to offer not just college classes, but an associate's degree to aspiring high schoolers.
"I don't know what I want to do or where I want to do it, but I do know having a two-year head start will be good," said Rachel Bakke of West St. Paul, who is enrolled in the program. "In 10 years I'll thank myself for doing it."
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Counsel for the accreditation of educator preparation:
On August 29, 2013, the CAEP Board of Directors approved new accreditation standards based on consensus recommendations from the CAEP Commission on Standards and Performance Reporting. CAEP requires that educator preparation providers (EPPs) seeking accreditation complete a self study and host a site visit, during which site visitors determine whether or not the provider meets CAEP standards based on evidence of candidate performance, use of data in program self-improvement, and EPP capacity and commitment to quality.In completing its standards-focused self study, a provider selects one of three pathways: Continuous Improvement (CI), Inquiry Brief (IB), or Transformation Initiative (TI). EPPs with accreditation visits scheduled for January 2014 through Spring 2016 may choose to write the self study and host the visit with (1) NCATE Standards or TEAC Quality Principles only (called legacy visits); (2) NCATE Standards or TEAC Quality Principles and CAEP's new standards (called dual accreditation); or (3) CAEP's new standards only(called CAEP pilots).
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New legislation may give teachers the power to forcibly remove mobile phones if they are being used disruptively during class.
Mobile phones and smartphones in particular can disrupt learning in many schools. The phenomenon is causing officials in the Ministry of Education and Culture to take a long hard look at the problem."The biggest issue is disruption. Students interfere with their own learning and that of others. They play games, download material, talk and send messages during classes," explained Janne Öberg, Counselor with the Ministry of Education and Culture.
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his essay starts with utopia--the utopia known as the American university. It is the finest educational institution in the world, everyone tells us. Indeed, to judge by the praise that is heaped upon it, the American university may be our best institution, period. With its peaceful quadrangles and prosperity-bringing innovation, the university is more spiritually satisfying than the church, more nurturing than the family, more productive than any industry.The university deals in dreams. Like other utopias--like Walt Disney World, like the ambrosial lands shown in perfume advertisements, like the competitive Valhalla of the Olympics--the university is a place of wish fulfillment and infinite possibility. It is the four-year luxury cruise that will transport us gently across the gulf of class. It is the wrought-iron gateway to the land of lifelong affluence.
It is not the university itself that tells us these things; everyone does. It is the president of the United States. It is our most respected political commentators and economists. It is our business heroes and our sports heroes. It is our favorite teacher and our guidance counselor and maybe even our own Tiger Mom. They've been to the university, after all. They know.
When we reach the end of high school, we approach the next life, the university life, in the manner of children writing letters to Santa. Oh, we promise to be so very good. We open our hearts to the beloved institution. We get good grades. We do our best on standardized tests. We earnestly list our first, second, third choices. We tell them what we want to be when we grow up. We confide our wishes. We stare at the stock photos of smiling students, we visit the campus, and we find, always, that it is so very beautiful.
And when that fat acceptance letter comes--oh, it is the greatest moment of personal vindication most of us have experienced. Our hard work has paid off. We have been chosen.
Then several years pass, and one day we wake up to discover there is no Santa Claus. Somehow, we have been had. We are a hundred thousand dollars in debt, and there is no clear way to escape it. We have no prospects to speak of. And if those damned dreams of ours happened to have taken a particularly fantastic turn and urged us to get a PhD, then the learning really begins.
The disaster that the university has proceeded to inflict on the youth of America, I submit, is the direct and inescapable outcome of this grim equation. Yes, in certain reaches of the system the variables are different and the yield isn't quite as dreadful as in others. But by and large, once all the factors I have described were in place, it was a matter of simple math. Grant to an industry control over access to the good things in life; insist that it transform itself into a throat-cutting, market-minded mercenary; get thought leaders to declare it to be the answer to every problem; mute any reservations the nation might have about it--and, lastly, send it your unsuspecting kids, armed with a blank check drawn on their own futures.
Was it not inevitable? Put these four pieces together, and of course attendance costs will ascend at a head-swimming clip, reaching $60,000 a year now at some private schools. Of course young people will be saddled with life-crushing amounts of debt; of course the university will use its knowledge of them--their list of college choices, their campus visits, their hopes for the future--to extract every last possible dollar from the teenage mark and her family. It is lambs trotting blithely to the slaughter. It is the utterly predictable fruits of our simultaneous love affairs with College and the Market. It is the same lesson taught us by so many other disastrous privatizations: in our passion for entrepreneurship and meritocracy, we forgot that maybe the market wasn't the solution to all things.
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chool had always been his safe harbor.Growing up in one of South Los Angeles' bleakest, most violent neighborhoods, he learned about the world by watching "Jeopardy" and willed himself to become a straight-A student.
His teachers and his classmates at Jefferson High all rooted for the slight and hopeful African American teenager. He was named the prom king, the most likely to succeed, the senior class salutatorian. He was accepted to UC Berkeley, one of the nation's most renowned public universities.
A semester later, Kashawn Campbell sat inside a cramped room on a dorm floor that Cal reserves for black students. It was early January, and he stared nervously at his first college transcript.
AdvertisementThere wasn't much good to see.
He had barely passed an introductory science course. In College Writing 1A, his essays -- pockmarked with misplaced words and odd phrases -- were so weak that he would have to take the class again.
He had never felt this kind of failure, nor felt this insecure. The second term was just days away and he had a 1.7 GPA. If he didn't improve his grades by school year's end, he would flunk out.
He tried to stay calm. He promised himself he would beat back the depression that had come in waves those first months of school. He would work harder, be better organized, be more like his roommate and new best friend, Spencer Simpson, who was making college look easy.
On a nearby desk lay a small diary he recently filled with affirmations and goals. He thumbed through it.
"I can do this! I can do this!" he had written. "Let the studying begin! ... It's time for Kashawn's Comeback!"
This is the story of Kashawn Campbell's freshman year.
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Judge Barbara Crabb (PDF), via a kind Susan Vogel email:
Dear Raymond, new graduates and their proud guests.I start today with rousing congratulations to the new graduates.
I realize that some of you may be thinking that condolences are more in order, but I don't agree. Yes, the market is not great for new lawyers. Yes, many of you have large student loans to worry about. But you are the holders of a degree many people can only dream of acquiring. And that degree is more than a piece of paper. It is evidence that you think differently today--you've been taught to do so critically and analytically. You attack problems differently because you have new tools for doing so. You demand proof of propositions you used to take for granted. Best of all, you understand that every complicated problem will, when properly studied, turn out to be even more complicated.
You've had three years of study with some great teachers. They've opened your minds to new possibilities. They've forced you to think harder than you thought you ever could. You may have worked on a law review. You may have taken part in moot problems you might never have imagined. You may have had internships--some of which were in federal court, which has given me a chance to get to know you-- and those have enabled you to put into practice your classroom learning. And now, after what loomed as an eternity three years ago, you're joining the ranks of the legal profession.Many people have contributed to make this day a reality: parents, spouses, partners, teachers, professors, friends, the taxpayers of the state of Wisconsin. All of them believe that their investment in you is a valuable one.
Yes, the future is uncertain. But uncertainty is a fact of life. I can assure you that you are not the first or the last class to graduate into uncertainty. I always keep in mind that Nathan Heffernan, who was chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court from 1983 to 1995, started his career in the only job he could find at the time of his law school graduation, which was as an insurance claims adjuster.
What is certain is that the world as we know it today will not be the world of tomorrow.
Fifty years ago, people graduating from law school were worried about the war in between the words of the Constitution and the reality of life for so many of the nation's citizens, but they had no idea of the protests that would take place in a few years as more people began to claim their rightful place in American society. In 1963, those graduates were mostly unaware of the civil rights movement that was simmering in Nashville and that would eventually change our country forever.
The world you are entering is in its usual and fractious state, although the causes and the disagreements are different. It seems possible that governmental functions will reach a permanent condition of stasis unless courageous and enlightened people can find areas in which they can cooperate and compromise. The middle east poses a multitude of threats and opportunities, as do many other areas of the world. The widening income gap in the United States is worrisome, as is the diminution of personal privacy.
The point is that life is never settled or determinable in advance. The next fifty years are as unknowable to you as the last fifty were in 1963 to those, like me, who graduated from law school then. None of us graduates with a script; we all improvise and adjust as we perform our roles in a play in which there are no rehearsals, often finding about.But it is this very uncertainty for which lawyers are trained. Big challenges, seemingly insoluble problems, conflict of all kinds, confrontations--they're all grist for the lawyer's mill. Mediating disagreements, finding common ground, defending the rights of minorities, holding those in power accountable when they abuse their power, finding solutions to problems, helping businesses grow, expand and create jobs, advising nonprofit corporations, defending the Constitution--that's what your training has prepared you to do.
It is wholly improbable that lawyers will be underemployed for long, given the need for them in every area. With your law degree, you have skills too valuable to go unused for long. Some of you will find those skills indispensable in a job outside the legal profession; some of you will take the more traditional routes of working for a firm, or the government or a nonprofit organization providing legal services. Some of you will end up teaching. Some of you will make your contribution in politics, a field perennially in need of smart, well educated lawyers who understand the world and the Constitution about finding work.
You may have to be innovators and the inventors of your own jobs, as the media keeps predicting. That seems to be part of the future: the stars of the future will be those who can invent not just new products but whole new ways of working.For those of you with these skills, I challenge you. Imagine a way of integrating technology with legal skills and information. Think about providing legal help to the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in our country who need lawyers and cannot afford them. It is a daunting challenge, especially because the only way to make it work is to make it profitable. But it is enormously important.
How can it be good for a democracy to have the kind of mismatch between legal needs and underutilized lawyers that we do? Consider these realities:
The vast majority of people seeking a divorce are unrepresented.
Parents who face the loss of their children in court actions to terminate parental rights have no right to appointed counsel.
Few persons facing foreclosure have counsel, including members of the armed
forces while they are deployed. Legal aid agencies are overworked and lack the funding to add lawyers.It is clear that the present fee-for-service model isn't working for these people. It is also clear that reliance on governmental or philanthropic funding is not an answer. We know how untreated medical problems can drag people down; unfilled legal needs can have the same effect. This country needs to learn how to help the millions of people whose lives could be improved and who could be contributors to society if their legal problems were be resolved.
Perhaps it's time to rethink the assumption that legal services always have to be individualized. Maybe ideas like LegalZoom.com an answer--or at least a marker on the road to something better. Are there other, better ways of delivering and paying for legal services?
I challenge you to come up with new ideas for other problems and to question everything. Does law school have to be three years long? Should lawyers continue to better ways to organize and provide legal services? Can courts be more effective and productive? Are the prison and probation systems doing as good a job as they could of reducing crime rates and turning out offenders ready to take their proper place in the community?
You are in the position to take a fresh look at what is not working as well as it could be in our country. You can help effect change. You can do your part in making the words of the Constitution a reality for more people. You have the legal education and you have a big advantage most of us older lawyers do not, which is an innate awareness of the possibilities of electronic media.
On a personal note, my wish for each of you is to find work to do that will engage all of your talents, provide you challenges and satisfaction, free you from the shadow of debt--and even give you time for a life.
The law has given me unimaginable opportunities. From the vantage point of the judge's bench, I have seen drama more exciting than any movie; I have seen lawyers of amazing talent. I have had fascinating cases to decide (along with many not so fascinating); some of these cases have been of great interest to the public; others have been important only to the parties. I have learned more about our society than I would have thought possible, about criminal schemes to defraud, about drug conspiracies, about family feuds over money and property, about patent litigation and about all forms of discrimination. I have had a glimpse into the unimaginable misery of the lives of some of the poorest and most deprived members of our society and have seen as well bits of the lives of some of the most fortunate and prominent members. I have seen firsthand how important the law is to people at every level of society and how every person values fairness and a chance to be vindicated. I have seen how lawyers have given them that chance and how hard the lawyers have worked in doing so.
I still believe that the law is an honorable profession and that those who practice it are among the luckiest people I know. Even with its flaws and shortcomings, it remains the bulwark of our society. I hope that you, too, will find your careers rewarding. I hope you will continue the work of your predecessors in improving the profession and in making legal services more accessible to more people. Good luck and congratulations.
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Academic Ranking of World Universities:
The 2013 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) is released today by the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Starting from a decade ago, ARWU has been presenting the world Top 500 universities annually based on transparent methodology and reliable data. It has been recognized as the precursor of global university rankings and the most trustworthy one.
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Four Dane County high schools ranked among the top nine in the state for average ACT score by 2013 graduates, according to recent figures from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.Tap on the map icons to view the percentage of students taking the ACT.Madison West (fourth), Middleton (sixth), Madison Memorial (eighth) and Waunakee (ninth) all had average scores above 25 on the college admissions exam, which measures students in English, math, reading and science and has a maximum score of 36.
West had the highest state ranking among local schools in English (third) and reading (fourth). Memorial was second in Wisconsin in math, while Waunakee was fifth in science.
All of the 21 Dane County high schools scored above the national composite score of 20.9, while 16 fared better than the state composite of 22.1.
Edgewood High School's composite ACT score is 25.7. All 146 graduates took the ACT according to its September, 2013 newsletter.
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This sprawling metropolis of honking cars and 22 million harried people has been brought to its knees, not by an earthquake or its ominous smoking volcanoes, but rather a small contingent of angry school teachers.Some 10,000 educators protesting a government reform program have in the span of a week disrupted international air travel, forced the cancellation of two major soccer matches, rerouted the planned route of the marathon and jammed up already traffic-choked freeways.
The disruptions have shown how little it takes to push a city that is snarled on a good day over the edge.
Taxi drivers are so desperate they are refusing fares to certain frequently blocked parts of the city, and residents have turned to urban survival skills - driving the wrong way down streets, using rental bikes, clambering over fences and piling into the back of police pickups to get to their destinations.
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It's easy to judge a college-football program from afar. To properly praise and ridicule, one needs hard data.As the season begins Thursday, The Wall Street Journal presents its third annual grid of shame. Because college football is as much about scandal as it is about sport, we have rated all 125 major-college teams on two axes: how good they're projected to be on the field and how shameful their activities have been off of it.
The ratings are systematic. To rank the teams' 2013 prospects, we calculated a composite of four 1-through-125 rankings: Athlon, Lindy's, the Orlando Sentinel and football guru Phil Steele. The shame component is based on five categories: each team's four-year Academic Progress Rate (APR) figure, the metric the NCAA uses to assess academic performance; recent history of major violations and probation; percentage of athletic-department revenues subsidized by student fees; number of player arrests in the off-season, and a purely subjective, overall "ick" factor. (Sorry, Penn State.)
The results show how loudly you should crow at your next tailgate--or whether you should consider using your diploma as a coaster.
This year, the geeks are taking over. Academic stalwarts Stanford and Northwestern rank among the winners. So does Notre Dame--although the Manti Te'o fake-girlfriend fiasco sent the Fighting Irish plummeting toward the "embarrassing" axis.
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One of the largest college teacher unions in the country has taken a rather odd education policy stance: opposition to measuring whether colleges are helping their graduates. In response to President Obama's push to tie federal college aid to labor-market outcomes, the American Association of University Professors has issued a stern warning against the seemingly uncontentious idea of evaluating colleges before giving them money. "In reality measuring the output of our colleges and universities in a meaningful way is simply not possible," writes President Rudy Fichtenbaum.As someone with an advanced degree in the mathematics of social science, I fully appreciate the difficulty in quantifying post-graduate outcomes. But, Fichtenbaum's opposition isn't to any specific metric; it's to the very idea of evaluation- not educational, not civic, not financial- nothing. He wants a blank check, even as colleges fail to improve student outcomes by their own standards.
"Quality education can give students skills that will be useful in helping them find jobs, but it is also about creating better human beings and giving students the knowledge to deal with the myriad of problems we face as a society. I have yet to see a test to measure whether or not someone has become a better human being."
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Parents send their children to school with the best of intentions, believing that's what they need to become productive and happy adults. Many have qualms about how well schools are performing, but the conventional wisdom is that these issues can be resolved with more money, better teachers, more challenging curricula and/or more rigorous tests.But what if the real problem is school itself? The unfortunate fact is that one of our most cherished institutions is, by its very nature, failing our children and our society.
School is a place where children are compelled to be, and where their freedom is greatly restricted -- far more restricted than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, we have been compelling our children to spend ever more time in this kind of setting, and there is strong evidence (summarized in my recent book) that this is causing serious psychological damage to many of them. Moreover, the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.
Compulsory schooling has been a fixture of our culture now for several generations. It's hard today for most people to even imagine how children would learn what they must for success in our culture without it. President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are so enamored with schooling that they want even longer school days and school years. Most people assume that the basic design of schools, as we know them today, emerged from scientific evidence about how children learn best. But, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
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Campaign for High School Equity:
The Campaign for High School Equity raises serious questions about state accountability plans under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act waiver program of the U.S. Department of Education--including whether the use of "super subgroups" could lead to fewer students of color receiving the supports and interventions they need to succeed in school.More, here.
In 2011, the U.S. Department of Education announced that states agreeing to certain requirements would become eligible for waivers from core accountability provisions of the current version of the ESEA--the No Child Left Behind federal education law. The waivers allow those states to create systems of accountability and improvement that differ greatly from those required under NCLB. Forty-one states and the District of Columbia have received waivers.
CHSE's analysis shows the waivers could weaken efforts to highlight inequities, narrow achievement gaps, and improve education for all students. This raises questions as to whether or not struggling students will receive the support and services they desperately need and deserve.
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The question "why does tuition keep increasing?" is one of the most important questions in all of education policy. But the most common answers to this question--that it's a result of inadequate state funding, increases in faculty compensation, or even that it might not be rising at all, are individually and collectively inadequate. Let's take these explanations one at a time.First up is state funding. Hundreds, if not thousands, of articles and op-eds have attributed the increase in tuition to declines in state funding: If the government cuts funding by $1 per student, the college has to charge each student $1 more. This is logical enough, but the data doesn't support it. The chart below shows the change in tuition from the previous year, and the change in appropriations (federal, state and local) per student for all 632 public four-year colleges with sufficient data. (Note that figures in this post are enrollment-weighted averages.) The change in appropriations is multiplied by minus one, so if a $1 decrease in state funding per student leads to a $1 increase in tuition, the two bars for each year should be exactly equal. They are not.
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William J. bushaw and Shane J. lopez:
As 45 states stand on the brink of one of the most ambitious education initiatives in our lifetime, Americans say they don't believe standardized tests improve education, and they aren't convinced rigorous new education standards will help. These are some of the findings in the 45th annual PDK/ Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools.Results of the poll come in a time of unsettledness in the American education franchise. Recent major reform efforts -- No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Common Core State Standards -- face uncertain futures even as the poll lays bare a significant rift between policy makers and ordinary citizens and parents.
For example:
Fewer than 25% of Americans believe increased testing has helped the performance of local public schools.
A majority of Americans reject using student scores from standardized tests to evaluate teachers.
Almost two of three Americans have never heard of the Common Core State Standards, arguably one of the most important education initiatives in decades,
and most of those who say they know about the Common Core neither understand it nor embrace it.
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We hear a lot about the importance that all children master algebra before they graduate from high school. But what exactly is algebra, and is it really as important as everyone claims? And why do so many people find it hard to learn?Answering these questions turns out to be a lot easier than, well, answering a typical school algebra question, yet surprisingly, few people can give good answers.
First of all, algebra is not "arithmetic with letters." At the most fundamental level, arithmetic and algebra are two different forms of thinking about numerical issues. (I should stress that in this article I'm focusing on school arithmetic and school algebra. Professional mathematicians use both terms to mean something far more general.)
Let's start with arithmetic. This is essentially the use of the four numerical operations addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division to calculate numerical values of various things. It is the oldest part of mathematics, having its origins in Sumeria (primarily today's Iraq) around 10,000 years ago. Sumerian society reached a stage of sophistication that led to the introduction of money as a means to measure an individual's wealth and mediate the exchange of goods and services. The monetary tokens eventually gave way to abstract markings on clay tablets, which we recognize today as the first numerals (symbols for numbers). Over time, those symbols acquired an abstract meaning of their own: numbers. In other words, numbers first arose as money, and arithmetic as a means to use money in trade.
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As we slowly ramp up content creation for Khan Academy Computer Science, I put together this list of design guidelines as a reference point for teaching our programming talkthroughs. We'd like to use them as a starting point to spark a conversation with the teaching community.It's our first iteration, and we're under no illusion that we've figured it all out. We know that teaching is complicated and difficult, and we're still trying to live up to our own guidelines given the time and tool limitations. While we have to strike a balance between covering material, developing strong content, and enhancing the platform, we always like to discuss what we could do better.
So, we would love to hear reactions to these design guidelines based your experiences teaching kids programming. How can we better fulfill these guidelines? How can we support more effective learning within the talkthrough format? What are the tips and tricks you've picked up from your teaching or research? Please write a comment, or get in touch with us at compsci-feedback@khanacademy.org.
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Public schools are usually the most costly item in state and local budgets. Yet despite tremendous and persistent spending growth in the last half-century, the public vastly underestimates the true cost of public education.To better understand the source of this misperception, this report examines the spending data that all 50 state education departments make available to the public on their websites. It reveals that very few state education departments provide complete and timely financial data that is understandable to the general public.
Half of all states report a "per pupil expenditures" figure that leaves out major cost items such as capital expenditures, thereby significantly understating what is actually spent. Alaska does not even report per pupil expenditure figures at all.
Eight states fail to provide any data on capital expenditures on their education department websites. Ten states lack any data on average employee salaries and 41 states fail to provide any data on average employee benefits.
When the state education departments provide incomplete or misleading data, they deprive taxpayers of the ability to make informed decisions about public school funding. At a time when state and local budgets are severely strained, it is crucial that spending decisions reflect sound and informed judgment.
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This lesson will, incidentally, showcase two classical Methods of Inquiry that are ingrained in the academic world: the Scientific Method, involving the collection and analysis of empirical data; the Socratic Method, involving a series of questions put forward to stimulate critical thinking about some puzzle.
The particular objective here is to understand what appears to be long-term cancerous growth of the managerial sector in the University of California. The following graph shows the latest data; and the text after that conveys a sad story of official responses.The University of California provides a regular tally of its employees, going back over many years, posted at http://www.ucop.edu/ucophome/uwnews/stat/ Here one can see twice-yearly statistics of FTE (Full Time Equivalent) counts in three major categories, with two dozen subcategories:
I have written up several studies starting with this data, and they are posted at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~schwrtz under the series heading, "Financing the University."
- Management (Senior Management Group - SMG, Management & Senior Professionals - MSP)
- Academic Staff (Faculty, Researchers, Librarians, Student Assistants, etc.)
- Professional and Support Staff - PSS (Clerical, Fiscal, Health Care, Technical, Craft, etc.)
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Stephanie Banchero & Arian Campo-Flores:
Millions of students heading back to school are finding significant changes in the curriculum and battles over how teachers are evaluated, as the biggest revamps of U.S. public education in a decade work their way into classrooms.Most states are implementing tougher math and reading standards known as Common Core, while teacher evaluations increasingly are linked to student test scores or other measures of achievement. Meantime, traditional public schools face unprecedented competition from charter and private schools.
Supporters say the overhauls will help make U.S. students more competitive with pupils abroad. But others worry that the sheer volume and far-reaching nature of the new policies is too much, too fast. Already, the changes have sparked pushback.
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When San Jose State University student Kyle Brady published the source code of his completed homework assignments after finishing a computer science class, his professor vigorously objected. The professor insisted that publication of the source code constituted a violation of the school's academic integrity policy because it would enable future students to cheat. Brady stood his ground as the confrontation escalated to the school's judicial affairs office, which sided with the student and affirmed that professors at the university cannot prohibit students from posting source code.This conflict reflects some of the broader friction that exists between open source ideological values and an academic system in which collaboration and the ability to repurpose existing work makes it difficult to measure individual achievement. Free culture science fiction novelist Cory Doctorow shared his thoughts about the issue on Thursday in a blog post on BoingBoing. Doctorow suggests that assignments are ultimately more valuable to the students when the work that they produce can have broader purpose than merely fulfilling academic requirements. He also rightly points out that peer review of source code and studying existing implementations are both common practices in the real world of professional software development.
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Although the Fairfax County School Board faces projected budget deficits and each year asks the Board of Supervisors for more taxpayer money to fund its regular operations, it also has found a creative way to pay for projects and add items to classrooms: a fund filled with millions in leftover cash.Related: Fairfax plans to spend $2,500,000,000 during the 2013-2014 school year for 184,625 students or $13,541/student, about 14.4% less than Madison's per student spending.Fairfax's school system has ended each budget year with an average of $30 million in unspent funds from the system's budget during the past decade, a budget that topped out at $2.5 billion this past year. The leftover cash, ranging from $4 million to $55 million, is usually generated from savings -- such as heating bills that are lower than projected during a mild winter -- or from unforeseen revenue increases, including income that was higher than expected from county sales taxes.
The leftover money accounts for about 1 to 2 percent of the school system's annual budget, but that portion often amounts to a considerable sum worth tens of millions of dollars that can be used at the School Board's discretion. Over the past 10 years, the leftover funds have added up to more than $305 million.
While the board often elects to use the extra funds to balance the following year's budget, a sizable figure has been used for what amounts to a school system wish list. The outlays in recent years have included $400,000 for BlackBerry smartphones for administrative staff, $500,000 for adding automatic external defibrillators at schools, $693,000 to place assistant principals in all elementary schools and $375,000 to expand a culinary arts program.
All while the School Board has stared down deficits. In 2015, for example, the school system must address a projected $195 million deficit driven by rising enrollment figures and compensation needs. The school system had about $55 million left over this year and will use about $10 million of that to purchase new school buses and add three positions to the system's legal staff.
Arthur Purves, president of the Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance, said he thinks the school system's millions of dollars in leftover cash are a symptom of a larger problem. He said the extra money, when combined with tens of millions of dollars in reserves and other "extraneous" items, suggests significant "padding" in the annual budget.
"It is suspect," Purves said, adding that, as a "persnickety tax watchdog," he thinks the school system budget is bloated with such expenses.
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"Statute Forbidding Any One to Annoy or Unduly Injure the Freshmen. Each and every one attached to this university is forbidden to offend with insult, torment, harass, drench with water or urine, throw on or defile with dust or any filth, mock by whistling, cry at them with a terrifying voice, or dare to molest in any way whatsoever physically or severely, any, who are called freshmen, in the market, streets, courts, colleges and living houses, or any place whatsoever, and particularly in the present college, when they have entered in order to matriculate or are leaving.A friendly reminder for the new academic year: please resist the temptation to terrify the freshmen with spooky voices, at least for the first few weeks.
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According to the U.S. Department of Education, the average annual tuition, fees and room and board at a public college or university in 1964-65 -- the first year for which there's data -- was $6,592, in 2011 dollars. By 2010-2011, that had increased to $13,297 -- a 101.7 percent increase. The increase for private schools was even more dramatic. Average tuition, fees and room and board in 1964-65 was $13,233 a year; in 2010-2011, it was $31,395, an 137.2 percent increase.That's after accounting for inflation. But some experts think that the adjustment lets colleges off the hook -- after all, the rising price of college tuition is itself a significant driver of inflation. If you don't adjust for inflation, college tuition prices increased 297 percent from September 1990 to September 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Medical care prices, by contrast, only increased 152 percent.
You'd think that such enormous price increases would keep consumers away. You'd be wrong. In 1967, 4.3 million people were enrolled in full-time in colleges and universities as undergraduates, amounting to 2.2 percent of the U.S. population.
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Jeff Glaze, via a kind reader's email:
Much more on the Madison School District's 2013-2014 budget, here.The Madison School Board adopted on Monday a $433.6 million budget for the 2013-14 school year.
The budget and levy both passed by 6-1 votes with board member Mary Burke representing the lone no vote.
The $433.6 million budget includes a $260.4 million tax levy. The levy means homeowners will pay $12.03 per $1,000 of assessed value, up 51 cents from last year.
Mr. Glaze's article once again fails to mention Madison's substantial increase in redistributed state tax dollar receipts one year ago... Remarkable. Perhaps a Washington Post style District investigative finance article might one day occur here.
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Jill Tucker, via kind reader's email:
Alonzo Swift has pretty much settled on Yale University.Related: Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School, rejected by a majority of the Madison School Board.The Oakland boy knows he needs to pass fifth grade first and that it's cold in Connecticut, but he has heard Yale "is a good college" and he's sure his mom would send him there with plenty of hot chocolate, marshmallows and a warm coat.
"It's hard to get in there, so you have to be focused," the 9-year-old said.
Where Alonzo will go to college might still be up in the air, but if he'll go is not.
At the 100 Black Men of the Bay Area Community School, every student, including Alonzo, is black, male and on the road to college.
If the public charter school is successful, it will - within a decade - significantly boost the number of African American boys graduating from high school in Oakland and heading to a four-year university.
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This is the first hint of how Finland does it: rather than "trying to reverse engineer a high-performance teaching culture through dazzlingly complex performance evaluations and value-added data analysis," as we do, they ensure high-quality teaching from the beginning, allowing only top students to enroll in teacher-training programs, which are themselves far more demanding than such programs in America. A virtuous cycle is thus initiated: better-prepared, better-trained teachers can be given more autonomy, leading to more satisfied teachers who are also more likely to stay on.The Smartest Kids in The World And How They Got That Way By Amanda RipleyKim soon notices something else that's different about her school in Pietarsaari, and one day she works up the courage to ask her classmates about it. "Why do you guys care so much?" Kim inquires of two Finnish girls. "I mean, what makes you work hard in school?" The students look baffled by her question. "It's school," one of them says. "How else will I graduate and go to university and get a good job?" It's the only sensible answer, of course, but its irrefutable logic still eludes many American students, a quarter of whom fail to graduate from high school. Ripley explains why: Historically, Americans "hadn't needed a very rigorous education, and they hadn't gotten it. Wealth had made rigor optional." But now, she points out, "everything had changed. In an automated, global economy, kids needed to be driven; they need to know how to adapt, since they would be doing it all their lives. They needed a culture of rigor."
Rigor on steroids is what Ripley finds in South Korea, the destination of another of her field agents. Eric, who attended an excellent public school back home in Minnesota, is shocked at first to see his classmates in the South Korean city of Busan dozing through class. Some wear small pillows that slip over their wrists, the better to sleep with their heads on their desks. Only later does he realize why they are so tired -- they spend all night studying at hagwons, the cram schools where Korean kids get their real education.
Ripley introduces us to Andrew Kim, "the $4 million teacher," who makes a fortune as one of South Korea's most in-demand hagwon instructors, and takes us on a ride-along with Korean authorities as they raid hagwons in Seoul, attempting to enforce a 10 p.m. study curfew. Academic pressure there is out of control, and government officials and school administrators know it -- but they are no match for ambitious students and their parents, who understand that passing the country's stringent graduation exam is the key to a successful, prosperous life.
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Next spring, seniors at about 200 U.S. colleges will take a new test that could prove more important to their future than final exams: an SAT-like assessment that aims to cut through grade-point averages and judge students' real value to employers.The test, called the Collegiate Learning Assessment, "provides an objective, benchmarked report card for critical thinking skills," said David Pate, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at St. John Fisher College, a small liberal-arts school near Rochester, N.Y. "The students will be able to use it to go out and market themselves."
The test is part of a movement to find new ways to assess the skills of graduates. Employers say grades can be misleading and that they have grown skeptical of college credentials.
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Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance (PDF):
Wisconsin's state-local tax burden rose from 11.7% to 11.8% of income but its rank fell from 9th to 10th, according to U.S. Census Bureau fi gures. Fiscal year 2011 fi gures were released today and analyzed by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance (WISTAX), a nonpartisan, nonprofi t policy research organization dedicated to citizen education.Related: A Public Hearing on the Madison Schools' Proposed 4.5% Property Tax Increase Monday, No Mention of Last Year's Significant State Tax Dollar Funding Increase.In addition to Wisconsin, state-local taxes relative to income rose in 36 other states. Nationally, that percentage rose from 10.7% to 10.9%. Neighboring Illinois saw its tax burden jump from 10.3% (27th) to 11.0% (16th) of income. Minnesota's taxes climbed from 11.3% (14th) to 11.9% (8th) of income. Minnesota's jump in rank explains Wisconsin's drop from 9th to 10th.
"One interesting phenomenon is the increasing similarity of states in the upper midwest," said WISTAX President Todd A. Berry. "In 2011, ranks for Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa were bunched between 8th and 17th."
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Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance (PDF):
The number of Wisconsin public school teachers rose modestly in 2013 from 59,384 to 59,540, the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance (WISTAX) said today. This ended a three-year decline in teaching positions. Despite the 2013 increase, teacher numbers declined 2.1% during 2011-13, following a drop of 2.6% during 2009-11. These are some of the important findings in WISTAX's new report, "Post Act 10 School Staffing." WISTAX is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to public policy research and citizen education.
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A few months ago we did an analysis of the college-readiness numbers of the system's high-school graduates. That analysis showed that the system's college-readiness rate - 22.2% -- was largely attributable to a small number of high schools. The 35 schools that made up the top 10 percent of high schools contributed nearly half of the graduates ready for college, while hundreds of other high schools had college-ready rates in the single digits.That same pattern - a "tale of two school systems" - is echoed in the results of the recent state tests on grades 3-8 based on the Common Core standards. In these most recent tests, as in the college-ready statistics, a minority of high-achieving schools helped camouflage much lower results in the majority of schools.
In these new tests based on the much more demanding Common Core standards, only about 26 percent of grade 3-8 students citywide were judged proficient in reading and 30 percent proficient in math, far below the achievement levels on previous state tests. But even this unimpressive level was not reached by the great majority of elementary and middle schools. In these schools student achievement was lower - sometimes much lower -- than the citywide average.
One quarter of schools produce half to two-thirds of proficient students.
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Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) CDC:
State and local school vaccination requirements are implemented to maintain high vaccination coverage and minimize the risk from vaccine preventable diseases (1). To assess school vaccination coverage and exemptions, CDC annually analyzes school vaccination coverage data from federally funded immunization programs. These awardees include 50 states and the District of Columbia (DC), five cities, and eight U.S.-affiliated jurisdictions.* This report summarizes vaccination coverage from 48 states and DC and exemption rates from 49 states and DC for children entering kindergarten for the 2012-13 school year. Forty-eight states and DC reported vaccination coverage, with medians of 94.5% for 2 doses of measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine; 95.1% for local requirements for diphtheria, tetanus toxoid, and acellular pertussis (DTaP) vaccination; and 93.8% for 2 doses of varicella vaccine among awardees with a 2-dose requirement. Forty-nine states and DC reported exemption rates, with the median total of 1.8%. Although school entry coverage for most awardees was at or near national Healthy People 2020 targets of maintaining 95% vaccination coverage levels for 2 doses of MMR vaccine, 4 doses of DTaP†vaccine, and 2 doses of varicella vaccine (2), low vaccination and high exemption levels can cluster within communities, increasing the risk for disease. Reports to CDC are aggregated at the state level; however, local reporting of school vaccination coverage might be accessible by awardees. These local-level data can be used to create evidence-based health communication strategies to help parents understand the risks for vaccine-preventable diseases and the benefits of vaccinations to the health of their children and other kindergarteners.Vaccination coverage among children entering kindergarten is assessed annually by awardees. Each school year, the health department, school nurse, or other school personnel assess the vaccination and exemption status of a census or sample of kindergarteners enrolled in public and private schools to determine vaccination coverage, as defined by state and local school requirements established to protect children from vaccine-preventable diseases. Among the 50 states and DC, 43 awardees used an immunization information system (IIS) as at least one source of data for some of their school assessment. To collect data, 33 awardees used a census of kindergarteners; 11 a sample of schools, kindergarteners, or both; two a voluntary response of schools; and five a mix of methods. Results of the school-level assessments are reported to the health department. Aggregated data are reported to CDC for public and private schools. Data for homeschooled students were not reported to CDC. All estimates of coverage and exemption were weighted based on each awardee's response rates and sampling methodology, unless otherwise noted. Of the 50 states and DC, 12 awardees met CDC standards for school assessment methods in 2012-13.§
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The U.S. Justice Department is suing Louisiana in New Orleans federal court to block 2014-15 vouchers for students in public school systems that are under federal desegregation orders. The first year of private school vouchers "impeded the desegregation process," the federal government says.Thirty-four school systems could be affected, including those of Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. John the Baptist and St. Tammany parishes. Under the lawsuit, the state would be barred from assigning students in those systems to private schools unless a federal judge agreed to it. A court hearing is tentatively set for Sept. 19.
The statewide voucher program, officially called the Louisiana Scholarship Program, lets low-income students in public schools graded C, D or F attend private schools at taxpayer expense. This year, 22 of the 34 systems under desegregation orders are sending some students to private schools on vouchers.
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A recovery school district for low-performing schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools system? The news that a group of civic leaders convened last week at the initiative of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce to consider such an idea gave me an instant trip to the land of MPS Structural Reform Ideas Past.Start with the 1970s, when then-State Rep. Dennis Conta and others proposed redoing school districts in the Milwaukee area so there would be a small number of districts shaped like slices of pie, each including parts of the central city and parts of the suburbs. Caused a big stir, but, of course, it didn't happen. (I wonder what would have resulted if it had come to pass.)
Jump to the late 1990s: Then-Gov. Tommy Thompson announced he was setting several goals for Milwaukee Public Schools, including test score and attendance improvement, and if they weren't met, he was going to have the state take over MPS. My assumption is that he thought about it a little more, asking himself, why would I want to take on that mountainous headache? MPS, of course, didn't meet the goals, but Thompson didn't pursue the idea.
In 2009, then-Gov. Jim Doyle said he wanted to put MPS under the control of a board appointed by the mayor of Milwaukee. Mayor Tom Barrett kind of seemed to go along. But Doyle and Barrett didn't do a good job of making the case, community opposition was effective and the idea came to nothing.
In 2010, then-candidate for governor Scott Walker said he thought MPS should be broken up into a set of smaller districts the size of, oh, say, Wauwatosa, where his kids went to school. Never heard any more about that idea, perhaps because Walker realized it was not doable.
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Some years ago, I stumbled on a battered copy of The Silence of the Lambs in a train carriage. It was during one of those lonely chunks of life when reading takes on a new importance, and I found a quite unexpected friend in that rather dark and worrisome tale. The anonymous former owner had doodled on and annotated the book before inexplicably abandoning it to its fate on public transport.Amusing, insightful and often veering wildly from the actual text, this commentary entirely changed my reading of Thomas Harris's story of a serial murderer and obsessive police procedure. My anonymous guide was a university student, most likely a young woman, studying the book from a feminist perspective. Harris's novel is a superior police procedural, but still guilty of that genre's casual sexism, picked apart by my guide with glee.
I've often wished that I could talk to that anonymous commentator. Today, if they were using an e-reader, I might be able to. Readmill is an e-reading app that, on the surface at least, will be familiar to anyone who has read a Kindle book on their smartphone or tablet. But what makes this scrappy indie app a potential Amazon giant-killer is how Readmill helps readers - and writers - talk to each other.
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But now it's Friday, and what do we see in the news? Lots and lots of coverage of the President's suddenly-urgent new road show around America's college campuses, where he's stumping for his "bold" new plan to reduce tuition costs. Obama on Monday and Tuesday was Darth Vader; today, he's being feted in the New York Times for his ostentatiously progressive-sounding new plan to help the student demographic. From the Times editorial board this morning:President Obama has been accused of promoting small-ball ideas in his second term, but the proposal he unveiled on Thursday is a big one: using sharp federal pressure to make college more affordable, potentially opening the gates of higher education to more families scared off by rising tuitions. While there are questions to be answered about his plan, his approach - tying federal student aid to the value of individual colleges - is a bold and important way to leverage the government's power and get Washington off the sidelines.
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The government has also made sure that many laws, such as the Truth in Lending law, do not apply to student loans.Some student debt can make sense but when 40% of students drop out of college, when even the graduates do not graduate with the degrees that pay and when the job market is weak, student debt can be life-crippling:
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So far I don't get it. There seems to be plenty of information about colleges, and I doubt if a federal rating system would improve on those ratings already privately available. To the extent that federal system became focal, the incentives to game and scheme it would become massive, and how or whether to punish the gamers, if and when they are caught, would be a political decision. I don't see that as healthy.Given that previous educational subsidies mostly are converted into higher rates of tuition and thus captured by the school, the second plank would simply boost the subsidy to high performing colleges. There are plenty of ways to do that and in any case it doesn't seem to help today's marginal students, who probably cannot do well in those environments in any case. Furthermore colleges with high graduate earnings are very often those located in or near high-paying cities. Should we be subsidizing on that basis? Should we be giving colleges an incentive to identify and deny admission to potential lower earners? Do we really want the federal government helping to crush humanities majors? And I don't see that the kind of rating system under discussion here is measuring actual value added, ceteris paribus of course.
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Another school year beckons, which means it's time for President Obama to go on another college retreat. "He loves college tours," says Ohio University's Richard Vedder, who directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. "Colleges are an escape from reality. Believe me, I've lived in one for half a century. It's like living in Disneyland. They're these little isolated enclaves of nonreality."Mr. Vedder, age 72, has taught college economics since 1965 and published papers on the likes of Scandinavian migration, racial disparities in unemployment and tax reform. Over the last decade he's made himself America's foremost expert on the economics of higher education, which he distilled in his 2004 book "Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much." His analysis isn't the same as President Obama's.
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More charts on Madison schools' spending & property tax growth over the years, here.
Karen Rivedal:
The Madison School Board will hold a one-hour public hearing at 5 p.m. Monday on a preliminary $391 million budget proposal for the 2013-2014 school year, in the McDaniels Auditorium of the Doyle Administration Building at 545 W. Dayton St.Related: Madison Schools' 2013-2014 Budget Charts, Documents, Links, Background & Missing Numbers.After the hearing, the board is to vote on the budget, which includes a $260.4 million property tax levy, increasing the tax bill on an average $230,831 Madison home by about $102. The board will take a final vote on the tax levy in October, after official state aid figures are known.
Finally, Rivedal's article fails to mention this: Up, Down & Transparency: Madison Schools Received $11.8M more in State Tax Dollars last year, Local District Forecasts a Possible Reduction of $8.7M this Year. Local household income changes are unmentioned, as well (national data).
Much more on the 2013-2014 Madison schools' budget, here.
Rivedal's article is unfortunately a classic "low information" piece. It would not take much effort to challenge the new Superintendent's rhetoric on "state funding decline". The prior year's significant increase goes unmentioned.
Is it the State Journal's policy to simply publish rhetoric without investigation?
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The Partnership at Drugfree.org today released new research from the latest Partnership Attitude Tracking Study (PATS), a nationally projectable survey that tracks teen drug and alcohol use and parent attitudes toward substance abuse among teens. The research, sponsored by MetLife Foundation, shows that Hispanic teens are using drugs at alarmingly higher levels when compared to teens from other ethnic groups. It confirms that substance abuse has become a normalized behavior among Latino youth.According to the new PATS data, Hispanic teens are more likely to engage in substance abuse when compared to teens from other ethnic groups and are more likely to have abused the following substances within the past year:
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An unprecedented set of recent Education Department decisions about No Child Left Behind waivers is at the least an overreach and at the very worst illegal, a chorus of critics say.
Last week, the department declared NCLB waivers for Kansas, Oregon and Washington state "high-risk" because each state has more work to do in tying student growth to teacher evaluations - a major requirement for states that want out of the more arduous provisions of the law. And in early August, the department granted waivers to eight districts in California, the first time the department bypassed states on No Child Left Behind flexibility.
Observers and analysts say the department's high-risk waiver decision simply isn't allowed under federal law. And they say Education Secretary Arne Duncan broke with what he told Congress in February about a preference not to grant district waivers, which these critics think are just plain bad policy. NCLB is long overdue for reauthorization. With that renewal nowhere in sight, Duncan has granted more than 40 waivers of the law to states, D.C. and the group of California districts, freeing states from requirements such as having all students reading and doing math at grade level by the 2013-14 school year.
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For Chris Christie and NJEA, N.J.'s primary teacher union, it's deja vu all over again. After several years of a relatively decorous detente, we're back to the rude fisticuffs and catcalls of 2010 and 2011, and all within a matter of days. What's behind this political and behavioral regression?
Christie's strategy is clear. In order to secure the 2016 Republican nomination for president, he has to confirm his conservative bona fides. Thus, this week he vetoed a gun control bill that he supported last year and endorsed Tea Party nut Steve Lonegan for U.S. Senate.Christie's attack on N.J.'s primary teacher union NJEA last week in Boston, then, was just one more genuflection to the Ron Pauls and Rick Santorums of the GOP. During a speech to the Republican National Committee (supposedly closed to the press but leaked to a Politico reporter) Christie described NJEA's resistance to N.J.'s 2010 passage of health and benefits reform legislation:
"The teachers union in our state collects $140 million a year in dues. ... It's a $140 million political slush fund for them to use however they wish in mandatory dues," he said. "That's who we're up against. So we decided very early that we had to fix the pension and benefit problem, at least move toward fixing it. And the only way to do it was to take them on directly... My philosophy on this can be best described this way: When you come to a new school yard and you're the new kid in school -- like you are when you're the governor and you come to Trenton for the first time -- and you walk onto the schoolyard and you see a bunch of people lying on the ground bloody and beaten up, and you see one person standing there with their arms folded across their chest staring at you. That's the bully. In New Jersey, that bully is the New Jersey Education Association."
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Two weeks ago, there was a literal brouhaha over news that English dictionaries around the world had finally given in and ruined English by entering the hyperbolic and figurative meaning of "literally". While people flapped their hands and began to eulogize our fine language, lexicographers battened down the hatches and waited for the storm to pass, as it would. The death of English was literally (senses 1 and 2) old news to us.As far back as the 15th century, English speakers were bemoaning the shortcomings of their language. The earliest worries were that English simply didn't have enough words in it: England's own poet laureate whinged in 1545 that his native language was so full of difficulties that he didn't think he'd be able to find the "termes to serve my mynde". By the 1700s, the idea that unless upright citizens who cared about grammar stepped in, "good" and "proper" English might dwindle into nothing was already well established.
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A Texas girl suspended for refusing to wear a student ID card implanted with a radio-frequency identification chip is being re-admitted to her former high school where fall classes begin Monday, her lawyers said today.The flap concerns Andrea Hernandez, who will be a junior at John Jay High in San Antonio. She was suspended in January and sued the Northside Independent School District on privacy and religious grounds.
She lost the case and began attending another school that did not require pupils to wear the ID badges. The girl's lawyers said today that she is returning to the magnet school where the highly contested legal battle commenced. That's because the district has abandoned its year-long RFID-student monitoring program.
Radio-frequency identification devices are a daily part of the electronic age -- found in passports, and library and payment cards. Eventually they are expected to replace bar-code labels on consumer goods. Schools across the nation are slowly adopting them as well, despite the Northside district quietly deciding last month to discontinue RFID chips on the grounds that they were ineffective.
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More than 100 companies providing federally funded tutoring services in San Francisco and Oakland public schools have been cut off from the beginning of the school year after the schools terminated the program.On August 6 the U.S. Department of Education granted a one-year waiver allowing eight California school districts, including San Francisco and Oakland, to opt out of the No Child Behind Act. SFUSD and OUSD received $700,000 and $3.42 million respectively in supplemental education services (SES) funds for the upcoming school year. Under No Child Left Behind, schools were required to use that money to offer programs such as afterschool tutoring for struggling students. With the waiver, both districts have decided not to offer the SES program and plan to use the money in other ways to help low-income students.
Last year, there were 121 state approved SES providers for Oakland schools alone. The district expects the number of contracted SES providers to drop drastically.
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Patrick Denice , Robin Lake, Betheny Gross:
How well do charter schools serve the students with special needs who choose to attend them? Finding the means to answer this question is complicated.In March 2013, CRPE convened a group of nine experts, from leading economists to special education authorities, to determine the best ways for researchers to assess the learning and socio-emotional outcomes of charter school students with special needs.
Drawing on the panel's conversations, this brief outlines the challenges associated with producing methodologically sound and practically useful research on how students with special needs fare in charter schools as compared to in district-run schools. These challenges include inconsistent approaches to identifying and tracking students with diverse learning needs, data and methodological limitations, and inconsistencies in state policy.
The authors include a set of recommendations for designing the kind of rigorous research needed to inform policy and practice and help policymakers and the public become wiser consumers of special education charter schools studies.
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Students and families are more willing than ever to borrow to pay for college and increasingly reliant on federal grants and loans to help with tuition bills, statistics released today from the U.S. Education Department show.For the first time, a majority of undergraduates are receiving some kind of federal financial aid -- 57 percent. A higher proportion than ever are taking out loans. But while the federal government gave out more grants for low-income students, colleges continued using their own money on grants for students from wealthier families. That's a trend that concerns some who argue that colleges should do more to help students of limited means.
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New Jersey's branch of Democrats for Education Reform has released results of a poll that shows that "[e]ight out of ten New Jersey Democrats say that Cory Booker's support for pragmatic education reforms as Mayor of Newark make him a good choice for the United States Senate."The poll was conducted by Education Reform Now Advocacy and confirms that Booker's outspoken views on expanding school choice and improving teacher quality are popular with Garden State Democrats. 49% of voters surveyed said Booker's education platform was "very convincing" and another 29% called it "convincing."
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Most people know the story of the boy who was rescuing sea stars that had washed up on a beach by throwing them back into the ocean. When a man scoffed to the boy that his efforts didn't make a difference since he couldn't save all of them, the boy tossed another sea star back into the ocean and replied, "It made a difference to that one." The little-known ending to the story is that the boy was sued by the Southern Poverty Law Center for violating the Constitution's Equal Protection clause.Sadly, this is only a slight exaggeration. Earlier this week, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a federal lawsuit contending that Alabama's new scholarship tax credit program violates the Equal Protection clause and harms the low-income students attending failing public schools whom the law is intended to help:
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President Obama plans to announce a set of ambitious proposals on Thursday aimed at making colleges more accountable and affordable by rating them and ultimately linking those ratings to financial aid.A draft of the proposal, obtained by The New York Times and likely to cause some consternation among colleges, shows a plan to rate colleges before the 2015 school year based on measures like tuition, graduation rates, debt and earnings of graduates, and the percentage of lower-income students who attend. The ratings would compare colleges against their peer institutions. If the plan can win Congressional approval, the idea is to base federal financial aid to students attending the colleges partly on those rankings.
"All the things we're measuring are important for students choosing a college," a senior administration official said. "It's important to us that colleges offer good value for their tuition dollars, and that higher education offer families a degree of security so students aren't left with debt they can't pay back."
Mr. Obama hopes that starting in 2018, the ratings would be tied to financial aid, so that students at highly rated colleges might get larger federal grants and more affordable loans. But that would require new legislation.
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Maria Pappas, the treasurer of Cook County, Illinois, got tired of being asked why local taxes kept rising. Betting that the answer involved the debt that state and local governments were accumulating, she began a quest to figure out how much county residents owed. It wasn't easy. In some jurisdictions, officials said that they didn't know; in others, they stonewalled. Pappas's first report, issued in 2010, estimated the total state and local debt at $56 billion for the county's 5.6 million residents. Two years later, after further investigation, the figure had risen to a frightening $140 billion, shocking residents and officials alike. "Nobody knew the numbers because local governments don't like to show how badly they are doing," Pappas observed.Since Pappas began her project to tally Cook County's hidden debt, she has found lots of company. Across America, elected officials, taxpayer groups, and other researchers have launched a forensic accounting of state and municipal debt, and their fact-finding mission is rewriting the country's balance sheet. Just a few years ago, most experts estimated that state and local governments owed about $2.5 trillion, mostly in the form of municipal bonds and other debt securities. But late last year, the States Project, a joint venture of Harvard's Institute of Politics and the University of Pennsylvania's Fels Institute of Government, projected that if you also count promises made to retired government workers and money borrowed without taxpayer approval, the figure might be higher than $7 trillion.
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Ever since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut last December, school officials across the country have debated how best to improve safety, including whether to arm teachers.A panic button was installed in a secret location at A.L. Burruss Elementary School in Marietta, Ga., where students make their way to class.
The debate intensified Tuesday when a gunman walked into a DeKalb County, Ga., elementary school, barricaded himself in the front office and fired multiple shots at police before being taken into custody. No one was injured.
Many schools are opening their doors this semester with an option less controversial than arming teachers: panic buttons. At least 400 schools in a dozen states, from California to Maine, are adding the devices, according to administrators.
"It's basically a common-sense approach. Businesses have these buttons all over the place," said Mario Civera, a county council member in Delaware County, Pa., which is installing panic buttons in its 237 schools.
Panic buttons are installed under desks, in school front offices or on pendants around administrators' necks. When pressed, they silently alert local security companies or 911 dispatchers of a high-level emergency, signaling that authorities should be sent immediately--no questions asked.
Some panic-button systems also send text messages to administrators and announce an alert over the school's intercom system after 911 is called. The buttons are meant for the worst type of emergencies, such as a shooting or a hostage situation, school officials say.
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As opening days for fall classes draw near, agreements in support of dual enrollment have been reached between Daytona State College and Volusia and Flagler school districts.Related:Obtaining credit for non Madison School District Courses has been an ongoing challeng. Perhaps this issue has faded away as past practices die? Madison'snon-diverse or homogeneous governance model inflictsnumerous cost, fromone size fits all curricula to growth in the 'burbs accompanied byever increasing property taxes on top of stagnant or declining income.The college's District Board of Trustees on Aug. 13 approved agreements to cover the majority of the schools' costs for services associated with dual enrollment in 2013-14.
The Volusia and Flagler school boards will vote on the agreements in upcoming weeks.
Dual enrollment provides college-credit classes on Daytona State campuses, giving college-bound students a head start on their higher education, at no cost to them.
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Americans have a decidedly mixed view of the education reforms now sweeping the nation, supporting moves to open up public schools to more competition -- and yet wary of ceding too much control to market forces.That's the message that emerges from a trio of new polls on public education. Taken together, the polls out this week capture a deep ambivalence:
Parents want a degree of choice in education; they continue to back charter schools. But they're increasingly skeptical of voucher programs that use public funds to help families pay private and parochial school tuition.
Parents are fine with high-stakes testing; in large numbers, they agree that kids should be held back a year or denied a high school diploma if they can't pass state exams. Yet they're less certain about tying teachers' salaries and performance evaluations to student test scores.
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Enrollment in AP classes has soared. But data analyzed by POLITICO shows that the number of kids who bomb the AP exams is growing even more rapidly. The class of 2012, for instance, failed nearly 1.3 million AP exams during their high school careers. That's a lot of time and money down the drain; research shows that students don't reap any measurable benefit from AP classes unless they do well enough to pass the $89 end-of-course exam.In its annual reports, the nonprofit College Board, which runs the Advanced Placement program, emphasizes the positive: The percentage of students who pass at least one AP exam during high school has been rising steadily. Because so many students now take more than one AP class, however, the overall pass rate dropped from 61 percent for the class of 2002 to 57 percent for the class of 2012.
Even more striking: The share of exams that earned the lowest possible score jumped from 14 percent to 22 percent, according to College Board data.
The trend challenges a widespread philosophy that students exposed to higher standards will find a way to meet them. Graded in part by college professors, AP exams provide a fairly objective measure of performance -- and the results suggest that when the bar is raised too high, a good number of students trip.
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Don't blame retiring Madison Area Technical College president Bettsey Barhorst or state Capitol Police Chief David Erwin for scoring a sweet payout and raise, respectively.Blame their bosses -- the MATC District Board and the Walker administration, respectively. They're the ones who offered and agreed to these deals, which are bad for taxpayers.
The State Journal reported Sunday that Barhorst, who announced her retirement in January, will receive about $88,000 for four and a half months as an on-call consultant to her successor, Jack E. Daniels, and other top MATC officials. After the first month of her consulting gig, Barhorst doesn't even have to be available in person. She can phone it in.
That doesn't justify the same pay as she was making before Daniels arrived on the job Monday. Yet that's what she'll get, courtesy of the MATC District Board. The $88,000 for 19 weeks of on-call help is based on her regular annual salary of nearly $240,000.
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Wisconsin State Journal editorial
About a third of kindergartners in Madison schools miss 10 or more days of classes. And a fifth are "chronically absent," meaning they miss 18 or more days, which is at least 10 percent of the school year.Attendance improves by fifth grade and into middle school, then falls when students reach high school.
That's why the United Way of Dane County this fall plans to emphasize in new ways the need for young parents to establish strong habits for children going to school every day (barring illness).
The effort -- dubbed "Here!" -- will stress the correlation between good attendance and academic success. It will include promotional materials at schools, follow-up calls to parents and encouragement from community leaders such as church pastors who will include the message in their sermons.
"We shouldn't be surprised that the (high school) graduation rate is about the same as the attendance rate," said Deedra Atkinson, the United Way's senior vice president of community impact and marketing.
The nonprofit, as it launches its annual fundraiser today, also is committing more attention and resources to helping high school dropouts earn diplomas and find work.
The United Way does so much good work for our community that it deserves your financial support and time. The public is welcome at today's lunch and launch of the United Way's annual Days of Caring. So far, the number of volunteers is up about 400 people from last year, to 3,500.
The group's annual fundraising goal is $18.1 million, up 3 percent from last year's total collected, said campaign chairman Doug Nelson, regional president of BMO Harris Bank.
The United Way of Dane County will host its annual Days of Caring this week, starting today with a lunch and campaign kickoff at Willow Island at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. The public is welcome. To donate to the nonprofit's fundraising effort go to www.unitedwaydanecounty.org or call 608-246-4350. To volunteer, visit www.volunteeryourtime.org or call 608-246-4357. Donate your time; donate your money.
Please help if you can.
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Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email:
A few weeks ago, after I gave a presentation on the opportunities and challenges of the portfolio model, a charter school proponent asked me, "Robin, do you really believe districts can innovate?"Certainly not under the current governance model, which is actually hostile to innovation. By innovation, I'm not talking about buying everyone iPads and Smart Boards. I'm talking about committing to an ongoing problem-solving disposition, and relentlessly hunting down the most promising new ideas--no matter their source--for addressing learning challenges. True innovation means seeking out evidence-based solutions and adapting quickly. It means facilitating proven solutions at scale rather than one-off programs or schools.
That's simply not possible in traditional school districts, where finance systems dictate spending based on set staffing models and class sizes, which prevent schools from experimenting with more productive uses of teachers and new student grouping strategies. Accountability systems can discourage risk-taking and diverse approaches to instruction by penalizing schools for any short-term drops in test scores. Rigid internal regulations and processes (such as procurement) make it hard to try anything new. Salary structures and work rules assign people to a school regardless of whether they believe in its approach. While no single one of these factors by itself kills innovation, the sum is a self-limiting, regulated environment that discourages experimentation with new ways to serve students.
Districts will never be capable of innovating if they don't fundamentally restructure and downsize central offices. They won't be capable of innovating without closing dysfunctional schools and creating new schools; without partnering with charter schools, which have the flexibility and focus that district-run schools lack; and without committing to continually assessing what works and adjusting course quickly.
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At New Orleans charter schools, even students in the primary grades sometimes start the day with rousing chants professing their commitment to college. "This is the way, hey!/ We start the day, hey!/ We get the knowledge, hey!/To go to college!" kids shout. During several years writing about the remaking of the school system since Hurricane Katrina, I have heard high school teachers remind students to wash their hands before leaving the restroom because otherwise they might get sick, which might cause them to miss class, which would leave them less prepared for college. College flags and banners coat the walls and ceilings of schools across the city. College talk infuses the lessons of even the youngest learners. College trips expose older kids to campuses around the country.While particularly strong in New Orleans, the "college-for-all" movement has swept the nation over the past decade, with education reformers in different cities embracing the notion that sending more low-income students to and through college should be America's primary antipoverty strategy. In his first address to a joint session of Congress, President Barack Obama echoed that theme when he asked every American to pledge to attend at least one year of college. "We will provide the support necessary for you to complete college and meet a new goal: By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world."
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James Piereson & Naomi Schaefer Riley:
For the latest evidence of the town-gown divide, look no further than New Jersey, where earlier this summer residents of Princeton banded together to sue the prestigious school in their backyard. The residents argued that Princeton University, which boasts the largest endowment per student in the country, should no longer be entitled to its tax-exempt status because the school makes money--from its scientific patents, ticketed concerts, on-campus eateries and more. The Ivy League school is operating like a business, the plaintiffs say, so the tax code should treat it like one.The conflict isn't going away. In June, a state tax court judge said the case had merit and refused the school's request to dismiss the case. Princeton officials don't seem worried: Reacting to the judge's decision, a school vice president said that he expected any adjustments to its tax bill to be "quite modest."
Perhaps, but the townies still have a point. According to the lawsuit, the university took in over $115 million from patents in 2011, of which $35 million was given to various faculty members. The lawyer for the plaintiffs told the Times of Trenton that "People in Princeton pay at least one-third more in taxes because the university has been exempt all of these years." If all of the school's property were taxed, the bill would come to roughly $28 million a year, instead of the roughly $10 million the university is now contributing voluntarily to town coffers.
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For most teens starting college this fall, a chat has seldom involved talking, GM means food that's Genetically Modified and a tablet is no longer something you take in the morning.Each August since 1998, Beloit College has rolled out its internationally known Mindset List, originally aimed at giving faculty witty glimpses of the pop culture that has shaped the lives of incoming freshmen, so they can avoid dated references.
Over time, the list has become a public relations gold mine for the small liberal arts college in Beloit, each year generating a million hits on its website.
The Class of 2017 may be the last to have its own Mindset List, though, if two anonymous professors -- one from a large public university and the other from a community college -- can torpedo it.
The two -- who write as "John Q. Angry" and "Disgruntled Prof" and say they have no connection to the college -- launched a blog this week called Beloit Mindlessness, "dedicated to the mockery and eventual destruction of the Beloit Mindset List."
The blog's introduction says it will lay out the case against The Mindset List "through a thorough examination of each of the 1,000+ items that have appeared on the list over the past 16 years."
Why all the hate?
The list "is a poorly written compendium of trivia, stereotypes and lazy generalizations, insulting to both students and their professors, and based on nothing more than the uninformed speculation of its authors," according to Beloit Mindlessness. "It inspires lazy, inaccurate journalism and is an embarrassment to academia."
The Mindset List is the brainchild of Ron Nief, emeritus director of public affairs for Beloit College, and Tom McBride, an English professor there.
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Upon the death of the Marxist-inspired historian Howard Zinn in 2010, eulogies rang out from coast to coast calling him a heroic champion of the unsung masses. In Indiana, then-Gov. Mitch Daniels refused to join the chorus and instead sent emails to his staff wondering if the historian's "execrable" books were being force-fed to Hoosier students. The recent revelation of these emails provoked an angry backlash.High-school teachers within Zinn's vast network of admirers blogged their disapproval of the governor's heresy, and leading professional organizations of historians denounced the supposed threat to academic freedom. At Purdue University, where Mr. Daniels now serves as president, 90 faculty members hailed Zinn as a strong scholarly voice for the powerless and cast the former governor as an enemy of free thought.
An activist historian relentlessly critical of alleged American imperialism, Zinn managed during his lifetime to build an impressive empire devoted to the spread of his ideas. Even after his death, a sprawling network of advocacy and educational groups has grown, giving his Marxist and self-described "utopian" vision a wider audience than ever before.
Zinn's most influential work, A People's History of the United States, was published in 1980 with an initial print run of 4,000 copies. His story line appealed to young and old alike, with the unshaded good-guy, bad-guy narrative capturing youthful imaginations, and his spirited takedown of "the Man" reminding middle-aged hippies of happier days. Hollywood's love for Zinn and a movie tribute to his work has made him even more mainstream. As his acolytes have climbed the rungs of power, still seeking revolution, A People's History has increased in popularity. To date, it has sold 2.2 million volumes, with more than half of those sales in the past decade.
In Zinn's telling, America is synonymous with brute domination that goes back to Christopher Columbus. "The American system," he writes in A People's History, is "the most ingenious system of control in world history." The founding fathers were self-serving elitists defined by "guns and greed."
For Americans stuck in impoverished communities and failing schools, Zinn's devotion to history as a "political act" can seem appealing. He names villains (capitalists), condemns their misdeeds, and calls for action to redistribute wealth so that, eventually, all of the following material goods will be "free--to everyone: food, housing, health care, education, transportation." The study of history, Zinn taught, demands this sort of social justice.
Schools with social-justice instruction that draw explicitly on Zinn are becoming more common. From the Social Justice Academy outside of San Francisco to the four campuses of the Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy, in Washington, D.C., social-justice academies relate their mission mainly in terms of ideological activism. At UCLA's Social Justice Academy, a program for high-school juniors, the goal is that students will "develop skills to take action that disrupts social justice injustices."
While social-justice instruction may sound to some like it might be suited to conflict resolution, in practice it can end up creating more discord than it resolves. Several years ago, the Ann Arbor, Michigan, public schools faced complaints from the parents of minority students that the American history curriculum was alienating their children. At a meeting of the district's social-studies department chairs, the superintendent thought that he had discovered the cure for the divisions plaguing the school system. Holding up a copy of A People's History, he asked, "How many of you have heard of Howard Zinn?" The chairwoman of the social studies department at the district's largest school responded, "Oh, we're already using that."
Zinn's arguments tend to divide, not unite, embitter rather than heal. The patron saint of Occupy Wall Street, Zinn left behind a legacy of prepackaged answers for every problem--a methodology that progressive historian Michael Kazin characterized as "better suited to a conspiracy-monger's website than to a work of scholarship."
Yet despite the lack of hard evidence in three-plus decades that using A People's History produces positive classroom results, a number of well-coordinated groups recently have been set up to train teachers in the art of Zinn. Founded five years ago out of a partnership between Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, the Zinn Education Project offers more than 100 lesson plans and teachers' guides to Zinn's books, among a variety of other materials, including "Beyond Heroes and Holidays: A Practice Guide to K-12 Anti-Racist, Multicultural Education and Staff Development." Already, the project claims to have enlisted 20,000 teachers in its efforts.
Before Zinn launched his own teaching career, he became a member of the Communist Party in 1949 (according to FBI reports released three years ago), and worked in various front groups in New York City. Having started his academic career at Spelman College, Zinn spent the bulk of it at Boston University, where on the last day before his retirement in 1988 he led his students into the street to participate in a campus protest.
Today, Boston University hosts the Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture Series, and New York University (Zinn's undergraduate alma mater) proudly houses his academic papers. In 2004 Zinn was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Havana, an occasion he took to excoriate the lack of academic freedom in America. As recently as 2007, A People's History was even required reading at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy for a class on "Leaders in America."
Thanks in part to an endorsement from the character played by Matt Damon in 1997's "Good Will Hunting," Zinn's magnum opus has also turned into a multimedia juggernaut. Actor Ben Affleck (like Mr. Damon, a family friend of Zinn's), and musicians Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Eddie Vedder and John Legend all have publicly praised Zinn. A History Channel documentary produced by Mr. Damon, "The People Speak," featured Hollywood A-listers Morgan Freeman, Viggo Mortensen, Kerry Washington and others reading from Zinn's books. There are "People's Histories" on topics including the American Revolution, Civil War, Vietnam and even science. Zinn die-hards can purchase a graphic novel, A People's History of American Empire, while kids can pick up a two-volume set, A Young People's History of the United States (wall chart sold separately).
In 2005, as a guest on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," Zinn delivered his standard wholesale condemnation of America. Surprised by the unrelenting attack, host Jon Stewart gave the historian an opportunity to soften his criticism. "We have made some improvements," the comedian asked, "in our barbarity over three hundred years, I would say, no?" Zinn denied there was any improvement.
As classes resume again this fall, it is difficult not to think that despite the late historian's popularity, our students deserve better than the divisive pessimism of Howard Zinn.
Mr. Bobb, director of the Hillsdale College Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship, in Washington, D.C., is author of Humility: An Unlikely Biography of America's Greatest Virtue, forthcoming from Thomas Nelson.
A version of this article appeared August 12, 2013, on page A17 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: "Howard Zinn and the Art of Anti-Americanism."
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Taobao Classmates (not official translation) , an online course market, was launched recently. Teachers, education organizations or agencies, or third-party online education services can set up Taobao stores to sell live broadcasts, recorded videos, offline courses or events, or courses on third-party sites (including Tmall) -- in short, anyone is allowed to set up a store selling online educational content or related physical goods such as offline event tickets.Just the same with buying physical goods on Taobao, consumers need to log into Taobao and pay with Alipay -- not a problem to the majority of Chinese. There is, of course, no delivery fee unless a store charges you for delivering physical tickets and the like.
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In the past three years, 18 states have lifted caps on the number of charters schools allowed, another sign that lawmakers are embracing charters as valuable options in public education."I think there's a growing recognition from state policymakers that charter schools are one of the pieces of the puzzle of education reform,'' said Todd Ziebarth of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. "They're not the silver bullet. They're not a panacea.''
But when charter schools are allowed to push the traditional system, they can become the labs of innovation they were designed to be, he said.
The information on caps comes in a new report from the alliance, which also looked at other changes states have made to charter school laws. Forty-two states and the District of Columbia now have charter schools, and the alliance concluded 35 of them strengthened their laws. In the alliance's view, that could mean anything from increasing transparency of the approval process to ensuring local charter school authorizers are adequately funded.
Most of the progress was on lifting the caps, said Ziebarth, who co-authored the report and is the alliance's senior vice president for state advocacy and support. Between 2010 and the beginning of 2013, 16 states lifted caps. Since January, Mississippi and Texas have joined the list.
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After an overhaul of high school schedules implemented last year -- forcing some teachers to take on an additional class -- the Broward school district now owes its teachers as much as $20 million in back pay.
The district doesn't dispute its teachers are owed money, but in closed-door negotiations, officials have requested a 20-year payment plan, according to Broward Teachers Union President Sharon Glickman.Glickman said she was astounded by the "insulting" offer, and immediately rejected it.
"I said, 'You're going to pay teachers when they're in the cemetery, when they're no longer alive?,'" Glickman said, adding that she's received hundreds of emails from teachers who want to be paid immediately. Glickman said the school district also made a separate offer: pay the affected teachers between $2,000 and $3,000 each, over a period of a couple of years.
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Barry Garelick, via a kind email:
I am a mathematics teacher. I majored in math and, prior to going into teaching, used it throughout my career.My facility with math is due to good teaching and good textbooks. I fully expected the same for my daughter, but after seeing what passed for mathematics in her elementary school, I became increasingly distressed over how math is currently taught in many schools.
Optimistically believing that I could make a difference in at least a few students' lives, I decided that after I retired, I would teach high school math. To obtain the necessary credential, I enrolled in George Mason University Graduate School for Education in the fall of 2005.
The ed school experience did have some redeeming features. Most of my teachers had taught in K-12, and had valuable advice about classroom management problems and some good common-sense approaches to teaching that didn't rely on nausea-inducing theories.
Those theories are inescapable, unfortunately.
Specifically, many education theorists hold that when students discover material for themselves, they learn it more deeply than when it is taught directly. In this vein, the prevailing belief in the education establishment is that although direct instruction is effective in helping students learn and use algorithms and mathematical procedures, it is ineffective in helping students develop mathematical thinking.
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As school begins in the coming weeks, parents of boys should ask themselves a question: Is my son really welcome? A flurry of incidents last spring suggests that the answer is no. In May, Christopher Marshall, age 7, was suspended from his Virginia school for picking up a pencil and using it to "shoot" a "bad guy" -- his friend, who was also suspended. A few months earlier, Josh Welch, also 7, was sent home from his Maryland school for nibbling off the corners of a strawberry Pop-Tart to shape it into a gun. At about the same time, Colorado's Alex Evans, age 7, was suspended for throwing an imaginary hand grenade at "bad guys" in order to "save the world."In all these cases, school officials found the children to be in violation of the school's zero-tolerance policies for firearms, which is clearly a ludicrous application of the rule. But common sense isn't the only thing at stake here. In the name of zero tolerance, our schools are becoming hostile environments for young boys.
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Where should you go to college--assuming you're a high school student and getting ready for this new phase of your life? Where should you encourage your son or daughter to go--assuming that you're a parent? As a college professor, I get asked the where-to-go question frequently, and I know that all of us teaching in colleges and universities do too. How should one answer? What is the right thing to say to someone deciding on his or her future? For myself, I'm inclined to respond by posing another question.Are you looking for a corporate city, or are you looking for a scholarly enclave? Neither of these kinds of schools exists in its pure form. To the scholarly enclave, even the most ideal, there will always be a practical, businessy dimension. Somebody's got to keep the books and pay the bills. And even in the most corporate of colleges, there will be islands of relative scholarly idealism.
Many, if not most, American high school students have already had a taste of the corporate city. These are students and parents who are emerging from the mouth of that great American dragon called the "good high school." I won't hide my prejudices: I have a lot of qualms about the good American high school. Most good high schools now look to me like credential factories. They are production centers that kids check in to every day. The motivated, success- oriented students set to work from the moment of arrival, producing something, manufacturing something. And what they produce are credentials. High schools now are credential factories in overdrive.
It doesn't mean that students don't have to work to get those credentials: Of course they do. It takes lots of effort, planning, and organization-- and it takes some smarts-- to get what students, the workers in the high school factory, are out to get. Students feel that they need to get A's-- they need to excel in their courses. They also feel they need to stimulate the goodwill of their teachers and their guidance counselors: Those recommendations are crucial. Students in high school now also need to rack up lots of extracurriculars: They need to do some community service; they need to be president (or, maybe better, treasurer) of a club or two; it's good as well if they can play at least one varsity sport, or, if they are prone to stumbling over their own feet (as I was in high school), they can at least manage a team or keep the uniforms clean.
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Two of three bills to help students with dyslexia and other reading disorders get more help in school were signed Wednesday by Gov. Chris Christie.via a kind Wisconsin Reading Coalition email:The two bills require teachers to get training in reading disabilities, and require the state Department of Education to providing training opportunities for teachers.
A third bill that has not yet been signed, and the one considered most important by advocates, would require the state to incorporate the International Dyslexia Association's definition of dyslexia into state special education regulations. Currently the state classifies students with dyslexia only as having a specific learning disability.
A fourth bill that would require that all children be screened for reading disabilities by the end of first grade has been approved by the Senate, but not yet by the Assembly.
One requires teachers to get training in reading disabilities, and the other requires the NJ Department of Education to provide training opportunities for teachers.Other pending legislation includes a statutory definition of dyslexia based on the definition used by the International Dyslexia Association, screening for reading disabilities by 1st grade, and developing a certificate for teachers of students with dyslexia.
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Tyler Weaver calls himself "the king of the reading club" at Hudson Falls Public Library. But now it seems Hudson Falls Public Library Director Marie Gandron wants to end his reign and have him dethroned.The 9-year-old boy, who will be starting fifth grade next month, won the six-week-long "Dig into Reading" event by completing 63 books from June 24 to Aug. 3, averaging more than 10 a week.
He has consistently been the top reader since kindergarten, devouring a total of 373 books over the five contests, according to his mother, Katie.
"It feels great," said Tyler, an intermediate scholar student at Hudson Falls School. "I think that was actually a record-breaking streak."
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In June, Ron Matus introduced a short series of entries responding to his question, "Can teachers unions adapt?" Responses came from anti-union writers Gary Beckner and Terry Moe, from DFER staff member and former journalist Joe Williams, and from former Pinellas County Teachers Association head and current SUFS president Doug Tuthill.I am a current member and former officer in the United Faculty of Florida (Florida's college and university faculty union), but I think the most useful approach I can suggest comes from my role as an education historian. The reality is that teachers unions (or any organizations tied to schooling) have a long record of varied change in response to circumstances.
Despite occasional crass claims about an educational status quo and "industry-era education," rough stability is a more useful concept for education history than absolute fixedness. As David Tyack and Larry Cuban argue in their wonderful history of school reform, Tinkering toward Utopia, change often happens through long-term trends rather than through the more visible and cyclical rhetoric of the reform du jour.
More importantly, the sources of relative stability derive more from shared values and long-term social dilemmas than come from either self-interest (as Joe Williams claims) or from bureaucracy. Bureaucracy has its influences and people include material self-interest as part of their identity and their role in organizations like unions. But schools have social scripts for all sorts of reasons, including our country's bundling of education with citizenship and the common experiences adults remember from their time in schools.
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Critics of affirmative action generally argue that the country would be better off with a meritocracy, typically defined as an admissions system where high school grades and standardized test scores are the key factors, applied in the same way to applicants of all races and ethnicities.But what if they think they favor meritocracy but at some level actually have a flexible definition, depending on which groups would be helped by certain policies? Frank L. Samson, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Miami, thinks his new research findings suggest that the definition of meritocracy used by white people is far more fluid than many would admit, and that this fluidity results in white people favoring certain policies (and groups) over others.
Specifically, he found, in a survey of white California adults, they generally favor admissions policies that place a high priority on high school grade-point averages and standardized test scores. But when these white people are focused on the success of Asian-American students, their views change.
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Fast forward, and after attending a presentation at this year's ASA in New York last week, I've come to question my assessment--and theirs. At the time, I was looking at percentage point gains over time, and we know that these are not a good way to assess effect sizes since they do not take into account the amount of variation in the sample. Once the gains are standardized, Arum and Roksa find that students tested twice, four years apart, improve their scores on the Collegiate Learning Assessment by an average of 0.46 standard deviations. Now that's a number we can begin to seriously consider.Is a gain of 0.46 sd evidence of "limited learning" and something to sniff at? As I said back in 2009, we need a frame of reference in order to assess this. In the abstract, an effect size means little if anything at all.
For their part, the authors point to a review of research by Ernie Pascarella and Pat Terenzini indicating that on tests given at the time, students in the 1980s gained about 1 standard deviation. Doesn't that mean students learn less today than they once did, and that that's a problem? Actually, no.
Scores cannot simply be compared across different tests. The scales on tests differ and can only be linked by administering the same test to comparable people. Clearly, the CLA was not administered to students attending college in the 1980s. Nor, for that matter, were students then comparable in demographic characteristics to the students of today, or were the conditions of testing the same.
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Next January, the Georgia Institute of Technology plans to offer a master's degree in computer science through massive open online courses for a fraction of the on-campus cost, a first for an elite institution. If it even approaches its goal of drawing thousands of students, it could signal a change to the landscape of higher education.From their start two years ago, when a free artificial intelligence course from Stanford enrolled 170,000 students, free massive open online courses, or MOOCs, have drawn millions and yielded results like the perfect scores of Battushig, a 15-year-old Mongolian boy, in a tough electronics course offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
But the courses have not yet produced profound change, partly because they offer no credit and do not lead to a degree. The disruption may be approaching, though, as Georgia Tech, which has one of the country's top computer science programs, plans to offer a MOOC-based online master's degree in computer science for $6,600 -- far less than the $45,000 on-campus price.
Zvi Galil, the dean of the university's College of Computing, expects that in the coming years, the program could attract up to 10,000 students annually, many from outside the United States and some who would not complete the full master's degree. "Online, there's no visa problem," he said.
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BBC:
Using Facebook can reduce young adults' sense of well-being and satisfaction with life, a study has found.
Checking Facebook made people feel worse about both issues, and the more they browsed, the worse they felt, the University of Michigan research said.The study, which tracked participants for two weeks, adds to a growing body of research saying Facebook can have negative psychological consequences.
Facebook has more than a billion members and half log in daily.
"On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection. Rather than enhancing well-being, however, these findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it," said the researchers.
Internet psychologist Graham Jones, a member of the British Psychological Society who was not involved with the study, said: "It confirms what some other studies have found - there is a growing depth of research that suggests Facebook has negative consequences."
But he added there was plenty of research showing Facebook had positive effects on its users.
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The United States has stopped funding for a charity that educates some of Afghanistan's most vulnerable abuse victims, including a tortured child bride and a teenager scarred by acid after refusing to marry a militia commander.The decision to end financing for Aid Afghanistan for Education, which provides schools for girls and women excluded from government classrooms, came despite a pledge last month to spend more than $200m (£130m) on "women's empowerment" as foreign troops head home.
Since funds were cut off this spring teachers have been leading classes for free in the hope that the charity's director, Hassina Sherjan, can cobble together funds to pay their modest $140 monthly wages before they have to find new jobs.
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I am thankful that former WEAC Executive Director Morris Andrews spent time recently to discuss public education 24MB mp3 audio.
I thought about this conversation during a recent drive through a "de-industrialized" city. I observed beautiful buildings, boarded structures, a well attended park event via a free lunch program, a jobless center across the street, emerging strip malls and a nearby Planned Parenthood facility (with protesters).
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It takes some degree of chutzpah to evaluate teacher preparation programs with data said to be "in-depth" and "comprehensively collected" and then bury in small type the fact that some of the data isn't actually all that trustworthy.That's what the New York City Department of Education did with the newly released reports that are said to grade teacher prep programs at colleges and universities in the city. The department put out a news release this week with the headline: "New York City Becomes the First Major School System in the Country to Comprehensively Collect and Analyze Data on New Teacher Hires from Post-secondary Schools of Education." You can find individual reports on a department webpage under the title "Human Capital Data."
The U.S. Education Department under Secretary Arne Duncan has been pushing "accountability" on teacher prep programs, using the standardized test scores of the students of the programs' graduates as a key measure, despite warnings from testing experts that this is an unreliable way of evaluating teachers. New York is the first to do it but this effort is going to be reproduced around the country
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Helen Gym is the founder of Parents United for Public Education, an organization advocating for a strong Philadelphia public school system.
What is Parents United?Parents United for Public Education came about to engage public school parents and charter parents all across the city to stand up around a strong public school system. With all the events that have transpired in the last year or so there's nothing more important than the quality of our schools. It's tied to our population, our future and tied to children --getting people engaged and active and passionate about our public schools.
Tell us a little more about yourself.
I'm a transplant from the Midwest, came here from college. Stayed here more permanently since the 90s. I'm a former public school teacher in the district. I was the first editor of the Philadelphia Public School Notebook. I'm a parent of three children. I helped found a charter school in Chinatown. I'm a daughter of immigrants.What was life growing up in the Midwest?
My parents did not have that much. Everything I ever got in my life, including sports, art activities and community functions, learning to ride my bike at the park, swimming in public swimming pool came from public spaces. They have had an impact. That belief I carry with me. No matter what background you come from these public goods help all to give each other the quality and access to opportunity that many people would not have otherwise. I appreciate the fact that there was an amazing recreational center where I grew up (in Columbus, Ohio) that was public and free.
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In Part One of a two-part interview, LA School Report contributor Vanessa Romo talks with Deasy about his relationship with teachers, the challenges of pioneering the new Common Core curriculum and the possibility that district-wide test scores might fall this year.
Q: Despite the upward trend of metrics that suggest the district is making progress - rising API scores, increasing graduation rates, and a significant reduction in suspension rates - the vast majority of respondents* to a teachers' union survey found your performance either "below average" or "poor", especially when it comes to morale and spending money. How do you answer your critics?A: I can make no sense of it whatsoever. I have a fantastic relationship with the teachers of this district. Our teachers are doing a phenomenal job. I've been calling on the Board to give teachers and all employees a raise. I admire them, and I'm not confused about my mission, which is to lift youth out of poverty.
If you want to get technical about it, I don't spend money. I make recommendations, and the [school] board decides. So since my recommendation is that 96 cents of every dollar go to schools, I don't even know how to respond to that statement. I'm looking for partners to do this work with the teachers union leadership. I would love to have a partner to advance this work and recognize great teaching.
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American teenagers ages 12 to 17 care about their privacy. Even as youth share increasing amounts of information online (and have information about them shared by others), they also take steps to manage what can be seen and who can access it. This report asks the questions: Who do teens rely on when working their way through the privacy choices that confront them each time they go online? And when they reach a point where they need outside help, where do teens turn for advice about how to manage their privacy online? These questions have great relevance for those who want to understand who or what influences teens as they make choices about what to share and what not to share online.
In order to fully understand how teens are managing their privacy online, this project collected data in two modes - first, through a nationally-representative telephone survey fielded in the summer of 2012, and second, through a series of focus group interviews with adolescents around the country. As our focus groups show, for their day-to-day privacy management, teens generally rely on themselves to figure out the practical aspects of sharing and settings on their own. The bulk of teens are figuring out how to manage their privacy themselves, whether by being walked through their choices by the app or platform when they first sign up, or through search and use of their preferred platform. However, the national survey shows that, at some point, the majority of teens have found themselves in a situation where they needed some outside advice about how to manage their privacy online.70% of teen internet users have asked for or sought out advice on managing their privacy online. Teens are just as likely to reach out to their friends and peers as they are to reach out to their parents for advice.
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Rishi Satpathy was faced with an age-old high school problem. "I was in a class that none of my friends were in," he says, "and I didn't like the teacher."
At most high schools, that's a problem with no easy solution. Changing your schedule is like a ridiculously cruel game of Tetris where you have to go out and find the blocks yourself. You make countless calls to friends, comparing schedules one class at a time, and then there's trip after trip to the guidance counselor as you try to fit your new set of classes together. But Satpathy and other students at the prestigious Illinois Math and Science Academy have a better way. They use a website called WikiRoster.With the site -- co-created by an IMSA alum -- Satpathy can sync up with his friends and fill holes in his schedule from the web browser on his laptop. "It's saved many, many trips to the guidance counselor," he says.
Typically, high schools don't post student schedules publicly due to privacy concerns, but there's nothing to stop students from volunteering this information on a third-party website. That's what happens on WikiRoster. Students can then instantly compare schedules and view them in a visual way that makes it all the easier to mix and match classes. Once school starts, they can also use the site to discuss homework assignments or collaborate on class projects.
Teenage founders Jason Lin, Kendrick Lau, and Jung Oh created the site while still in high school. Like many startups, it began as a way to scratch a personal itch.
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The video that was posted online appeared to be a tour of the spa area at some swanky new hotel.Related: Alabama participated in the 2011 TIMSS global exam along with Minnesota and Massachusetts. Wisconsin has never benchmarked our students via the global exams. We have been stuck with the oft-criticized WKCE.
There were cascading waterfalls into hot and cold pools. There was an arcade section. A smoothie bar. Flat-screen TVs adorned every open space. There were lockers the members at Augusta National would find acceptable.This was luxury, no doubt. But it was not at a hotel.
Instead, this shaky video tour was of the inside of a college football team's training and lounge area. Specifically, it is the training, weight room and lounge area within the Mal Moore Athletic Complex on the campus of the University of Alabama.
Pricetag: $9 million. (And that's just for the upgrades. The original facility, which opened in 2005, cost about $50 million.)
We have lost our minds.
And I say that not simply because a college football team's training area now has a waterfall and a smoothie bar, which would, I think, be reason enough for me to make that statement, but also because these $9 million in upgrades to facilities that were pretty darn good to start with occurred at a school that just raised tuition on the average student for the sixth consecutive year.
This year, it went up 3 percent. Last year, it jumped 7 percent.
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Today, as schools across the country wrestle with new approaches to teacher training, evaluation, development and compensation, it is critical to consider and understand the views of teachers themselves. Beyond teachers unions and newer organizations that seek to amplify the opinions of practicing teachers, education leaders and policymakers often turn to scientific polls and surveys such as the MetLife Foundation's annual Survey of the American Teacher.In sampling the opinions of all teachers, these surveys provide useful information--some of which we have incorporated into our own research and work--but they also cast a very wide net. While it is important to understand the views of all teachers, we believe the perspectives of our very best teachers are especially important.
Our 2012 study The Irreplaceables showed that improving our nation's urban schools requires creating policies and working conditions that will attract more outstanding teachers and encourage them to stay in the classroom. We should be building the profession around its finest practitioners. Today, too little is known about the opinions and experiences of top- performing teachers, because researchers rarely focus specifically on them. We launched the Perspectives of Irreplaceable
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Public schools in the United States, particularly in "blue" cities like New York and Washington,D.C., seem to be an ongoing slow-motion train wreck. Recently the state of the New York City schools came to the top of the recurring-news pile. While Mayor (for life) Michael Bloomberg pursued his various important concerns, CBS News reported that 80 percent of New York City high school graduates required remedial classes in reading, arithmetic, or both, before they were prepared for classroom work in New York's own community colleges.The report was originally headlined "80 percent illiterate" because not being prepared for college work is not the same as being actually illiterate. But then it's appropriate to point out that the New York City schools have a graduation rate of only around 65 percent, and we can also assume that students applying for admission to the community colleges are to some extent self-selected as well. If only 20 percent of that selected population are prepared for a community college curriculum, what about the others?
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May 31st, president Barack Obama strolled into the bright sunlight of the Rose Garden, covered from head to toe in the slime and ooze of the Benghazi and IRS scandals. In a Karl Rove-ian masterstroke, he simply pretended they weren't there and changed the subject.The topic? Student loans. Unless Congress took action soon, he warned, the relatively low 3.4 percent interest rates on key federal student loans would double. Obama knew the Republicans would make a scene over extending the subsidized loan program, and that he could corner them into looking like obstructionist meanies out to snatch the lollipop of higher education from America's youth. "We cannot price the middle class or folks who are willing to work hard to get into the middle class," he said sternly, "out of a college education."
Flash-forward through a few months of brinkmanship and name-calling, and not only is nobody talking about the IRS anymore, but the Republicans and Democrats are snuggled in bed together on the student-loan thing, having hatched a quick-fix plan on July 31st to peg interest rates to Treasury rates, ensuring the rate for undergrads would only rise to 3.86 percent for the coming year.
Though this was just the thinnest of temporary solutions - Congressional Budget Office projections predicted interest rates on undergraduate loans under the new plan would still rise as high as 7.25 percent within five years, while graduate loans could reach an even more ridiculous 8.8 percent - the jobholders on Capitol Hill couldn't stop congratulating themselves for their "rare" "feat" of bipartisan cooperation. "This proves Washington can work," clucked House Republican Luke Messer of Indiana, in a typically autoerotic assessment of the work done by Beltway pols like himself who were now freed up for their August vacations.
Not only had the president succeeded in moving the goal posts on his spring scandals, he'd teamed up with the Republicans to perpetuate a long-standing deception about the education issue: that the student-loan controversy is now entirely about interest rates and/or access to school loans.
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It's happened. Literally the most misused word in the language has officially changed definition. Now as well as meaning "in a literal manner or sense; exactly: 'the driver took it literally when asked to go straight over the traffic circle'", various dictionaries have added its other more recent usage. As Google puts it,"literally" can be used "to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis or to express strong feeling".Did we, as genuinely hundreds of people are tweeting, just break the English language? Or did we, astotally tens of bloggers are writing, prove that the English language is a beautiful, organic creature that is forever slipping out of our control? Well, no: to be precise, we have done something mildly annoying.
"Literally", you see, in its development from knock-kneed, single-purpose utterance, to swan-like dual-purpose term, has reached that awkward stage. It is neither one nor the other, and it can't do anything right. So to use it at all is to encounter one of several pitfalls:
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Here are arguments made by critics of the core curriculum, and responses from the Branstad administration:TRANSPARENCY
TRANSPARENCY
CRITICISM: Although critics object to government telling them what their kids must learn, they also complain that the common core was developed by two private membership organizations through a process that was not subject to any freedom of information acts or other sunshine laws that government agencies must follow.
RESPONSE: "The common core standards were developed by a coalition of states led by governors and state school chiefs through their membership in the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Forty-eight states took part, drawing on the expertise of content specialists, teachers, school administrators and parents. The process was open for public comment, and more than 10,000 comments were received. The standards were created for voluntary adoption in states through their own unique processes. In Iowa, the standards were discussed and adopted by the State Board of Education at public meetings in 2010."
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The attack by the American Legislative Council (ALEC) threatens public education on five critical fronts, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Julie Mead explains in an article published Wednesday by theInstitute for Wisconsin's Future.Taking care of the basic such as reading and teacher preparation, will address some of the present public education system's governance issues.Interviewed by The Real News Network as protesters were arrested trying to crash ALEC's 40th annual convention in Chicago last week, Mead said that education model bills flowing out of the conservative organization introduce market forces into and privatize education, increase student testing and decrease the influence of local school districts and school boards.
"One of the things that I like to talk about is what's public about public education, because I really do believe that that is precisely what is at stake: what is public about public education," Mead, a professor in the department of educational leadership and policy analysis, said in the article.
Trends fueled ALEC jeopardize five essential dimensions of public education, she said: Public purpose, public funding, public access, public accountability to communities and public curriculum.
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A new Iowa law that mandates university faculty continuously improve their courses is the latest in a wave of legislation nationwide that seeks to hold public colleges accountable for their performance.Starting this fall, faculty at Iowa's public universities must administer tests that measure student learning to improve courses with 300 or more students.
Iowa's legislation stands apart from broader efforts in other states because it seeks to dictate how faculty teach courses, said Daniel Hurley, director of state relations and policy analysis for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities in Washington.
"This legislation is clearly an aberration from the norm, in terms of legislative intrusion on university academic matters," Hurley said.
Iowa is one of just 10 states where legislatures are not pursuing policies that tie state funding to performance measures like graduation rates, according to a July Pew Charitable Trusts report. That trend is being driven by concerns over tight state budgets, rising tuition and a desire to improve the employment prospects of graduates, the report said. Sixteen states have policies that link dollars to performance measures. Four are in the process of implementing such measures, while 20 are considering doing so, according to the Pew report.
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Webcam hacking has officially gone mainstream with yesterday's revelation that the new Miss Teen USA, Cassidy Wolf, was the victim of a "sextortion" plot in which someone slipped Remote Administration Tool (RAT) software onto her computer and used it to snap (apparently nude) pictures of Wolf in her room. "I wasn't aware that somebody was watching me (on my webcam)," she told The Today Show. "The light (on the camera) didn't even go on, so I had no idea."Wolf said that the hacker tried to extort her, threatening to release the pictures publicly if she didn't follow his demands. The FBI has admitted that it is investigating the case and eventually said that hasidentified a suspect.
The story itself isn't remarkable--indeed, earlier this year I documented an entire community of RAT users who gather to share tips and pictures of the "slaves" whose machines they have infected--but these kinds of sextortion plots have to date been covered largely in the tech press and in local papers. (Though GQ ran a fine story on sextortionist Luis Mijangos in early 2012 that's well worth a read). Wolf has now taken the story onto the morning TV talk shows, and her interviewers appear to be amazed that such hacks are even possible.
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Tiffany Lankes and Dave McKinley:
New York's top education official wants state lawmakers to sign off on a bill that would give the Board of Regents power to take over school districts that are failing academically or financially.Education Commissioner John King said the bill would allow the Regents to remove a school board from a district that consistently fails to meet state standards and appoint an oversight board that would take over responsibility for running the system.
"That's certainly one of the options we believe should be on the table for the Board of Regents when you have a district that is chronically underperforming and, from a governance perspective, unable to move forward," King said.
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There's a question.I was amused to see Bruce Ramsey, another Seattle Times editorial board member, put out a column today that (oddly) asked Tim Burgess (who you may recall could even stick it out through the primary race), what the mayor of Seattle is and isn't. Baffling.
Here's what the column said about public education:
He (Burgess) mentions education. I (Ramsey) object: Seattle Public Schools aren't under the mayor, and in a mayoral race it is a distraction. Burgess disagreed: The mayor can use the Families and Education Levy to push for high standards.Here's what I said in a comment:As for the schools, the Families and Education should work with the district's direction, not the City's. If the City does not want to provide support to the schools because they disagree with the direction or standards the duly-hired Superintendent decides on, that's their call.
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This is the sixth in a series of reports evaluating the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship (FTC) Program, as required by the Florida Statutes, s. 1002.395(9)(j). This report provides information on private school compliance with program rules regarding required testing, describes the attributes of eligible students who participate in the program, and presents data on student test score levels and gains in the program (as well as school-level gain scores), the performance of participating students prior to their entry into the program, and the performance of participating students once they leave the program to return to the public sector.During the 2011-12 academic year, David Figlio, the Project Director, collected test score data from private schools participating in the FTC Program in real time. This is the sixth year for which program participants' test score data were collected, and the fifth year in which this data collection occurred in real time.
Compliance with program testing requirements, 2011-12:
- Compliance with program testing requirements in 2011-12 was at its highest level to date, and private school reporting errors continue to be at very low levels. Private schools provided usable test scores for a record 96.4 percent of program participants in grades 3-10. Another 2.5 percent of participants were ineligible for testing or were not enrolled in the school at the time of testing; this is largely driven by the fact that some students arrived in schools after fall testing (for schools that test in the fall, principally those that administer the Iowa Test of Basic Skills) and some students who began the year in a school left the school prior to the more typical spring testing. The 0.9 percent rate of reported illness/absence remains at a very low level. Test administration compliance errors by participating schools have held steady for the last several years, with reporting problems involving only 0.3 percent of participants in 2011-12.
- A large majority, though lower than prior years (57.5 percent), of test-takers took the Stanford Achievement Test. Other popular tests were the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (22.5 percent) and the TerraNova (12.1 percent). Substantially larger numbers of schools administered Terra Nova in 2011-12 than in prior years.
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When the Missouri Supreme Court ruled in June that students from unaccredited districts could transfer to better-performing schools, Cornell and Shonte Young were among thousands of St. Louis County parents who entered a lottery to determine where their children would attend class.The lottery asked parents to list three choices, but the Youngs left two lines blank and only listed one district - Kirkwood, where 13-year-old Cornell IV hoped to follow his father's footsteps and join the Pioneer football team.
But Kirkwood already had filled its available seats, so the family was content with returning to the Riverview Gardens district, even though it lost its state accreditation six years ago.
"The only other option was to come back here," Shonte Young said. "Other than Kirkwood, we never had any plans to go anywhere else."
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Grading at Sanborn Regional High School in Kingston, N.H., is not influenced by some of the more traditional factors, such as turning in homework on time or doing "extra credit." Instead, each class defines a set of about four "competencies" - central concepts and skills - and a student must be proficient in each one to pass. Stellar performance in one can't make up for lack in another.Students here have multiple opportunities along the way to show teachers what they know: There are quizzes and tests, yes, but also projects, individual portfolios, and class performances.
Spelling out what students need to demonstrate to earn passing or high grades "takes the subjectivity out of it," says Sanborn English teacher Aaron Wiles. A student tripping over one math concept gets pinpointed help, rather than accumulating gaps in understanding and having to take the entire course again. Students reflect on and revise their work until they meet expectations. "They take ownership of it," Mr. Wiles says.
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How should textbooks be designed? A new paper by Jennifer Kaminski and Vladimir Sloutsky shows that that can be real subtly in the answer.The researchers examined early elementary materials meant to teach kids how to read graphs. They were specifically interested in comparing boring, monochromatic, abstract, bar graphs versus colorful, fun graphs that use a graphic. (Please excuse the black & white reproduction.)
We all know that textbook publishers are eager to make books more visually appealing. And in this case, what's the harm? The graph with the objects seems like a natural scaffold to learn the concept.kaminski & Sloutsky found that some children shown the graph with embedded objects adopted a counting strategy to read a graph, even if they were taught to focus on the bar height and the axis. The authors surmise that the counting routine is so well-learned that when the child is presented with the vivid graphic with salient objects to count, it's simply very easy to go down that mental path. And of course the child does read the graph correctly.
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When prospective educators go through training to prepare for teaching low-income, minority or at-risk children, they learn how to empathize with their students' lives. They're taught to acknowledge environments lacking in resources, order or stability and "meet" the students at their level before expecting them to learn as easily as other children do.Yet for all the lip service that modern pedagogy pays to the precept that "all children can learn," rare are the educators who believe this enough to push such students toward their full academic potential.
Instead, educators come up with misguided policies to go easy on groups of underperforming students, perpetuating the worst kind of disrespect -- that of lowered expectations -- on whole categories of children who are assumed to be less capable.
Disrespected, underestimated and left behind is how you might imagine many Florida students and their parents felt about the new standards. The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a civil rights complaint against their state board of education's strategic plan, which sets less ambitious goals for black and Hispanic students than for white and Asian ones.
Approved last fall, the plan is designed to reduce below-grade-level performance by categorizing K-12 students into subgroups with adjusted goals for each. Where it goes astray is in expecting less of certain students based on their race.
The Florida Board of Education set the 2018 goal for reading at grade level at 90 percent for Asian students and 88 percent for white students, while expecting only 81 percent of Hispanic and 74 percent of black students to do so.
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The state of Minnesota saw a 2.3 percent drop in enrollment between 2006 and 2011, but still manged to increase the K-12 teacher workforce 3.1 percent.The largest disparity was in Minneapolis, where enrollment fell 9.4 percent during that five-year period, but the number of teachers grew 6.4 percent.
Enrollment decreased significantly in every one of the state's five largest school districts, but South Washington County, Rochester and Elk River - ranked 6th through 8th - all defied the trend.
Spending patterns among school districts were typical, with one notable exception. As with most states, the large urban districts spent much more per-pupil than other districts. In Minnesota, expenditures for both Minneapolis and St. Paul were more than $3,000 per-pupil higher than the state average.
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Twenty years ago, Dennis DiNoia taught middle school math in typical classrooms, in typical Florida public schools. Now his classroom is a local church, or bookstore, or online. Students come from public schools, private schools, and homeschooling co-ops. Lessons are based on a curriculum he designed and put on video.DiNoia even has a toehold in the growing market of charter school consulting, explaining math and test-taking skills to students and teachers at a conversion charter school in Hawaii.
School choice has opened up a whole new career track for DiNoia, allowing the business school graduate to earn enough money to remain in a profession he loves while giving him the satisfaction of helping students master his favorite subject.
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All schools funded by state taxpayers -- including private voucher schools -- would be held to new standards and Milwaukee's public schools would still face state intervention, under long-expected legislation offered Wednesday by two key GOP lawmakers.Work has been under way for two years on the measure, which would establish the first-ever rating for private voucher schools based on their student performance data. It comes a month and a half after lawmakers and Gov. Scott Walker expanded Wisconsin's voucher program for private schools statewide.
The measure would not change the status of Milwaukee Public Schools, which under the state's current accountability system is the only district in Wisconsin so far to face corrective action.
The new standards were proposed Wednesday by the chairmen of the Senate and Assembly education committees, Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon) and Rep. Steve Kestell (R-Elkhart Lake).
"We want parents to have the best information possible while at the same time making sure all of their choices are quality options," Kestell said in a statement.
The bill would cover all schools receiving tax dollars, from traditional public schools to public charter schools and voucher schools. Work on it began two years ago with a task force chaired by Walker and state schools Superintendent Tony Evers, an ally to Democrats, along with Olsen and Kestell.
But passage of the complex measure through the Republican-held Legislature is by no means guaranteed. Both Olsen and Kestell have sometimes taken more aggressive postures on overseeing vouchers than some other Republican colleagues, particularly those in the Assembly.
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The results released on Wednesday showed that even some of the country's most prestigious programs have room for improvement. For example, one in five recent graduates of teaching programs at Columbia University and New York University were given low marks for how much they were able to improve student test scores; by contrast, 1 in 10 teachers who graduated from City College of New York received poor marks.Related: National Council on Teacher Quality.
City officials cautioned against drawing sweeping conclusions from the data, saying the numbers were meant to provoke conversation, not rivalry. They noted that sample sizes were small; that test scores were available only in certain grades, in math and English; and that the data reflected only information from the past four years.But in New York City, where competitive streaks are widespread, education leaders could not resist a little jockeying.
David M. Steiner, dean of Hunter College School of Education, said the results would prompt schools like Columbia and N.Y.U. to rethink elements of their program.
"These are places that are very well known for their research and scholarship," Dr. Steiner, a former state education commissioner, said. "Is it possible that they need to pay more attention to their clinical preparation of teachers?"
Thomas James, provost of Teachers College at Columbia, said the reports prompted the school to examine how closely its curriculum aligned with city academic standards. He said the data also spurred interest in increasing the number of teachers who pursue certification in special education, where city data showed the school lagged behind its peers.
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"IQ is a metric of such dubiousness that almost no serious educational researcher uses it anymore," theGuardian's Ana Marie Cox wrote back in May. It was a breathtakingly ignorant statement. Psychologist Jelte Wicherts noted in response that a search for "IQ test" in Google's academic database yielded more than 10,000 hits -- just for the year 2013.But Cox's assertion is all too common. There is a large discrepancy between what educated laypeople believe about cognitive science and what experts actually know. Journalists are steeped in the lay wisdom, so they are repeatedly surprised when someone forthrightly discusses the real science of mental ability.
If that science happens to deal with group differences in average IQ, the journalists' surprise turns into shock and disdain. Experts who speak publicly about IQ differences end up portrayed as weird contrarians at best, and peddlers of racist pseudoscience at worst.
I'm speaking from experience. My Harvard Ph.D. dissertation contains some scientifically unremarkable statements about ethnic differences in average IQ, including the IQ difference between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites. For four years, the dissertation did what almost every other dissertation does -- collected dust in the university library. But when it was unearthed in the midst of the immigration debate, I experienced the vilification firsthand.
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A new Florida State University study has found that adolescent boys who are hurt in just two physical fights suffer a loss in IQ that is roughly equivalent to missing an entire year of school. Girls experience a similar loss of IQ after only a single fighting-related injury.
The findings are significant because decreases in IQ are associated with lower educational achievement and occupational performance, mental disorders, behavioral problems and even longevity, the researchers said."It's no surprise that being severely physically injured results in negative repercussions, but the extent to which such injuries affect intelligence was quite surprising," said Joseph A. Schwartz, a doctoral student who conducted the study with Professor Kevin Beaver in FSU's College of Criminology and Criminal Justice.
Their findings are outlined in the paper, "Serious Fighting-Related Injuries Produce a Significant Reduction in Intelligence," which was published in the Journal of Adolescent Health. The study is among the first to look at the long-term effects of fighting during adolescence, a critical period of neurological development.
About 4 percent of high school students are injured as a result of a physical fight each year, the researchers said.
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The two biggest statewide teachers unions -- California Teachers Association (CTA) and California Federation of Teachers (CFT) -- have problems with the waivers granted to eight school districts from the federal program, No Child Left Behind. The objections, however, are more about how they came about than what they mean."My guess is that there are probably some elements in there that we would embrace, but I think the process itself is flawed," said CFT President Joshua Pechthalt. "Somehow, the women and men who are actually in the classrooms doing the day-to-day teaching were left out of the process of improving our schools. It's just not going to work."
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A new measure of the effects of cranial impact in American football players can be used in conjunction with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and neurological testing to assess the cumulative effect on players before and after the American football season.Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina have developed the novel metric, known as Risk Weighted Cumulative Exposure (RWE), to allow them to capture the exposure of players to the risk of concussion over the course of a football season by measuring the frequency and magnitude of all impacts. The metric was developed by biomedical engineers Joel Stitzel, Jillian Urban and colleagues at Wake Forest Baptist and the Virginia Tech - Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences. Details have now been published in the online edition of the Annals of Biomedical Engineering.
The team collected data from high school football games and practices during the sport's season and looked at the effects in terms of linear and rotational acceleration separately on the overall risk of injury to layers. They also recorded the combined probability of injury associated with both types of movement and then developed the RWE to give them cumulative risk of injury.
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Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II plans to unveil a 12-point education plan on Tuesday that would push for charter schools, offer voucher-like scholarships for preschoolers and empower a majority of parents to close down, convert or overhaul their children's failing school, according to an outline of his K-12 education plan.The Republican gubernatorial candidate wants to double the number of female students who focus on science and technology, widen the use of virtual schooling and expand on the commonwealth's nearly two-year-old law that gives tax credits to donors who provide voucher-like scholarships for low-income students to attend private schools. Cuccinelli also would seek two amendments to Virginia's constitution, including one that would clear the way for government funds to flow to religious schools.
Cuccinelli, who is the GOP's gubernatorial nominee, is expected to unveil his education policies Tuesday in Richmond during a campaign stop at the Maggie L. Walker Governor's School for Government and International Studies. Several of his proposals are intended to address the achievement gap among some minority students and chronically underperforming schools in jurisdictions such as Petersburg and Norfolk.
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Peggy Wang has lived in China her entire life. A successful, English-speaking executive, she frequently travels abroad for work, but never imagined that her most recent itinerary would include dropping off her 15-year-old daughter at a prestigious boarding school outside Washington.While there is a long history of Chinese students pursuing advanced degrees abroad, especially in the United States, Ms. Wang's daughter, Susan Li, is part of a rapidly growing trend in which Chinese students are choosing to seek their education overseas as early as middle school or high school.
In the 2010-11 school year alone, nearly 24,000 high school-age Chinese were studying in the US, more than 15 percent of the total number of Chinese students in the US overall, up from virtually none five years ago. US middle schools hosted 6,725 Chinese middle schoolers in 2011, up from just 65 in 2006, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
This phenomenon, known as students "growing younger" in Chinese, is seen as resulting from two key interrelated factors: the rigidity of the Chinese education system, and a desire to avoid the gaokao, the country's rigorous college-entrance exam, for which six-day-a-week preparation begins in 9th grade.
Not surprisingly, officials at schools with a significant number of Chinese students say the students have heightened the sense of competition and achievement. But they also say the students have helped others see a more nuanced and human view of China. For many of the Chinese students themselves, it is most likely the beginning of lives lived abroad, given that the core of their education will have come in English - and without the gaokao.
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Jim Bender, executive director of School Choice Wisconsin, the pro-voucher lobby, says the choice program is a reflection of the private school market, which in Wisconsin is predominantly religious."If you look at the history of education in Wisconsin, that's a cornerstone of operating schools in the private market," he says, pointing out that many parochial schools are typically cheaper than non-religious private schools because they are subsidized by their affiliated churches. "In the past, not long ago, many religious schools were free."
Bender says he believes the development of a statewide voucher program will "change the economics" and allow for more secular private schools to flourish, since they can now receive taxpayer funds.
And yet, as I mentioned above, that hasn't been the case in Milwaukee.
Alan Borsuk, who helped found two Jewish schools in Milwaukee and covered the city's choice program as a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, says the money provided in the voucher program still isn't enough to convince many secular schools to participate.
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With nearly half of its students failing to graduate on time, Atlanta's school system turned to online education as one way to help.The Atlanta Virtual Academy program won't solve the problem of students dropping out or falling behind, but it could slowly inch Atlanta Public Schools' 51 percent graduate rate upward.
About 100 high school students enrolled in the pilot program this summer, with 43 percent of those who were retaking classes earning passing grades. The school district considers that a win -- those students are one step closer to graduation than they were before the online option.
This summer, rising junior Darius Brown spent a few hours every day at a computer retaking an algebra and geometry class he failed in the spring. Working remotely, he scored a B and stayed on track.
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There is no shortage of lists that attempt to rank the world's universities and research-focused institutions. However, it's well known that some places are much stronger in one area of science than others but it is not always possible to interrogate these rankings by discipline.Today, Lutz Bornmann at the Administrative Headquarters of the Max Planck Society in Germany and a few pals release new online ranking tool that does this and more. Their website site lists the top institutes by discipline and also displays them on a map of the world allowing different regions to be compared as well.
The site uses a straightforward measure of excellence. It assumes that a good indicator of an institution's worth is the rate at which it produces high quality scientific papers, in other words those papers that are most highly cited.
So the site counts the number of papers produced by an institution in a given discipline and then counts the number of these that are among the top 10 per cent of most highly cited. If more than ten per cent of the institution's papers are in this category it gets a positive rating, if less than 10 per cent, it gets a negative rating.
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When I was in Santa Fe a week or two ago, I had occasion to drop in on a seminar about Henry V at St. John's College. (St. John's maintains two campuses, the original one in Annapolis and the Land-of-Enchantment one in Santa Fe.) I've long been interested in St. John's. I first learned about it when I was in college myself. I went to a latitudinarian backwater where the only thing required of a student was a pulse and someone in the background with a checkbook. At St. John's, I heard, everything was required, near enough. There was room for outside study groups, but basically everyone in every class was reading, looking at, or listening to the same thing at the same time. It sounded simultaneously amazing and forbidding.After college, I didn't think much about St. John's until I met the woman I later married. She, canny lass that she was, gave Harvard a miss in favor of St. John's, and, according to her, it was far more amazing than forbidding. (What did it was a flyer from the college that she received: "Next year, the following teachers are returning to St. John's: Homer, Plato, Aristotle," etc.) Having served briefly on St. John's Board of Visitors, I am convinced she is right.
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Student Backchanneling is the digital hosting of background conversations by students during learning.
These sorts of conversations are held on sites like chatzy (which has mobile capability), and add an immediate layer of complexity and interactivity to any existing activity. This kind of flexibility makes it easy to try in any content area, and most grade levels.While the traditional response to "background chatter" is to mute it with "classroom management," if that "chatter" can be supported by recording, sharing, and curating, it has powerful potential beyond any that "quiet" might bring. Students can quietly clarify misconceptions during a lecture, video, or group activity-and this process of socializing thinking can have significant long-term effects on the climate of the classroom. They can also brainstorm possibilities, take "collaborative notes," and share insights.
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Prompted by last year's massacre in Newtown, Conn., Los Angeles Unified is instructing administrators and faculty in how to keep students safe if there's a gunman on campus.Steve Zipperman, a retired LAPD captain who is now chief of the district's police force, said principals participated this summer "live-shooter training" that will be shared with teachers in the new school year.
While he declined to share details that could jeopardize campus safety, he said school leaders are being guided on "how to decide in the moment how to save as many lives as possible."
We provided them with alternatives and choices that may be available to them should an active shooting occur, and a traditional lockdown may not be the most appropriate decision," Zipperman noted. "This may mean the rapid relocation of students, either on or off-campus."
The U.S. Department of Education recently released recommendations for developing school emergency plans that included a "live shooter" section. It suggests a protocol to run, hide and -- as a last resort -- fight.
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An all-too-familiar scene was enacted on the campus of Swarthmore College during a meeting on May 4 to discuss demands by student activists for the college to divest itself of its investments in companies that deal in fossil fuels. As a speaker was beginning a presentation to show how many millions of dollars such a disinvestment would cost the college, student activists invaded the meeting, seized the microphone, and shouted down a student who rose in the audience to object.Although there were professors and administrators in the room -- including the college president -- apparently nobody had the guts to put a stop to these storm-trooper tactics. Nor is it likely that there will be any punishment of those who put their own desires above the rights of others. On the contrary, these students went on to demand mandatory campus "teach-ins," and the administration caved on that demand. Among their other demands are that courses on ethnic studies, and on gender and sexuality, be made a requirement for graduation.
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During my graduate studies in the Department of Religion at Columbia, I spent countless hours in the Burke Library of Union Theological Seminary, where I had a spectacular, cater-corner view of the construction and unveiling of the Northwest Corner Building, Columbia's new interdisciplinary science building. Although the 14-story steel and aluminum tower was designed to complement the brick and limestone gothic tower of Union, its dominating presence on the corner of Broadway and 120th serves as a heavy-handed reminder of where we are heading. Walking from Union toward Columbia's main campus through its doors, I often felt, passing through the overwhelmingly aseptic marble lobby, as if the building was meant to cleanse northwesterly intruders who have not been intimidated by the facade.The ninth floor of this building houses a laboratory of Rafael Yuste, lead author of an ambitious brief that appeared in the prominent neuroscience journal Neuron in 2012. The paper proposed the need for the "Brain Activity Map Project, aimed at reconstructing the full record of neural activity across complete neural circuits." This April, the Obama administration endorsed the project, setting aside $100 million for it in 2014 alone, and renaming it the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative, or the Brain Initiative for short.
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M. Night Shyamalanhas spent most of his career as a filmmaker coming up with supernatural plotlines and creepy characters, but these days, he says, he's got a different sort of fantasy character in mind: Clark Kent, the nerdy, bookish counterpart to the glamorous, highflying Superman.Ah, content knowledge!Best known for producing films such as "The Sixth Sense" and "The Village," Mr. Shyamalan is about to come out with a book called "I Got Schooled" on the unlikely subject of education reform. He's the first to admit what a departure it is from his day job. "When you say 'ed reform' my eyes glaze over," Mr. Shyamalan says, laughing. "I was going to have some provocative title like 'Sex, Scandals and Drugs,' and then at the bottom say: 'No, really this is about ed reform."
.......
Until recently, he says, moviemaking was his real passion. "I'm not a do-gooder," he says. Still, after the commercial success of his early movies, he wanted to get involved in philanthropy. At first, he gave scholarships to inner-city children in Philadelphia, but he found the results disheartening. When he met the students he had supported over dinner, he could see that the system left them socially and academically unprepared for college. "They'd been taught they were powerless," he says.
He wanted to do more. He decided to approach education like he did his films: thematically. "I think in terms of plot structure," he says. He wondered if the problems in U.S. public schools could be traced to the country's racial divisions. Because so many underperforming students are minorities, he says, "there's an apathy. We don't think of it as 'us.' "
One reason that countries such as Finland and Singapore have such high international test scores, Mr. Shyamalan thinks, is that they are more racially homogenous. As he sees it, their citizens care more about overall school performance--unlike in the U.S., where uneven school quality affects some groups more than others. So Mr. Shyamalan took it upon himself to figure out where the education gap between races was coming from and what could be done about it.
An idea came to him over dinner with his wife and another couple who were both physicians. One of them, then the chief resident at a Pennsylvania hospital, said that the first thing he told his residents was to give their patients several pieces of advice that would drastically increase their health spans, from sleeping eight hours a day to living in a low-stress environment. The doctor emphasized that the key thing was doing all these things at the same time--not a la carte.
"That was the click," says Mr. Shyamalan. It struck him that the reason the educational research was so inconsistent was that few school districts were trying to use the best, most proven reform ideas at once. He ultimately concluded that five reforms, done together, stand a good chance of dramatically improving American education. The agenda described in his book is: Eliminate the worst teachers, pivot the principal's job from operations to improving teaching and school culture, give teachers and principals feedback, build smaller schools, and keep children in class for more hours.
Over the course of his research, Mr. Shyamalan found data debunking many long-held educational theories. For example, he found no evidence that teachers who had gone through masters programs improved students' performance; nor did he find any confirmation that class size really mattered. What he did discover is plenty of evidence that, in the absence of all-star teachers, schools were most effective when they put in place strict, repetitive classroom regimens.
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At a school district outside Chicago, students participated in a French class by using cellphones to call classmates and speak with them in French.
And when school starts this fall at Mason High School near Cincinnati, students like Mrudu Datla will pack iPads and iPhones in their backpacks."(Using technology in everyday life is) not that new to us because we grew up with technology," Datla, a sophomore, said.
Although schools have traditionally banned or limited cellphones in the classroom, 73% of Advanced Placement and National Writing Project teachers said their students use phones in the classroom or to complete assignments, according to a Pew Research Center study released in February.
"Teachers are starting to take advantage of the opportunities of cellphones in the classroom," said George Fornero, superintendent of Township High School District 113, located outside Chicago, whose school system has begun allowing its students use cellphones.
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Jeff Bryant, via a kind Laura Chern email:
Thanks for having me here today. I'm feeling a little out of context at a meeting for the Young Elected Officials. And it's not because I'm not an elected official.But I suppose there are some advantages and benefits to aging. Wisdom, however, is not one of them, as the demographics of Fox News bear out.
In aging you have experiences that you can reflect and act on over time and experiences that are unique to your generational cohort. For instance, how many of you have deep expertise in junk mail? That happens to be my work in trade as I've been in that business for over 20 years; although, the industry is nothing like what it once was and is rapidly going the way of the dinosaurs.
Also, how many of you were in school in the South during the early years of forced integration of the races? I was in second grade in Dallas, Texas and remember vividly the day they bused the poor kids across town to my school.
When they brought the poor kids into my class, there was a girl named Brenda who didn't have on any shoes. And there was a little boy named Jerald who still sucked his thumb and was basically dressed in rags.
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I came away from Ronn Johnson's classroom thinking he was the best teacher I ever met.Now, he sits in the Milwaukee County Jail.
It was 23 years ago that I met Johnson. He was 24 and teaching fifth grade at Lee Elementary School in Milwaukee with less than two years on the job.
The wiry and energetic teacher was himself the product of Milwaukee Public Schools and a graduate of Marquette University. His mother and his aunt were both teachers.
In an article I wrote in 1990, I said: "A visit to Johnson's classroom is the antidote to what seems like chronic bad news about academic achievement in city schools. His pupils -- all black and all from the economically depressed neighborhood near the school at 921 W. Meinecke Ave. -- appeared attentive and enthusiastic about learning. The school day ended at 2:40 p.m., but the pupils remained at their desks engaging in a stimulating give and take with their teacher until after 3."
The principal at Lee, George Hughes, called Johnson one of the most outstanding teachers he had ever supervised. Johnson was able to maintain strict discipline and to teach in a way that connected to the students' real lives. A sign on his classroom door said: "Have no misunderstanding. Learning takes place here."
"I teach the way I would like to be taught. I hate going through the workbook page by page," he told me.
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The National Assessment of Educational Progress exams in civics, U.S. history, and geography have been indefinitely postponed for fourth and twelfth graders. The Obama administration says this is due to a $6.8 million sequestration budget cut. The three exams will be replaced by a single, new test: Technology and Engineering Literacy."Without these tests, advocates for a richer civic education will not have any kind of test to use as leverage to get more civic education in the classrooms," said John Hale, associate director at the Center for Civic Education.
NAEP is a set of national tests of fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders that track achievement on various subjects over time. Researchers collect data for state to state comparisons in mathematics, reading, science, and writing. The other subjects only provide national statistics and are administered to fewer students. The tests provide basic information about students but do not automatically trigger consequences for teachers, students, and schools.
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What do you see when you see a good school? A few months ago, a teacher asked me that question. I gave a simple answer:Muscle and music.
It's a more complex and important question than you might think. Any parent wants a good school for her or his child, but few have a good handle on what that involves. Experts and advocates have heated debates about how to define school quality -- and whether it can be done at all.
Increasing emphasis is being put on judging schools, in the name of accountability and better quality. But getting constructive results from such work is, best as I can tell, not paying much reward nationwide.
Wisconsin, for example, overhauled its report cards for schools in 2012 to add lots more data and rate schools by whether they meet, beat or fail to fulfill "expectations." The resulting reports are a step forward in that they give a lot more information than used to be readily available. But the system is a work in progress. It will be several years before there is a decent reading on whether these report cards are helping in any way.
Some states have gone to giving schools grades, A through F, with consequences good or bad for the schools. That idea is, at best, under a cloud, following a news report a few days ago that the then-education chief of Indiana, Tony Bennett, had the grading system there changed in 2012 so that a specific charter school, led by a major Republican donor, would get an "A" instead of a "C." In short order, Bennett resigned from his new job as education chief of Florida, even as he said he did nothing wrong.
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Davion Thomas didn't like to read. It was challenging, not interactive and not his idea of fun.Then things changed when the 13-year-old Whitehorse Middle School student began reading books that taught him things he could relate to in his seventh-grade literacy class, and he joined a summer program that allowed him to make short films on an iPad about the books he's read.
"At first I didn't like reading, but now I enjoy it," said Davion, who will be in eighth grade when school starts Sept. 3. "I think what really made me enjoy reading more was the fact that I was getting a
reward for doing it, but also keeping my brain working during the summer."
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By Morris Andrews former Executive Secretary Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) 1972-1992
Lost in the two-month maelstrom at the state Capitol is the role of teachers and their union, WEAC, as the chief advocates for school quality in Wisconsin. Scott Walker and the Fitzgeraids paint WEAC as a destroyer. They say eradicate WEAC, an organization they know almost nothing about except that it opposes their antisteacher agenda. Should they succeed in killing the voice of organized teachers, the real loser wilt be our public schools.
Teachers have fought hard to make schools better over the past four decades. And it was Republican and Democratic votes in support of WEAC issues that resulted in the passage of pro-education bills. Such bipartisanship is but one casualty of today's polarized politics.
Beginning in the 1970s WEAC became a political force, mainly by deciding to start backing legislative candidates. To receive WE/C's endorsement, a candidate had to support a list of education-related issues. Many Republicans did support these school improvement issues. And WEAC members consequently worked to help them win election or reelection. One Republican who received a WEAC endorsement was Tommy Thompson when he was in the Assembly.
Today it seems unbelievable that the 1977 collective bargaining bill now reviled by the governor passed with Republican support. At the time, there were 11 Republicans in the Senate; five of them supported the bill. When the law's three-year trial period was about to expire, a group of Senate Republicans voted to extend it--despite a veto by Republican Governor Lee Dreyfus. Notably, Mike Ellis (then in the Assembly) was among a group of Republicans who jumped party lines on procedural votes that saved it.
Our members then also reflected views across the spectrum. They identified themselves this way: Independents, 37%; Democrats, 35%; and Republicans, 27%. This spectrum was reflected at the annual WEAC convention, held a few days before the 1976 presidential election, when Gerald Ford and Walter Mondale both spoke to the huge assembly. Today, these numbers have changed as the Republicans shift further and further to the extremes.
Did WEAC work to improve teacher pay and benefits? Yes, of course. But we were also committed to changing the wide variation in school quality from district to district.
At the top of WEAC's school improvement list was getting a set of minimum educational standards that applied to every school district. In 1974, with Republican support, we succeeded. Today these standards are taken for granted. Among the many changes were requirements that every district must:
establish a remedial reading program for underachieving Ke3 student
offer music art, health, and physical education.
have a kindergarten for five-year olds.
ensure that school facilities are safe. (Many aging buildings were crumbling)
provide emergency nursing services.
require teachers in Wisconsin to go through continuing education and to have their licenses renewed once every five years. (Prior to enactment of minimum standards. districts were empbying unlicensed teachers for whom they secured an emergency license that they would hold year after year).
On this foundation of programs Wisconsin students rose to the top of the national ACT scores for decades.
The state Department of Public instruction (DPI), headed by State Superintendent Barbara Thompson, was charged with implementing the minimum standards. She accepted most of WEAC's recommendations. WEAC backed Thompson, a Republican with strong GOP support for her reelection in 1977.
We sought common ground with Republicans. When Democratic Governer Pat Lucey proposed strict cost controls on school budgets in 1975, it was Republicans and Democrats in the Senate 110 coalesced with WEAC and school boards against Democrats on the Joint Finance Committee to ease the restrictions. Years later, when Republican Governor lee Dreyfus vetoed a measure to raise the cost control ceiling, the WEAC-supported override succeeded with the votes of 23 Assembly Republicans and eight Senate Republicans against the Republican governor.
As late as 1984, Wisconsin had no uniform high school graduation requirements. WEAC supported Gov. Tony Earl's efforts requiring graduates to have a specified number of credits in English, maths science, social studies, physical education, health, and computer science.
To curb underage drinking, WEAC Joined with a coalition of organizations on a bill that gave teachers and administrators legal protection to remove students suspected of drinking from school premises and events. All Assembly Democrats and all but three Republicans voted for the bill. In the Senate all Republicans voted for it and all but two Democrats voted for it.
WEAC allied with Republicans and Democrats to repeal a longestanding provision that gave city councils in 41 of our largest cities veto power over their school boards' budgets.
The fate of students with special needs also concerned WEAC in 1973, four years before Congress passed the federal special education law, WEAC successfully lobbied the Wisconsin Legislature for a state special education law that required every district to have a special education program. The chief sponsor was James Devitt, a Republican state senator.
In 1976, the Legislature approved WEAC-backed bills to require tests of newborns for signs of mental retardation, and require children under age five to undergo a test for visual impairment. During this time WEAC successfully supported a bill that required teachers to report suspected child abuse, which has helped protect children across the state from life-altering harm.
In the 1970s, sex discrimination in school athletics was a major issue. In most school districts many sports were for boys only. This changed after WEAC joined with women's groups to ensure that girls who wanted to play in sports have the same opportunity as boys. There were less than half as many WIAA-sponsored statewide tournaments for girls as there were for boys 14 for boys, six for girls. WEAC filed sex discrimination lawsuits against both the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletics Association (WIAA) and the DPI that helped correct this inequality. WEAC also convinced the Legislature to budget the additional state funding needed to add programs for girls.
Working with the Great Lakes lnter-Tribal Council, which represents Native Americans on ten reservations, WEAC successfully lobbied for a bill that provided state aid to districts that employed home/school coordinators for Native American students. And for passage of a law allowing Native Americans without certification to teach native culture and endangered native languages.
Citizens who wanted to add new or replace old school buildings asked WEAC to help them pass local bond referendums. Monroe was one district where WEAC's help resulted in passage of a school bond for a much needed elementary school. The measure had failed in four previous elections. With WEAC help it won by a huge margin on the fifth attempt.
Property taxes are a major source of school funding. VVEAC recognized that tax increases place a burden on low income homeowners, especially retirees on fixed incomes. To help these people, we backed an expanded homestead tax-relief program. Another action in support of low income citizens was creation of the Citizens Utility Board (CUB). CUB fights for affordable electricity and telephone service on behalf of Wisconsin customers before regulatory agencies, the Legislature, and the courts. Two organizations that fought hardest for CUB were WEAC and the United Auto Workers. All Wisconsin utilities opposed it.
The key to these achievements in the 1970s and '80s was the cooperative spirit between WEAC and politicians of both parties. People from different sides of the aisle respected and listened to one another. We socialized outside of the Capitol. We grew to like each other, even if we disagreed on political issues.
Today there is no middle ground. Compromise is deemed "caving in." Winning is not enough for the extremists. The "enemy must be completely destroyed. But if teacher unions are silenced, who will replace them as effective advocates for students?
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I appreciate Mr. Andrews sharing this piece. I recently talked with him about the history of WEAC and where he sees the K-12 world going. I plan to post the interview this week.
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Once upon a time, we invested in our young people so that they could enter the world without debt. Now, we turn them into deadbeat debtors before they're old enough to legally buy a drink, left far behind their financial betters.The truth this week came courtesy of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Wall Street Journal, whose data parsing revealed that about one in five college graduateswho borrowed for tuition via the federal direct loans program are not paying the money back.
In other words, a lot of people who recently attended college are in deep financial trouble. This should come as no surprise.
The United States is suffering from a massive jobs shortfall. For years, we've parroted the line that more education will somehow buttress the economy, as if we expect the good jobs fairy to shower magic, well-paying employment sparkle over the land when she sees how many of our young people attended college.
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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has done a breakdown of the repayment status of the one trillion dollars of outstanding federal student loan debt (this figure doesn't include private student loans), held collectively by nearly 51 million Americans.
Here are the numbers:Total federal student loan debt: $999.7 billion
In repayment: $493.7 billion
In school: $146 billion
In grace period (these are people who graduated recently): $47 billion
In deferment: $122.1 billion
In forbearance: $91.1 billion
In default: $89.3 billion
Other: $9.5 billion
So only 49% of federal student loans are currently getting paid back. Another 19% aren't being paid back because the people who owe the money are either currently in school or graduated recently. That leaves nearly one-third of federal student loans either in deferment, forbearance, or default. (A commenter notes that some and perhaps most of the loans in deferment are held by people who are doubling down on more degrees).
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Students who enroll in a new competency-based program at Northern Arizona University will earn a second transcript, which will describe their proficiency in the online bachelor degree's required concepts. The university will also teach students how to share their "competency report" transcripts with potential employers.The university shared a sample version of a competency report. The document looks nothing like its traditional counterpart, and lacks courses or grades.
Northern Arizona's first crack at a transcript grounded in competencies gives an early glimpse of how credentialing in higher education might be shifting, experts said. And while the competency reports could be improved, some said, the university also deserves credit (no pun intended) for attempting to better-define what students do to earn their degrees.
"Our employer studies show that employers basically find the transcript useless in evaluating job candidates," Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, said in an e-mail message. "Higher education definitely needs to start fresh with a redesign of its public descriptions of student accomplishment."
Clifford Adelman agrees. Adelman is a senior associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy and an expert on credentialing. He suggested several possible upgrades to a sample competency-based transcript from Northern Arizona, particularly the use of more specific language and fewer "generalized verbs." But Adelman also said the university was headed in the right direction.
"God bless them for actually trying," he said. "These are more effective statements than listing courses."
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Today, The Guardian provides a look at 10 academic libraries. A representatives from each institution is interviewed with the discussions focusing on the, "challenges they face, plans for the future, and their role in higher education."
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Sheena Dooley, via a kind reader's email:
The former leader of the Des Moines School Board misled the public multiple times about former Superintendent Nancy Sebring's departure and the circumstances surrounding it, according to court documents and district emails obtained by Iowa Watchdog.These include board member Teree Caldwell-Johnson's account of Sebring's resignation and the reason for her departure. The documents also reveal details of an inappropriate closed door session that conflict with Sebring's account of what happened, as well as emails between Caldwell-Johnson and Sebring leading up to her resignation.
CALDWELL-JOHNSON: Documents show conflicting accounts of what she said about Sebring resignation.
Caldwell-Johnson's statements were largely made in a news release that was leaked to at least one media outlet prior to sexually explicit emails between Sebring and her alleged lover, both of whom were married at the time, became public. Those emails were released nearly a month after Sebring's resignation and Caldwell-Johnson's public statement that Sebring was leaving her job early to help plan her daughter's wedding and get ready for a new job leading the Omaha School District, which wasn't the case.
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When prospective educators go through training to prepare for teaching low-income, minority or at-risk children, they learn how to empathize with their students' lives. They're taught to acknowledge environments lacking in resources, order or stability and "meet" the students at their level before expecting them to learn as easily as other children do.Yet for all the lip service that modern pedagogy pays to the precept that "all children can learn," rare are the educators who believe this enough to push such students toward their full academic potential.
Instead, educators come up with misguided policies to go easy on groups of underperforming students, perpetuating the worst kind of disrespect -- that of lowered expectations -- on whole categories of children who are assumed to be less capable.
Disrespected, underestimated and left behind is how you might imagine many Florida students and their parents felt about the new standards. The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a civil rights complaint against their state board of education's strategic plan, which sets less ambitious goals for black and Hispanic students than for white and Asian ones.
Approved last fall, the plan is designed to reduce below-grade-level performance by categorizing K-12 students into subgroups with adjusted goals for each. Where it goes astray is in expecting less of certain students based on their race.
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Related: Obtaining credit for non Madison School District Courses has been an ongoing challenge. Perhaps this issue has faded away as past practices die? Madison's non-diverse or homogeneous governance model inflicts numerous costs, from one size fits all curricula to growth in the 'burbs accompanied by ever increasing property taxes on top of stagnant or declining income.
It's now even easier and cheaper for local high school students to get a college education.At a joint meeting between City Council, The Roanoke City School Board and Virginia Western the community college talked about it's newest program.
Back in March, Virginia Western announced it's waiving tuition for students taking dual enrollment classes.
Those are classes students can take in high school and earn college credit, but many students weren't.
They can now.
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The education debate in the United States has taken on a particularly nasty tone, and it's turning into a needless war. Sides are digging in, accusations are being launched and, sadly, children's lives are being negatively affected because we are too blind to see that this is all built on false choices.The latest skirmish came in May, when author Diane Ravitch wrote on her blog that the executive director of Parent Revolution, Ben Austin, was "loathsome" for helping parents petition to remove their school's principal and that there was a "special place in hell" for Parent Revolution contributors. (Ravitch has since made an apology of sorts for the personal attacks.) The fire and brimstone does not come purely from one camp; prominent education reform supporter Whitney Tilson called Ravitch's remarks "thuggery" in an e-mail newsletter.
As a former teacher, what saddens me is that the sides draw battle lines where there need not be any. There is a sense that we are continually facing two doors: Address poverty factors or address school factors. Support standards or support teachers. Care about academic outcomes or care about the whole child. The ad nauseam this-or-that creates a house of mirrors that leaves us all turned around.
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In the next legislative session, state Sen. Aaron Osmond will introduce a bill to eliminate compulsory education. This law has potential to make sweeping, beneficial changes in our public education system.Repealing the compulsory education law will allow this forgotten law to take effect: "The primary responsibility for the education of children within the state resides with their parents or guardians and that the role of state and local governments is to support and assist parents in fulfilling that responsibility." (Utah Code, 53A-6-102-1b)
Did you catch the two main parts of this law? Parents are responsible to educate their own children. State and local governments are responsible to support and assist parents. Parents, teachers and students will all benefit from reviving this forgotten law.
Parents:
Removing compulsory education will put parents back in charge and make the Legislature, state board and local school districts responsible to support and assist them. Parents will be authorized to ask for the help they need.With Utah parents, there is a wide range of abilities to educate children. It ranges all the way from some who can do it completely at home, all the way to some who hold down two jobs or, for other reasons, spend little time with their children. Others, who may have time, would rather have professional teachers help them with it.
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The bigger challenge to business schools comes from fully online degrees.Georgia Tech in Atlanta has taken its $40,000 masters of computer science degree online and cut the price by 84 per cent, hoping to increase demand from 300 students to 10,000.
Surely putting degrees online, with high fixed costs but near zero marginal costs, endangers the price premium attached to face-to-face education?
The UCLA Anderson School of Management at does not think so. It is currently running traditional and online versions of its highly ranked Femba (fully employed MBA) side-by-side for working professionals, with the same admission standards, faculty and course content, and charging the same price for both.
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With so much attention focused on the market in recent years, now is just the time to show young people what investing is all about.So we asked The Experts this question: How do you recommend teaching teenagers (or younger) about investing?
This discussion relates to a recent Journal Report article on how financial advisers taught their own kids about investing and formed the basis of a discussion on The Experts blog on Aug. 1.
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The New York State Education Department clearly tried to play it safe in designing questions for the Grades 3 to 8 exams, with a lot of calculation and solve-the-equation problems, which would have been the same pre- or post-Common Core. Where NYSED gets into trouble is when it tries to be creative, particularly in word problems.So without further ado, here's a look at some of the released questions from the 2013 New York State Testing Program's Common Core Mathematics Test.
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It seems that women these days are too clever for their own good, at least when it comes to making babies. Research emerging from the London School of Economics examining the links between intelligence and maternal urges in women claims that more of the former means less of the latter. In an ideal world, such findings might be interpreted as smart women making smart choices, but instead it seems that this research is just adding fuel to the argument that women who don't have children, regardless of the reason, are not just selfish losers but dumb ones as well.Satoshi Kanazawa, the LSE psychologist behind the research, discussed the findings that maternal urges drop by 25% with every extra 15 IQ points in his book The Intelligence Paradox. In the opening paragraph of the chapter titled "Why intelligent people are the ultimate losers in life", he makes his feelings about voluntary childlessness very clear:
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A typical children's party, above, can often be unruly, which is why entrepreneurs now offer tutoring on how to behaveBribing toddlers can be counter-productive, according to Vanessa. Instead, the 28-year-old coaches her young charges how to play together - for $450 an hour. After all, play dates are no trivial matter. They can decide a child's future.
Vanessa, who declines to give her last name, is one of a new breed of play date experts that help children prepare for admission to New York's elite kindergartens. As part of the admission process to these schools that charge up to $40,000 a year, four-year-olds must attend a playgroup where they are tested by teachers for academic ability and their social and emotional IQ.
Play date experts set up situations to see how children respond and then make suggestions for improvement. For example, if everyone has to write down his or her name but there are not enough pencils, they must wait their turn.
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Javier Hernandez & Robert Gebelhoff:
The number of New York students passing state reading and math exams dropped drastically this year, education officials reported on Wednesday, unsettling parents, principals and teachers and posing new challenges to a national effort to toughen academic standards.In New York City, 26 percent of students in third through eighth grade passed the tests in English, and 30 percent passed in math, according to the New York State Education Department.
The exams were some of the first in the nation to be aligned with a more rigorous set of standards known as the Common Core, which emphasize deep analysis and creative problem-solving over short answers and memorization. Last year, under an easier test, 47 percent of city students passed in English, and 60 percent in math.
City and state officials spent months trying to steel the public for the grim figures.
But when the results were released, many educators responded with shock that their students measured up so poorly against the new yardsticks of achievement.
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Should federally mandated school accountability and testing requirements be abandoned? With Congress actively considering a major revision of No Child Left Behind, that question has moved to the top of the national education agenda. The Obama administration, teachers unions and some Republicans are joining forces to gut core provisions of the education law that was one of the Bush administration's crowning achievements.No Child Left Behind, which began in 2002, focused on the low performance of African-American and Hispanic students. It required that all students, no matter their race or ethnicity, reach proficiency by 2014. Since minority students had the longest road to travel, schools placed special emphasis on their instruction, and measured the quality of their instruction by ascertaining their performance on standardized tests.
Each school was required to report annual test-score results for every student in grades three through eight. (High-school students took only one test in four years.) Although all schools were tested, No Child requirements bore most heavily upon schools that received federal compensatory education dollars, which typically had substantial percentages of minority students.
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Rick Esenberg, via a kind reader's email:
Whether or not he is right, we are left with, again, with the very philosophical divide that I identified. Mr. Hughes thinks that centralized and collective decision-making will more properly value diversity (as he defines it) and make better educational choices for children than their parents will."We know best" has long been associated with parts of Madison's K-12 community, despite long term, disastrous reading scores and spending twice the national average per student.Of course to describe a philosophical divide does not tell us who has the better of the argument. Mr. Hughes defends his position by relying on a 2007 "study" by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute which, strictly speaking, was not a study at all and had more to do with the impact of choice on public schools than its value to the families who participate in the program.
The 2007 WPRI publication collected no data on what was actually happening in Milwaukee. It simply took a national data base on the educational involvement of families and extrapolated it to Milwaukee based on the socioeconomic characteristics of Milwaukee families. It was, strictly speaking, nothing more than a calculation. If low income and minority families in Milwaukee behave like low income and minority families nationally, the calculation showed, then, based on certain assumptions, very few would engage in informed decision-making regarding their children's education.
It was an interesting and thought provoking exercise but one with an obvious limitation. It is not at all clear that national findings would extend to a city with a relatively longstanding and actively promoted choice program. It is possible that the existence of a greater array of educational choices would change the incentives and capacity of parents to engage in the informed and engaged decision-making that would otherwise not happen.
Beyond that, the fact that only a subset of families will exercise a choice tells us precisely nothing about whether they ought to have the opportunity to make one - unless you entertain a presumption against individual choice and a diversity of alternatives in education.
Mr. Hughes argues that education is an "experience good" which is a fancy way of saying that it is something that consumers have a difficult time evaluating before deciding whether to buy it. But, again, the extent to which you think something is that type of good (many things are difficult to be sure about before you try them) and whether, having decided it is, you think that people should have someone else choose for them reflects very philosophical divide I'm concerned with.
It would certainly be useful to spend a bit of time learning about Milwaukee's experiences, positive and negative with a far more open k-12 climate. The results of Madison's insular, non-diverse approach are an embarrassment to students, citizens, taxpayers and employers. 
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The Vice Chancellor of Calicut University promptly ordered a probe by a senior dean who, after visiting the internet ( as is the academic practice these days) discovered to his horror that al-Rubaish did have terrorist affiliations. He recommended its removal saying that 'students would not lose much if they do not read this poem'. One of textbook's editors explained that, at the time of selection of the poem, there was not much material available online about the poet. He said that they would not have selected this poem if the poet's background was known to them.It is an irony of our times that the editors are being shamed for an intellectual act, which was in fact , a creative way to expose the young undergraduates to the emotional impact of the international 'war on terror' across continents . Who would dispute that war on terror is a contemporary issue? How does literature react to it? Why and how do the detainees of Guantanamo Bay, the international jail set up by the USA to isolate its prey from life itself, choose poetry as a site to convey their pain and trauma? Most of them were non-poets. Can something they inscribed on the coffee cups or floors of the prison cell, in their desperation to speak, be accorded the exalted status of poetry?
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Every day, students find it easier to take courses anywhere and anytime and accumulate them into a degree at a growing number of fully accredited institutions. StraighterLine, which Fast Company calls "An eBay For Professors To Sell College Courses Directly To Students", offers general education courses at $999/year for 10 courses. According to the Education Advisory Board, over 250 institutions across America, from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, have accepted at least some of these credits. Without their captive audience, how will most schools survive? One answer, I call "the college drop-in." In the long run, the drop-in phenomenon should drive a very desirable revolution for educational institutions, for individuals, and for business.Harvard Business School already outsources one of its entry-level courses to Brigham Young University because the online offering is "so good," freeing HBS resources--including faculty--for more specialized work. HBS students become BYU drop-ins, and both institutions--and their students--win. Similarly, under-enrolled courses in any specialized subject, for example rarely taught languages or advanced seminars in string theory--can meet their enrollment targets by inviting properly qualified drop-ins from vetted institutions.
Institutions and individuals waste resources--classroom seats--when a course is dropped or unsuccessfully completed. Instead of remaining in residence, a student can retake a single course--or even a single course module--online while working elsewhere in the summer, or in any other semester, dropping in to back and fill or, for underprepared students, dropping in for review or prerequisites so that when they do occupy those seats, they will succeed. Learning success and lowered total costs obviously serve the drop-in student.
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If you want your child to have an early start on becoming the next Zuckerberg or Gates, it's pretty clear that (for now, at least) you have to take matters into your own hands. According to estimates, less than 2 percent of students study computer programming, and it's not even offered at 90 percent of U.S. schools.To help boost those numbers, Mountain View, Calif.-based Tynker introduced its kid-focused learn-to-code program to schools earlier this year. On Tuesday, the company announced a new version of its software that kids can use at home.
Launched publicly in April, Tynker is a programming language inspired by Scratch, a visual programming language developed at MIT, as well as SNAP!, another programming language based on Scratch and created at Berkeley. Instead of making kids learn programming by stringing together words and numbers, it gives them a colorful, drag-and-drop platform to learn the concepts behind coding.
Through kid-friendly animations and creative projects, the browser-based program walks them through the basics and ultimately transitions them out of the visual programming language into traditional Javascript.
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Sizer has long preferred smaller schools and less standardized testing, which would seem to put him at odds with current moves toward more testing, teacher assessment, charter schools and pressure for results. But in the new book, he welcomes charters as one part of expanding choices he thinks are good for families and for reform.He is gently dismissive of those who decry policies they don't like and insist their changes will solve our problems. Sizer writes that all pundits ought to realize that school reform "WILL be messy, but constructive messiness is the cost of freedom. Growing up is often a painful, if energizing, process, and growing up today may take subtly different but important forms than those with which we are accustomed. . . . The leaders of every New American High School must understand and honor this."
One suggestion relevant to our local schools comes from his experience at the Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School in Devens, Mass. The school, which Sizer and his wife, Nancy Faust Sizer, helped found, uses oral exams, and he makes a persuasive case for using orals throughout high school.
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Let's say the history teacher, a descendant of the 1960s, is talking (of course) about the Vietnam War, and how Walter Cronkite won the Tet Offensive, even though the North lost it, and the student is perhaps paying some attention, but when the teacher shifts to an explanation of the hardships of war in the hot weather and the humidity, the student, effortlessly, may begin to remember what his grandfather told him about the cold at the Chosin Reservoir in 1950, and how easy it was to get frostbitten or even to freeze to death.
The teacher, quite understandably, so often has no idea that the student is no longer listening to, or learning from him, no matter how "great" the teacher is.
Those who say that teacher quality is the most important variable in student academic achievement seem to have forgotten the student's role in student academic achievement. They have failed to think about, and they have not come to realize, the fact that the student is the sole proprietor of his/her own attention, and that her/his attention is the sine qua non for student academic achievement.
Again, the history teacher might be talking about the rise of organized labor in American life, and the student's mind could easily slip away to the stories her aunt has told her about the difficult labor she had to go through with her first daughter.
Attention wanders, and in class wandering attention means the end of learning on the current topic for the time being, at least for that student, and for the "education" planned for that class period for any and all distracted students.
What can be done about this wayward-attention phenomenon? We might start by realizing that students own their attention and that we must negotiate with them successfully if we are to convince them to bring that attention to our offerings and to their duties as students. (Doesn't that sound quaint?--Students have duties?)
With this in mind, we might spend more time explaining why what we are teaching in a given period on any given day is worth the attention we need from students. We can order them to pay attention (that doesn't work), but we might be able to sell them on the chance that if they give their attention to what we are offering, it might prove to be worth their while.
We won't sell the opportunity to every one, but some students might be grateful for the respect we pay to their ownership of their own minds and their own attention, and more of them might be willing to give us the benefit of the doubt and give our
presentations and plans their attention on a trial basis. (And some students will surely be influenced by the attention they see their peers giving to the work at hand...)
Then, if what we are teaching is as important and as interesting to us as we hope it will be to them, there is a chance (well-tested in experience) that they may indeed find it of interest to them as well, and they will be, in that subject perhaps, on their way to becoming educated, and more than that even, they might be on their way to deciding to teach themselves more about the subject as well. Thus are scholars born.
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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Every year states hand out more than $11 billion in financial aid to college students with no certainty as to whether they'll ever graduate.Many states don't track the money. They simply hand it over and hope for the best, as one educational consultant put it.
It's a "one-sided partnership," according to Stan Jones, the president of the advocacy organization Complete College America. "The states provide the funds, but the expectations states have of students are really pretty low."
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From Horace Mann to President Obama, and legions of politicians and educators in between, education has been heralded as the great equalizer, an institution that can balance (if not undo) racial, ethnic or other inequities that separate segments of society.If higher education in the United States ever fulfilled that role, it is doing so less and less, not more, as time passes.
That is the stark and in many ways distressing conclusion of a report released today by researchers at Georgetown University: "Separate and Unequal: How Higher Education Reinforces the Intergenerational Reproduction of White Racial Privileged"
The report's assertion that African-American and Latino youth -- especially those from low-income backgrounds -- are underrepresented at the nation's 468 most selective four-year colleges and overrepresented at the 3,250 open-access two- and four-year institutions will probably surprise few; that's a circumstance of long standing.
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Testing firms are offering new ways to measure what students learn in college. Their next generation of assessments is billed as an add-on - rather than a replacement - to the college degree. But the tests also give graduates something besides a transcript to send to a potential employerAs a result, skills assessments are related to potential higher education "disruptions" like competency-based education or even digital badging. They offer portable ways for students to show what they know and what they can do. And in this case, they're verified by testing giants.
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August brings high anxiety for many parents awaiting big news for fall: Who will be their child's teacher? Will it be someone creative and inspiring? Or will they get stuck with a burnout, a bore or a scary drill-sergeant type?Now, that angst is being further intensified by a combination of factors, including a less experienced teacher pool, faster gossip grapevines and schools' increased strategies to limit parents' involvement in the teacher-placement process.
In fact, school officials are sending a strong message to parents: Don't ask. A growing number of principals hold parents at bay by sending questionnaires in the spring that ask for general information about a child, but prohibit requesting a specific teacher. More principals are skipping parent input altogether, setting firm policies that teacher assignments are up to the school.
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The high-profile episode underlines some of the pitfalls of grading schools."It should give us pause," said Anne Hyslop, an education analyst at the New America Foundation, a left-leaning think tank. "Any accountability system should be examined, analyzed and updated as needed. You may see some states changing their A-F systems or looking for other models, but it's a little bit too early to tell."
Maine, which unveiled school report cards for the first time in the spring, changed the grades for three of 600 schools after errors were caught in the calculations and made those changes public, said Samantha Warren, a spokeswoman for the state education department.
"If there are legitimate things that got screwed up within the accountability system, you want to make sure everyone understands what you did and why," said Kathy Christie of the Education Commission of the States. "You do not want to do that in a backroom."
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Obesity rates among preschoolers are falling in many states for the first time in decades, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.Small but significant declines in obesity among low-income preschoolers were found in 18 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands from 2008 to 2011, CDC director Thomas Frieden said at a press telebriefing. "This is the first report to show many states with declining rates of obesity in our youngest children after literally decades of rising rates."
The numbers are published in the CDC's latest Vital Signs report. It includes obesity rates from 40 states, the District of Columbia and two U.S. territories. The CDC excluded 10 states because some had changed how they collected data.
Florida, Georgia, Missouri, New Jersey, South Dakota and the U.S. Virgin Islands had the largest absolute decreases in prevalence of obesity, with a drop of at least 1 percentage point, the report says. Obesity rates held steady in 20 states and Puerto Rico. They rose in Colorado, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.
Researchers analyzed weight and height data of about 11.6 million children ages 2 to 4 in federally funded maternal- and child-nutrition programs. The data came from the Pediatric Nutrition Surveillance System.
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In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class. In the interest of confidentiality, her Convocation Speech name will be "ELLEN." ELLEN was small, shy. She wore these blue cat's-eye glasses that, at the time, only old ladies wore. When nervous, which was pretty much always, she had a habit of taking a strand of hair into her mouth and chewing on it.So she came to our school and our neighborhood, and was mostly ignored, occasionally teased ("Your hair taste good?" - that sort of thing). I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she'd look after such an insult: eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying, as much as possible, to disappear. After awhile she'd drift away, hair-strand still in her mouth. At home, I imagined, after school, her mother would say, you know: "How was your day, sweetie?" and she'd say, "Oh, fine." And her mother would say, "Making any friends?" and she'd go, "Sure, lots."
Sometimes I'd see her hanging around alone in her front yard, as if afraid to leave it.
And then - they moved. That was it. No tragedy, no big final hazing.
One day she was there, next day she wasn't.
End of story.
Now, why do I regret that? Why, forty-two years later, am I still thinking about it? Relative to most of the other kids, I was actually pretty nice to her. I never said an unkind word to her. In fact, I sometimes even (mildly) defended her.
But still. It bothers me.
So here's something I know to be true, although it's a little corny, and I don't quite know what to do with it:
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded...sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.
Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth?
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MMSD School Board President Ed Hughes said that public education these days is under a lot of pointed criticism if not under an outright attack. "Initiatives like the voucher expansion program are premised on the notion that urban traditional public schools are not up to the task of effectively educating a diverse body of students," Hughes says. "We're out to prove that they are wrong. We agree with Superintendent Cheatham that in Madison all of the pieces are in place for us to be successful. Following the framework that she will describe to you, we set the goal for ourselves to be the model of a thriving urban school district that is built on strong community partnerships as well as genuine collaboration of teachers and staff. As we do that, we will be the school district of choice in Dane County."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".Cheatham said that Madison has a lot of great things going for it, but also had its share of challenges.
"A continually changing set of priorities has made it difficult for our educators to remain focused on the day-to-day work of teaching and learning, a culture of autonomy that has made it difficult to guaranteed access to a challenging curriculum for all students," Cheatham said. "The system is hard for many of our students to navigate which results in too many of our students falling through the cracks."
It starts with a simple but bold vision that every school is a thriving school that prepares every student for college, career, and community. "From now on, we will be incredibly focused on making that day-to-day vision become a reality," she said.
"Many districts create plans at central office and implement them from the top down. Instead, schools will become the driving force of change in Madison," Cheatham said. "Rather than present our educators with an ever-changing array of strategies, we will focus on what we know works -- high quality teaching, coherent instruction, and strong leadership -- and implement these strategies extremely well."
Madison's long term, disastrous reading results.
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I'm often asked how CRPE's portfolio model differs from the vision put forth in my friend Andy Smarick's book, The Urban School System of the Future. My first response is, "Not all that much." Andy's proposed solution to urban school system dysfunction is one that is nearly identical to the thesis in my colleague Paul Hill's book Reinventing Public Education and CRPE's founding ideal nearly 20 years ago:Andy believes, though, that in the urban school system of the future, state charter authorizers, rather than publicly elected school boards, should oversee all city schools--which is the case now throughout most of New Orleans. If he had his druthers, no school district would have the right to charter.
- All public schools should operate like charter schools, with autonomy over their educational programs, funding, and staffing.
- They should be held accountable primarily for results, not inputs, via a performance contract.
- Families should have access to a broad range of high-quality public school options rather than being assigned to one school.
While I'm a great fan of the transformation of the New Orleans school system, the idea that an all-charter system is the right solution for every big city strikes me as shortsighted. First off, in many cities, charter school authorizers don't have a good track record. In Cleveland, for instance, the charter sector is at best mediocre, whereas the Cleveland school district, under the leadership of Superintendent Eric Gordon, has a strong plan for transitioning to a portfolio of high-performing autonomous schools, some charter, some district-run. In other cities, like Indianapolis and San Antonio, the charter sector offers a more plausible solution than the district, under the leadership of the city and with help from community-based incubators. In other cities, neither the district not the current charter authorizers are particularly effective governing agencies, so there needs to be a new or different solution.
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Simon Lovell's "How to Cheat at Everything: A Con Man Reveals the Secrets of the Esoteric Trade of Cheating, Scams and Hustles," is a veritable encyclopedia of cons, scams, tricks and rip-offs. Lovell is a magician by trade, and much of the book is given over to detailed sleight-of-hand HOWTOs for palming, greasing, fixing and cheating cards, dice, coins, and so on. Truth be told, this section bogged down a little for me -- unlike, say, The Big Con, which tries to give a representative sample of the world's con-games, Lovell is bent on detailing all of them. But this is more than made up for by the charming, breezy anaecdotes about rip-off bar-bets, boiler-room operations, and so on. I picked this up as reference for stories -- con-jobs are great fiction fodder -- but found myself absorbing its message in pro-active self-defense. Reading this thing cover-to-cover can leave you feeling pretty damned paranoid.Update: Harry sez, "For one summer Simon Lovell was a Councilor at "Camp Island Lake" where he headed up the card magic program. Somehow he had convinced the management to let him teach an activity called "Cheats, Con's and Swindles" which was very popular. About three weeks in however management shut the activity down because, shockingly, many of the kids taking it were swindling other campers out of cash."
Evan adds, "Simon Lovell is crazy but extremely nice, I've known him for quite a while and seen him perform. He was once gambling with an asshole in Macau who was being rude to a cocktail waitress. To get him back he scammed him out of his car and gave the keys directly to the cocktail waitress as a tip. He was formally trained in Oxford as a mathematician but has spent years in jail for cons and scams. As a joke he once slid into the back seat of his friends car, put a burlap sack over him and while they passed a police car he wiggled around as if trying to escape just to see how the cops would react. He was arrested."
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Hundreds of investment bankers, venture capitalists and geeky tech entrepreneurs gathered near the pool of the Phoenician, a luxury resort outside Phoenix. The occasion? A high-profile gathering of education innovators, and as guests sipped cocktails, the mood was upbeat.Major innovations -- forged by the struggles of the Great Recession and fostered by technology -- are coming to higher education.
Investment dollars are flooding in -- a record-smashing 168 venture capital deals in the U.S. alone last year, according to the springtime conference's host, GSV Advisors. The computing power of "the cloud" and "big data" are unleashing new software. Public officials, desperate to cut costs and measure results, are open to change.
And everyone, it seems, is talking about MOOCs, the "Massive Open Online Courses" offered by elite universities and enrolling millions worldwide.
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Look to the nation's automotive industry for an example of how the economy has changed the middle class during the last 50 years.In 1968, few mechanics had earned an education further than a high school diploma. Same with factory workers, and other blue collar laborers.
But according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, today's employers in the automotive industry now prefer to hire mechanics who have undergone a postsecondary education program. In 2007, more than one-third of auto mechanics had postsecondary degrees or certifications of some variety.
Jeffrey Stohl, of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, calls it the "upskilling factor" when explaining the present economy's reliance on workers who have an education beyond a high school diploma.
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The news that Chicago Booth Business School's executive MBA programme would relocate from Singapore was greeted in Hong Kong with as much enthusiasm as the acquisition of a star athlete. Education Secretary Eddie Ng Hak-kim trumpeted that the move would "enhance Hong Kong's position as a regional education hub, nurture talent to support the growth of our economy, and strengthen Hong Kong's competitiveness".
He could have been Hong Kong's cricket coach welcoming Mark Chapman from New Zealand only a week earlier: "We have a very good opportunity of playing in a World Cup for the first time and with the line-up we have, I think we can do it."But the ongoing changes in higher education are more like biological evolution than a cricket match. Extinction too is part of evolution--and several other American outposts in Singapore, including New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and the hotel school of University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), are pulling out of the city state with uncertain future plans.
Asia is trying to shortcut a process that took centuries to create the great American universities. And American universities seem to think that an intellectual Bering land bridge has opened. Suddenly they see huge areas with no natural competitors, a promising ecosystem for invasive species.
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Ruth Starkman, via a kind reader's email:
My job was to help sort the pool.We were to assess each piece of information -- grades, courses, standardized test scores, activities, leadership potential and character -- in an additive fashion, looking for ways to advance the student to the next level, as opposed to counting any factor as a negative.
External readers are only the first read. Every one of our applications was scored by an experienced lead reader before being passed on to an inner committee of admissions officers for the selection phase. My new position required two days of intensive training at the Berkeley Alumni House as well as eight three-hour norming sessions. There, we practiced ranking under the supervision of lead readers and admissions officers to ensure our decisions conformed to the criteria outlined by the admissions office, with the intent of giving applicants as close to equal treatment as possible.
The process, however, turned out very differently.
In principle, a broader examination of candidates is a great idea; some might say it is an ethical imperative to look at the "bigger picture" of an applicant's life, as our mission was described. Considering the bigger picture has aided Berkeley's pursuit of diversity after Proposition 209, which in 1996 amended California's constitution to prohibit consideration of race, ethnicity or gender in admissions to public institutions. In Fisher v. the University of Texas, the Supreme Court, too, endorsed race-neutral processes aimed at promoting educational diversity and, on throwing the case back to lower courts, challenged public institutions to justify race as a factor in the holistic process.
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Turning around low-performing urban school districts is in the same class as CEOs turning around failing companies.After serving in Chicago for six years, Philadelphia five years, and New Orleans four years, Paul Vallas put the saga of urban superintendents in stark, if not humorous, terms:
"What happens with turnaround superintendents is that the first two years you're a demolitions expert. By the third year, if you get improvements, do school construction, and test scores go up, people start to think this isn't so hard. By year four, people start to think you're getting way too much credit. By year five, you're chopped liver."
Vallas's operating principle, according to one journalist who covered his superintendency in Philadelphia, is: "Do things big, do them fast, and do them all at once." For over a decade, the media christened Vallas as savior for each of the above three cities before exiting, but just last week, he stumbled in his fourth district-Bridgeport (CT) and ended up as "chopped liver" in less than two years.
Vallas is (or was) the premier "turnaround specialist." Whether, indeed, Vallas turned around Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans is contested. Supporters point to more charter schools, fresh faces in the classroom, new buildings, and slowly rising test scores; critics point to abysmal graduation rates for black and Latino students, enormous budget deficits, and implementation failures. After Bridgeport, however, his brand-name as a "turnaround specialist," like "killer apps" of yore such as Lotus 1-2-3 and WordStar, may well fade.
Turning around a failing company or a school district is no work for sprinters, it is marathoners who refashion the company and district into successes. Lee Iaccoco was CEO of Chrysler from 1978-1992; Steve Jobs was CEO from 1997-2011, and Ann Mulcahy served 2001-2009.
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New York City and state schools officials have been warning publicly for more than a year that, thanks to harder state tests, scores for elementary- and middle-school students released this week will plummet.Now the Bloomberg administration, which has long used test scores as evidence of its success, has said the results due this week for third- through eighth-graders can't be used to gauge overall trends in the city schools.
"You can't really compare these directly, because they're not just slightly different tests, they're dramatically different tests," said Shael Polakow-Suransky, the city's chief academic officer. "It's going to be difficult to make close comparisons with old state exams."
The tests administered in the spring were the state's first attempt at measuring higher-level skills that are emphasized by new education standards known in New York as the Common Core Learning Standards. The tests, for example, ask students to do multiple calculations within one math question, while requiring students to think more deeply to answer questions about written texts.
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Cracks are opening in the traditional, age-old structures of higher education. Terms like "credit hour" and even the definition of what it means to be a college are in flux.
Higher education is becoming "unbundled." Individual classes and degrees are losing their connections to single institutions, in much the same way iTunes has unbundled songs from whole albums, and the Internet is unbundling television shows and networks from bulky cable packages.Technology isn't just changing traditional higher education. It's helping break it down across two broad dimensions: distance and time.
But that doesn't necessarily mean, as some contend, the traditional university is dead.
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If you go to a college with tougher grading standards than average, you're less likely to get into graduate school, new research shows--and there's a similar problem within the job market. Correspondence bias, a psychological phenomenon that makes us judge people based on their behavior (like GPA) while ignoring context (like the difficulty of the school attended), could be keeping you from getting the jobs you want.A recent study by researchers at the University of California Berkeley provides evidence that the bias affects hiring and admissions practices. Until now, corresponding author Samuel A. Swift told Quartz, it's only been observed in the lab. "It's a psychological idea that's been around for quite awhile," Swift said, "and we had relatively little testing whether the phenomenon has an effect in the real world. We always have to wonder if lab studies reflect on reality, and whether people will make the same mistakes they make in the lab in real-world situations."
To put correspondence bias to the test, Swift and his fellow researchers used actual admissions staff from US colleges in their experiment. When presented with students for admission, the counselors were more likely to select those with higher GPAs--even when they were also told how each student compared to his or her school's average. Even if a school's average GPA was questionably high, indicating grade inflation and poor standards, students who managed a 4.0 there were more successful applicants than those who pulled slightly lower GPAs at much tougher colleges.
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A year ago, I expressed my concerns on the Washington Post's blog that your decimal place value videos and exercises failed to incorporate very basic knowledge about how people learn place value.I wrote that your decimal comparison videos were problematic because they only addressed decimal numbers with the same number of decimal places, and that a very basic, robust finding in rational number learning research is that students do not struggle with these comparisons--because students can treat them like whole numbers and get correct answers. Instead, students struggle with comparisons where the decimals have different numbers of decimal places because here, the whole number place value rules do not apply.
Together with my co-author, I wrote,
A student who thinks that 0.435 > 0.76 is offered nothing in the way of correction on Khan Academy. In fact, one of the top questions on the page for this video (as of July 18, 2012) is "So is .02009 greater than .0207?" This is exactly the sort of question that a competent teacher of arithmetic needs to anticipate and to answer. Khan fails to pose it.
In short, these decimal videos and their accompanying exercises are useless.
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When the National Council on Teacher Quality released last month its report on teacher training programs, I was not shocked to read that the vast majority of colleges and universities do a poor job of preparing their students to teach. I imagine that many other people who have gone through such programs were equally unsurprised.Related: The Teacher Prep Review Honor RollI went to a highly ranked liberal arts college and graduated with a special major in sociology, anthropology and education as well as an elementary teaching certificate. I immediately found a job teaching breathtakingly underprivileged students in a persistently failing elementary school in Prince George's County. I wasn't prepared to teach my students how to tie their shoes, much less to make up for years of institutional neglect, hunger, poverty, family transience, isolation and other ills. My first year was a nightmarish blur; my second was only slightly less awful. My third had its highlights but was still a daily struggle. There are stories from that time that my parents never heard.
One of the perpetual concerns I held through those three years was how to teach the many special-needs students in my third- and fourth-grade classes who were not being served by the school's special-education teacher. To gain practical skills to serve the students I now understood would be in my classes, regardless of where I taught, I decided to go to graduate school for special education. I started a one-year master's program at Teachers College, Columbia University, which has long been regarded as among the best education programs in the country.
I quickly realized that I had made a terrible mistake. My professors seemed uninterested in teaching me anything practical. At that time, in 2000, the academic hero du jour was Lev Vygotsky, with his theory of the zone of proximal development. It seemed not to matter what I did in my teaching placement as long as I wrote every paper and approached all of my lesson planning from a Vygotskian perspective.
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Kim Ki-hoon earns $4 million a year in South Korea, where he is known as a rock-star teacher--a combination of words not typically heard in the rest of the world. Mr. Kim has been teaching for over 20 years, all of them in the country's private, after-school tutoring academies, known as hagwons. Unlike most teachers across the globe, he is paid according to the demand for his skills--and he is in high demand.The Madison School Board President recently wrote: "The notion that parents inherently know what school is best for their kids is an example of conservative magical thinking."; "For whatever reason, parents as a group tend to undervalue the benefits of diversity in the public schools...."Kim Ki-Hoon, who teaches in a private after-school academy, earns most of his money from students who watch his lectures online. 'The harder I work, the more I make,' he says. 'I like that.'
Mr. Kim works about 60 hours a week teaching English, although he spends only three of those hours giving lectures. His classes are recorded on video, and the Internet has turned them into commodities, available for purchase online at the rate of $4 an hour. He spends most of his week responding to students' online requests for help, developing lesson plans and writing accompanying textbooks and workbooks (some 200 to date).
"The harder I work, the more I make," he says matter of factly. "I like that."
I traveled to South Korea to see what a free market for teaching talent looks like--one stop in a global tour to discover what the U.S. can learn from the world's other education superpowers. Thanks in part to such tutoring services, South Korea has dramatically improved its education system over the past several decades and now routinely outperforms the U.S. Sixty years ago, most South Koreans were illiterate; today, South Korean 15-year-olds rank No. 2 in the world in reading, behind Shanghai. The country now has a 93% high-school graduation rate, compared with 77% in the U.S.
....
No country has all the answers. But in an information-driven global economy, a few truths are becoming universal: Children need to know how to think critically in math, reading and science; they must be driven; and they must learn how to adapt, since they will be doing it all their lives. These demands require that schools change, too--or the free market may do it for them.
Related: www.wisconsin2.org.
Ms. Ripley is an Emerson Fellow at the New America Foundation. This essay is adapted from her forthcoming book, "The Smartest Kids in the World--and How They Got That Way," to be published Aug. 13 by Simon & Schuster.
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It is summertime, which for those of you newly accepted into Teach for America, means you are enduring the long hard days of Institute. I congratulate you on being accepted into this prestigious program. You clearly have demonstrated intelligence, passion, and leadership in order to make it this far.And now I am asking you to quit.
Exacerbating Inequalities
Teach for America likely enticed you into the program with the call for ending education inequality. That is a beautiful and noble mission. I applaud you on being moved by the chance to help children, of being a part of creating equality in our schools, of ending poverty once and for all.
However, the actual practice of Teach for America does the exact opposite of its noble mission. TFA claims to fight to end educational inequality and yet ends up exacerbating one of the greatest inequalities in education today: that low-income children of color are much more likely to be given inexperienced, uncertified teachers. TFA's five weeks of Institute are simply not enough time to prepare anyone, no matter how dedicated or intelligent, to have the skills necessary to help our neediest children. This fall, on that first day of school, you will be alone with kids who need so much more. You will represent one more inequality in our education system denying kids from low-income backgrounds equitable educational opportunities.
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The private student lender Sallie Mae has released its annual look at "How America Pays for College," which continues to show how the Great Recession shook up college funding. The share of college costs that parents are shouldering has shrunk in recent years. In 2009-10, parental income and savings covered an average of 37 percent of college costs. This past school year, that fell to 27 percent. The dollar amount parents paid from savings and income fell 35 percent, to $5,727.At the same time, the share of a family's college costs covered by grants and scholarships rose to 30 percent from 23 percent. Grants and scholarships, though, were divvied up in different ways. This year, 63 percent of families earning less than $35,000 a year received an average of $6,170 in grants. Just 19 percent of high-income families (earning $100,000 or more) received grants averaging $5,757. Federal Pell Grants, which max out a $5,550, specifically target needy students.
Scholarships went the other way, getting more generous for wealthier families. Thirty-five percent of low-income families got an average of $7,237 in scholarships, while 36 percent of wealthy families got an average of $10,213 in scholarships. The gap reflects the priorities of the colleges: 69 percent of the scholarships for wealthy students come from the schools themselves rather than nonprofit or public sources. This confirms the results of a recent study by the New America Foundation that found that schools are increasingly using aid to lure wealthy students rather than targeting those most in need. So as stagnant incomes continue to stress less affluent families, wealthy parents are getting a helping hand.
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In a steady trickle, the come-on's for schools arrive in our mail. Usually in large-postcard format, they offer a photo of cute kids, stylish designs, and upbeat messages about the great program our child needs. They come from individual Milwaukee Public Schools, religious schools, charter schools, even Headstart programs. Some of the schools are at hefty distances from our neighborhood.Our youngest child graduated from high school eight years ago and none of our kids were ever candidates to go to the schools we hear from. I understand mass mailings are done from broad lists, but are these people serious?
The answer is yes, when it comes to marketing. Selling your school to potential parents has become an imperative in Milwaukee. Mass mail, billboards, tables at community events, door-to-door recruitment, print and electronic advertising, brochures, sidewalk solicitations -- they're all used by many schools. Use of computer-based social media is on the rise, of course.
Children and parents hold the power to make or break schools by deciding where to enroll, and unlike, oh, say, when I grew up, there is little presumption that people will choose the public school nearest to them just because that's what they're supposed to do.
You may associate school choice with private schools in the voucher program, charter schools and the thousands of City of Milwaukee kids who enroll in suburban public schools. You're right -- every enrollment decision in those situations is a product of choice, and frequently involves marketing.
But choosing what school you go to is pervasive among MPS parents, as well. There's a reason the main pillar of MPS enrollment is called the "three-choice" process. In the broad sense of the term, MPS is a powerful example of school choice in action. Again, marketing is a big part of this.
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INDIANAPOLIS -- Former Indiana and current Florida schools chief Tony Bennett built his national star by promising to hold "failing" schools accountable. But when it appeared an Indianapolis charter school run by a prominent Republican donor might receive a poor grade, Bennett's education team frantically overhauled his signature "A-F" school grading system to improve the school's marks.Madison and Wisconsin Math Data, 8th GradeEmails obtained by The Associated Press show Bennett and his staff scrambled last fall to ensure influential donor Christel DeHaan's school received an "A," despite poor test scores in algebra that initially earned it a "C.""They need to understand that anything less than an A for Christel House compromises all of our accountability work," Bennett wrote in a Sept. 12 email to then-chief of staff Heather Neal, who is now Gov. Mike Pence's chief lobbyist.
The emails, which also show Bennett discussed with staff the legality of changing just DeHaan's grade, raise unsettling questions about the validity of a grading system that has broad implications. Indiana uses the A-F grades to determine which schools get taken over by the state and whether students seeking state-funded vouchers to attend private school need to first spend a year in public school. They also help determine how much state funding schools receive.
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"Testing More, Teaching Less: What America's Obsession with Student Testing Costs in Money and Lost Instructional Time," released by the American Federation of Teachers, looks closely at two unnamed medium-sized school districts -- one in the Midwest and one in the East -- through the prism of their standardized testing calendars.
Standardized testing has become the focus of modern school reform since the implementation of the No Child Left Behind law in 2002, and continuing through the Obama administration's Race to the Top education initiative. Over the years, the time taken up by test prep and testing has risen, as have the costs and the lost instructional time.The grade-by-grade analysis of time and money invested in standardized testing found that test prep and testing absorbed 19 full school days in one district and a month and a half in the other in heavily tested grades. The Midwestern district spent $600 or more for standardized testing per pupil in grades 3-8; about $200 per student for grades K-2; from $400 to $600 per student for grades 9-11. The Eastern district spent more than $1,100 annually on testing per student in grades 6-11; around $400 per student in grades 1-2; between $700 and $800 per student for grades 3-5.
One of the districts gives 14 different assessments to all students at least once a year in at least one grade, the report said, and some assessments are administered for several subjects multiple times a year, resulting in 34 different test administrations. The other district had 12 different standardized assessments but 47 separate administrations over the course of the year.
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With more than half of all US college students now using the site for background information before embarking on an essay, it's clear that Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, has gained a foothold in the classroom. Darren Crovitz and W. Scott Smoot, writing in The English Journal, a publication of lesson ideas for English teachers, described the dimensions of one Wikipedia lesson that unfolded in Smoot's middle school classroom. The lesson encouraged students to use the site to generate fresh ideas for research topics by looking for gaps in Wikipedia's information.
Learning To Dig DeeperSmoot's ambition was to show how teachers can use Wikipedia to help students ask the right questions for writing research papers. First, he asked his class to shout out historical facts regarding president Abraham Lincoln. He wrote all the facts on the board: born in Kentucky; was president during The American Civil War; freed the slaves; and so on. Smoot then asked students to scroll through Lincoln's Wikipedia entry, which happens to contain the same information on the board - and not much more.
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Christopher Boone loves prime numbers and hates being touched. Oskar Schell has a hyperactive imagination. He won't swear, but he will say, "Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake." The behavioral problems of Christopher and Oskar, the respective narrators and protagonists of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, are never explicitly labeled as autistic spectrum disorders, In a brief statement, worth reading, Mark Haddon has written that "Curious Incident is not a novel about Asperger's... If anything, it's a novel about difference, about being an outsider."but it has been easy for readers to identify them in these terms. As much as both novels have relied on an existing public understanding of autism, they have each -- supported by stage and screen adaptations -- also helped to construct it. More than any other two books, these have encoded the autistic perspective into a literary trope with its own set of mechanisms and effects.While both the novels have male protagonists, and males are about four times more likely to have autistic spectrum disorders than females, the most prominent autobiographies of autism have been by women: See Temple Grandin's Emergence and Donna Williams' Nobody Nowhere.What distinguishes the autistic person is a difficulty gaining access to other people's minds. TNI Vol. 18: Family Planning is out now. Subscribe for $2 and get it today. He lacks the ability to reconstruct and predict thoughts, feelings, desires, and reactions. The neurologist Simon Baron-Cohen has called this "mindblindness." Those who don't suffer from this problem, on the other hand, unconsciously translate myriad physical and symbolic cues -- subtext, allusion, tone, and all the elements of body language. In Baron-Cohen's terms, we can read minds.
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Where have all the students gone?
Madison School Board President Ed Hughes:
Esenberg sets out to identify the fundamental differences between voucher advocates and opponents. His thesis is that views on vouchers derive from deeper beliefs than objective assessments of how well voucher schools perform or concerns about vouchers draining funds from public schools. To him, your take on vouchers depends on how you view the world.Mr Hughes anti-voucher rhetoric is fascinating on several levels:
Esenberg asserts that voucher advocates are united by their embrace of three fundamental principles: that a centralized authority is unlikely to be able to decide what is best for all; that families should be trusted to select their children's schools since ordinary people are capable of making choices for themselves without paternalistic direction; and that "government does not do diversity, experimentation and choice very well."By implication, he asserts that voucher opponents think that a centralized authority will be able to decide what's best for all, that families shouldn't be trusted to make choices for their children, and that government control is the best way to foster innovation.
And there you have it. Your views on school voucher expansion are entirely explained by whether you prefer individual freedom, like the voucher advocates, or stultifying government control, like the voucher opponents. In cinematic terms, voucher opponents are the legions of lifeless, gray drones in Apple's famous 1984 commercial and voucher supporters are the colorful rebel, bravely challenging the control of Big Brother and hurling her sledgehammer to smash mindless conformity. You couldn't ask for a more sophisticated analysis than that, could you?
While his thesis invites mockery, Esenberg's short article does present a bit of a challenge to voucher opponents like myself. Can we set out a coherent justification for our opposition that doesn't depend on the facts that voucher schools drain needed resources from public schools and don't perform any better? Sweeping those fairly compelling points aside, Esenberg asks, in effect, what else you got?
1. The Madison School District's long term, disastrous reading results. How much time and money has been wasted on anti-voucher rhetoric? Reading has long been job one.
2. Local private schools do not have much, if any availability.
3. Madison spends double the national average per student (some of which has been spent on program explosion). Compare Milwaukee Public and Voucher Schools' Per Student Spending.
4. Madison's inability to address its long-term disastrous reading results will bring changes from State or Federal legislation or via litigation.
5. Superintendent Cheatham cited 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".
I recall being astonished that previous Madison School District administrators planned to spend time lobbying at the State level for this or that change - while "Rome is burning". Ironically, Superintendent Cheatham recently said:
"Rather than do a lot of work on opposing the voucher movement, we are going to focus on making sure our schools are the best schools possible and the schools of choice in Madison," Cheatham said.
This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker - and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member - believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.A great, salient quote. I would hope that the District would focus completely on the matter at hand, disastrous reading scores. Taking care of that problem - and we have the resources to do so - will solve lots of other atmospheric and perception issues.
In closing, I sense politics in the voucher (and anti-open enrollment) rhetoric. Two Madison School Board seats will be on the Spring, 2014 ballot. One is currently occupied by Mr. Hughes, the other by Marj Passman. In addition, local politics play a role in becoming school board President.
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The U.S. Senate and House have passed a student loan bill President Obama will almost certainly sign. Bipartisanship lives! But don't get too excited. Heck, don't get excited at all: The bill will only deliver minor tweaks to a system that needs elimination, not a screw or two turned a little harder.The bill, which ties interest rates on federal student loans to 10-year Treasury notes, certainly makes more sense than having Congress arbitrarily set a rate. Student loan rates moving with overall interest rates -- not stuck well above or below them -- makes sense if you are trying to balance the government's need for revenue with a desire to furnish loans more cheaply than students would otherwise be able to get them. For supporters of such programs, getting this should have been simple, which is why -- despite significant fighting -- it ultimately got done.
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In the early years of the 20th century, the students in Bullitt County, Kentucky, were asked to clear a test that many full-fledged adults would likely be hard-pressed to pass today. The Bullitt County Geneaological Society has a copy of this exam, reproduced below--a mix of math and science and reading and writing and questions on oddly specific factoids-preserved in their museum in the county courthouse.But just think for a moment: Did you know where Montenegro was when you were 12? Do you know now? (Hint: it's just across the Adriatic Sea from Italy. You know where the Adriatic Sea is, right?)
Or what about this question, which the examiners of Bullitt County deemed necessary knowledge: "Through what waters would a vessel pass in going from England through the Suez Canal to Manila?" The Bullitt geneaological society has an answer sheet if you want to try the test, but really, this question is just a doozie:
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The performance ratings of individual teachers in the city school district are matters of keen public interest and should be released to the Los Angeles Times, a judge ordered Thursday.L.A. County Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant ruled that the public interest in access to the ratings outweighed any teacher expectations of privacy under the California Public Records Act. He rejected arguments by the Los Angeles Unified School District and United Teachers Los Angeles that the records were confidential personnel information that, if released, would create discord, stigma, embarrassment, difficulty in recruiting teachers and other harm.
"The public has an interest in disclosure of the scores because they reflect on both student achievement and teacher performance, as well as on LAUSD's choices in allocating time and resources," Chalfant wrote.
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he gist of her framework is hard to argue. It calls for a renewed focus on learning, a school system that makes curriculum consistent across the district and better measures student and teacher performance. In sum, it is a back-to-basics approach that does not require new money, at least for now.We shall see. Local media have greeted prior Superintendents, including Cheryl Wilhoyte with style points, prior to the beginning of tough decision-making.Madison, of course, has been grappling with its changing demographics where many students, especially minority children, struggle academically. In shorthand, it's called the "achievement gap," and the approach to date has been a long list of seemingly laudable, logical programs.
Now comes Cheatham saying we don't need more money, at least not yet, but instead we need to rebuild the foundation. Might some see that as counterintuitive, I wonder?
"It might be," she responds. "My take is that we were adding on with a big price tag to an infrastructure that was weak. ... Does that make sense? The bones of the organization were weak and we didn't do the hard work of making sure that the day-to-day processes ... were strong before deciding to make targeted investments on top of a strong foundation."
She continues: "That doesn't mean that there won't be some targeted investments down the line. I suspect that will be in things like technology, for instance, which is a real challenge ... and is going to have a price tag later. I need to make sure that the foundation is strong first."
Cheatham alludes to her Chicago experience. "Having worked with lots of schools -- and lots of schools that have struggled -- and worked with schools targeting narrowing and closure of the achievement gap, these fundamental practices" make the biggest difference. "It's that day-to-day work that ultimately produces results and student learning."
Another interesting governance question, particularly when changes to the 157 page teacher union contract, or perhaps "handbook" arise, is where the school board stands? Two seats will be on the Spring, 2014 ballot. They are presently occupied by Marj Passman and Ed Hughes. In addition, not all members may vote on teacher union related matters due to conflict of interests. Finally, Mary Burke's possible race for the Governor's seat (2014) may further change board dynamics.
I hope that Superintendent Cheatham's plans to focus the organization on teaching become a reality. Nothing is more important given the District's disastrous reading results. That said, talk is cheap and we've seen this movie before.
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For at least a half-century, the University of California has been considered the premier system in U.S. public higher education. The Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses always rank among the top 10 state schools, with several other UC campuses close behind.While the nomination of Janet Napolitano, the secretary of the Homeland Security Department, as the next chancellor of the University of California may have been a surprise, it isn't a comedown. The system has almost 240,000 students and an operating budget that exceeds $24 billion, almost triple the state budget of Arizona, for example, where Napolitano served as governor and attorney general.
Historically, a lawyer-politician who has never been a college professor, let alone a higher-education administrator, might not have been the preferred choice to lead a huge public university. But that has changed in recent years. Universities - - private as well as public -- are very much creatures of the U.S. political scene, highly dependent on federal and state funds. Who better to navigate that world than former elected officials? Napolitano joins such ex-politicians as Mitch Daniels at Purdue University, David Boren of the University of Oklahoma and Kent Hance of Texas Tech University.
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Jill Barshay, via a kind reader email:
Since President Johnson's War on Poverty Program in 1965, policy makers have been trying to equalize education spending across the United States. The lofty goal is for schools with lots of poor students to have access to the same resources that schools with rich kids have. But researchers and advocates for the poor have pointed to loopholes in Title I funding that effectively allow affluent schools to operate at higher levels of funding than low-income schools. For example, Marguerite Roza at the Center on Reinventing Public Education found that less money is spent on salaries in high-poverty schools than on low-poverty schools within the same district.Locally, Madison spends a bit more than $15,000 per student, or nearly double the US average.Because there can be so much variation in poverty within a school district (just think about the socio-economic differences between Tribeca and the Bronx), the Department of Education is making a big push to calculate exactly how much each school spends on a student. That might sound simple enough. But like any data project, the devil is in the details.
The issue is, how do you allocate administrative and other centralized expenses among schools? For example, say you have an itinerant teacher who spends a few hours at one school, then moves to another, and then another -- each day of the week. To properly figure out how much of that teacher's salary to attribute to each school, districts would need to create some sort of time-and-attendance punchcard system. But who wants to create such an expensive system or put teachers on punch cards?
I attended a boisterous and sometimes acrimonious session on this topic between district bean counters and the U.S. Department of Education at the NCES STATS-DC 2013 Data Conference on July 18, 2013. Many administrators protested the whole idea of counting pennies per school, saying it was too burdensome and impossible. They worried they would have to waste hours figuring out how to allocate all kinds of centralized activities, from computer servers to buses.
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The National Assessment of Educational Progress exams in civics, U.S. history, and geography have been indefinitely postponed for fourth and twelfth graders. The Obama administration says this is due to a $6.8 million sequestration budget cut. The three exams will be replaced by a single, new test: Technology and Engineering Literacy."Without these tests, advocates for a richer civic education will not have any kind of test to use as leverage to get more civic education in the classrooms," said John Hale, associate director at the Center for Civic Education.
NAEP is a set of national tests of fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders that track achievement on various subjects over time. Researchers collect data for state to state comparisons in mathematics, reading, science, and writing. The other subjects only provide national statistics and are administered to fewer students. The tests provide basic information about students but do not automatically trigger consequences for teachers, students, and schools.
Students have historically performed extremely poorly on these three tests. In 2010, the last administration of the history test, students performed worse on it than on any other NAEP test. That year, less than half of eighth-graders knew the purpose of the Bill of Rights, and only 1 in 10 could pick a definition of the system of checks and balance on the civics exam.
Science vs. Humanities
Since most civic education is taught to first-semester high school seniors, Hale said, not testing in twelfth grade creates a major gap of information.
"Is it possible to have a responsible citizenry if we don't teach them civics, history, and the humanities?" said Gary Nash, a professor of history education (sic) at the University of California Los Angeles. Postponing the exams, typically administered every four years, does not mean classroom education in the humanities will be cut. But the cuts indirectly say we can do without civics and U.S. history, Nash said.
Trading the humanities tests for technology tests is necessary to measure "the competitiveness of U.S. students in a science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)-focused world," said David Driscoll, chair of the NAEP Governing Board, in a statement. "The [Technology and Engineering Literacy] assessment, along with the existing NAEP science and mathematics assessments, will help the nation know if we are making progress in the areas of STEM education."
Nash agrees the U.S. needs more engineers and scientists: "But what are they without humanities under their belt?" he said.
Excellence in one area flows into others
A summer report from the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences explained the need for these subjects this way: "The humanities and social sciences provide an intellectual framework and context for understanding and thriving in a changing world. When we study these subjects, we learn not only what but how and why."
Nash pointed out that Franklin High School in the Los Angeles Unified School district is 94 percent Latino, and many families are immigrants. Without changing anything in science and math, the school began to emphasize humanities. The scores in science and math improved, testing almost on par with students in Beverly Hills. "It's about increasing their passion for learning," he says. Furthermore, giving students a context for learning helps them learn more.
Masters of Our Government
Students must be prepared "to think for themselves as independent citizens," said Hale. "Civics and Government (& History) is (are) as generative as math; we are not born as great democratic citizens. We aren't born knowing why everyone should have the right to political speech, even if it is intolerant speech."
Consider the current events of the last few weeks, he said: the Supreme Court rulings on marriage and the Voting Rights Act, the National Security Administration's data collection, and Congress debating immigration and student loan rates.
"Our leaders make decisions every day based on interpretations on the proper role of government; we have no way of knowing if these [decisions] are good or bad," Hale continued. "We are supposed to be masters of our government, not servants of it."
Cutting the civics tests indicates the government's priorities, and priorities affect curriculum, Nash noted. He suggested danger for a country that must govern itself if children do not learn how.
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Georgia Institute of Technology is about to take a step that could set off a broad disruption in higher education: It's offering a new master's degree in computer science, delivered through a series of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, for $6,600.The school's traditional on-campus computer science master's degree costs about $45,000 in tuition alone for out-of-state students (the majority) and $21,000 for Georgia residents. But in a few years, Georgia Tech believes that thousands of students from all over the world will enroll in the new program.
The $6,600 master's degree marks an attempt to realize the tantalizing promise of the MOOC movement: a great education, scaled up to the point where it can be delivered for a rock-bottom price. Until now, the nation's top universities have adopted a polite but distant approach toward MOOCs. The likes of Yale, Harvard, and Stanford have put many of their classes online for anyone to take, and for free. But there is no degree to be had, even for those who ace the courses. Education writer and consultant Tony Bates recently noted that until top institutions begin putting a diploma behind their MOOCs, "we have to believe that they think that this is a second class form of education suitable only for the unwashed masses."
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The Texas school that expelled a student for refusing to comply with its plan to track pupils with RFID tags has dropped the scheme, saying it just doesn't work.In November, Northside Independent School District (NISD) in San Antonio, Texas, began a trial of RFID tracking for students in an attempt to cut down on truancy. The district gets extra funding if students don't skip out after the register is taken, so NISD spent $500,000 on its "Student Locator Project".
The school issued students with a lanyard containing the RFID system, and insisted that they be used to get full access to the cafeteria, library, and even some restrooms. One student, Andrea Hernandez, gained national prominence when she was suspended for refusing to wear the lanyard on privacy grounds and because it conflicted with her religious beliefs.
"I feel it's the implementation of the Mark of the Beast. It's also an invasion of my privacy and my other rights," she said at the time.
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When Arnecia Hawkins enrolled at Arizona State University last fall, she did not realize she was volunteering as a test subject in an experimental reinvention of American higher education. Yet here she was, near the end of her spring semester, learning math from a machine. In a well-appointed computer lab in Tempe, on Arizona State's desert resort of a campus, she and a sophomore named Jessica were practicing calculating annuities. Through a software dashboard, they could click and scroll among videos, text, quizzes and practice problems at their own pace. As they worked, their answers, along with reams of data on the ways in which they arrived at those answers, were beamed to distant servers. Predictive algorithms developed by a team of data scientists compared their stats with data gathered from tens of thousands of other students, looking for clues as to what Hawkins was learning, what she was struggling with, what she should learn next and how, exactly, she should learn it.Having a computer for an instructor was a change for Hawkins. "I'm not gonna lie--at first I was really annoyed with it," she says. The arrangement was a switch for her professor, too. David Heckman, a mathematician, was accustomed to lecturing to the class, but he had to take on the role of a roving mentor, responding to raised hands and coaching students when they got stumped. Soon, though, both began to see some benefits. Hawkins liked the self-pacing, which allowed her to work ahead on her own time, either from her laptop or from the computer lab. For Heckman, the program allowed him to more easily track his students' performance. He could open a dashboard that told him, in granular detail, how each student was doing--not only who was on track and who was not but who was working on any given concept. Heckman says he likes lecturing better, but he seems to be adjusting. One definite perk for instuctors: the software does most of the grading for them.
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In just two years, spending by the state's public employee unions on lobbyists has plummeted from the summit of Wisconsin politics, leaving business interests uncontested at the pinnacle of Capitol lobbying, a new report shows.Related:The figures show the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state's largest teacher union, spent nearly $2.1 million in the first six months of 2011 and $1 million in the first half of 2009, but a mere $84,000 in the first six months of this year. The union is spending less than one-tenth of what it once did.
The preliminary lobbying figures from the Government Accountability Board released this week are just the latest sign of the deep impact of Act 10, Gov. Scott Walker's 2011 law repealing most collective bargaining for most public employees. The new figures on who's lobbying state lawmakers follow a recent Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report showing that this same law had crushed the membership and finances of government labor unions as well as eliminating most of their former duties.
The Wisconsin Education Association Council was first or second in spending on lobbying in legislative sessions over the past four years and reached the height of its lobbying efforts in the first six months of 2011, as labor leaders tried feverishly but unsuccessfully to block Walker's legislation.
But for the first six months of 2013, a critical period in which Republicans sharply expanded taxpayer-financed private voucher schools, WEAC's lobbying spending was nothing special when compared with the other groups that have filed their lobbying reports with state officials. The once heavyweight contender now ranks 40th in the total spending at the Capitol, with its lobbying so far this year almost exactly matching the spending by two other middleweight interests: Marquette University and a conservation group.
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With all the buzz in the news about education technology, one would think that teachers were integrating cutting-edge teaching tools into their lesson plans faster than edtech startups could pump them into the market.
But according to a nationwide survey by the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA), that isn't exactly the case. The report on their findings, presented at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference and expo in June 2013, suggests that technology integration in schools remains virtually unchanged from last year and still falls far short of the organization's determined ideal.So, what's going on here? What could be standing in the way of effective technology integration in the classroom? It's certainly not a lack of innovation on the supply side. Let's take a look at some of the data and see if we can't shed some light on things.
The Facts on the Ground
According to SIIA, edtech integration is lagging in all sectors. Postsecondary institutions do seem to have made a relatively successful effort to make use of educational technology in their coursework -- perhaps so much so that the perceived importance of continuing to integrate tech at the college level has fallen since last year -- but the K-12 educators surveyed reported some troubling truths.
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It represents just 1.5 percent of the city schools budget and often gets left out of education stump speeches, but arts education got the mayoral field's full attention on Tuesday night at a forum at Teachers College Columbia University.During a rotation of 12-minute interviews with public radio hosts Kurt Anderson and Leonard Lopate, a slew of candidates were each asked a version of the same question: Will you do a better job in funding arts education?
Arts programs in schools across the country have been the first to get cut as districts faced with economic downturns shifted their priorities toward meeting state standards in reading and math. Under the Bloomberg administration, arts spending has wavered around $300 million, or about $300 per student, a disbursement that each candidate said was not good enough.
While all the candidates said they'd spend more than the current annual totals, none pledged a specific dollar amount.
"It's always dangerous to pick a number," said Bill Thompson.
Thompson said that arts education had to be a part of how schools are evaluated, an idea that other candidates have proposed as well. When asked how he'd do that, Thompson said he'd require principals to allot more of their schools' budgets to arts programs and hold them accountable if they didn't
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Most Americans would agree that academic freedom is a sacred right of the academy and crucial to the American experiment in democracy. But what is it really?That's the question raised by the Associated Press's July 16 release of emails between Mitch Daniels, when he was the governor of Indiana, and his staff concerning Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." The emails were written in 2010 and Mr. Daniels, whose second term as governor ended this January, is now president of Purdue University in Indiana.
Published in 1980, Zinn's "A People's History" (the author died in 2010 at age 87) has been a staple of Advanced Placement courses at the high-school level and omnipresent in college syllabi for decades. Praised by some for focusing on American history from the ground up, the book has been condemned by others as emblematic of the biased, left-leaning, tendentious and inaccurate drivel that too often passes as definitive in American higher education.
Mr. Daniels falls squarely among the critics. Zinn's history, the then-governor wrote in February 2010, "is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page." Then Mr. Daniels asked: "Can someone assure me that it is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before any more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?"
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What price progress? The answer for parents who send their children to state schools for what they thought would be a free education is that it can be very high indeed. More and more parents are being asked to buy tablet computers for their children to use in class, at a cost of several hundred pounds. And the move is drawing grumbles from families on tight budgets and fuelling fears of a "digital divide" in education.With the use of digital technology expanding quickly in schools, headteachers are keen to be at the forefront of new teaching methods that they believe will save money in the long run on equipment such as books.
Now, ahead of the new school year in September, many schools are asking parents to stump up between £200 and £300 for an iPad or other tablet for their child, or pay for a device in instalments that can vary from £12 to £30 a month, as they rush to keep at the head of the information revolution.
While their introduction is popular with youngsters, parents and teaching unions are raising concerns that those from poorer backgrounds could lose out and that supposedly free state education looks destined to come with increasing built-in costs.
Hove Park school, in Hove, East Sussex, for example, has given parents a choice of three ways to acquire iPads as part of what it calls its "learning transformation" project.
They can send their child to school with their own device, rent one from the school for a minimum of £12.40 a month, or buy one from the school, for between £209 to £300. One parent said: "I'd like to see some evidence that bringing this kind of technology into classrooms is even beneficial to how kids learn. There's an awful lot of information out there on the net that is plain wrong. I feel quite uneasy about what we might be doing to them and to teaching."
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Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham wisely stated:
"Rather than do a lot of work on opposing the voucher movement, we are going to focus on making sure our schools are the best schools possible and the schools of choice in Madison," Cheatham said.Just a few days ago, the Madison School Board said this in the "strategic framework document":
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 must focus, laser like on academic achievement.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.
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Harris would like to see the city's youth football programs structured through the Madison Metropolitan School District.Madison's community & recreation budget will be at least $14,139,795 during the 2013-2014 school year.The lack of serious pre-high school sports programs is an issue is a vis suburban schools. The District should, in my view, focus on its long term, disastrous reading results. Success in that critical curriculum will lead to other opportunities.
"I think there are so many wonderful benefits of participating in athletics, not just football as a whole," he said. "And if we were to lock in on those individuals at the middle-school level, I think we could really help turn around some kids that are at disadvantages in every-day life."Sense of community
These days Schoessow, who coached Memorial from 1975-1997, makes his home in Houston. He has taught a "Football Theory" course at the University of Texas-San Antonio to aspiring coaches for the past eight years.
Among his coaching disciples are past players Harris and Verona's Dave Richardson, who will be inducted into the WFCA Hall of Fame with Waunakee's Pat Rice next March.
Schoessow considers declining participation and sports specialization to be two of the key factors in Madison football's fall from prominence. He also feels that part of the equation is the sense of community that is prevalent in the suburban programs and simply can't be matched by the city schools.
"When you have one school and the whole community rallies around (that team), the kids want to play. They see the tradition," Schoessow said. "To me, the tradition is the biggest thing. And that can be positive or negative. Right now, Madison's tradition is negative. They lose, and it's difficult to change that mindset into one of pride. And that's what these smaller communities have"
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From Horace Mann to President Obama, and legions of politicians and educators in between, education has been heralded as the great equalizer, an institution that can balance (if not undo) racial, ethnic or other inequities that separate segments of society.If higher education in the United States ever fulfilled that role, it is doing so less and less, not more, as time passes.
That is the stark and in many ways distressing conclusion of a report released today by researchers at Georgetown University: "Separate and Unequal: How Higher Education Reinforces the Intergenerational Reproduction of White Racial Privilege."
The report's assertion that African-American and Latino youth -- especially those from low-income backgrounds -- are underrepresented at the nation's 468 most selective four-year colleges and overrepresented at the 3,250 open-access two- and four-year institutions will probably surprise few; that's a circumstance of long standing.
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With computer science jobs and education on the rise for Millenials, parents need a 101 why it matters and what it means for their kids."Software engineering and programming are far more creative fields than people think"
- Ryan Oksenhorn, Software EngineerWith increased enrollment in computing majors, growing awareness for STEM education for kids, and hot programming jobs out there, it's safe to say that computer scientists are the new 'geek chic.'
In 2012 Forbes named software developer the #1 job. Stanford issued apress release stating that computer science is the largest major on campus, and over 90% of Stanford undergrads take at least once computer science course. But the upswing is no surprise, in conjunction with other statistics like this one: This is the fifth straight year of increased enrollment in computing majors by new students, according to a 2012 Computing Research Association (CRA) report. The CRA tracks computing degree and enrollment trends.
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A fully fledged intellectual kerfuffle has broken out in recent days over what declining enrollments in US colleges and universities really mean. The fate of Loyola University New Orleans took center stage as both theNew York Times and the Wall Street Journal attempted to identify the right conclusions to draw from a significant decline in student attendance this fall.
A freshman class of 25% fewer students than expected put Loyola squarely in the news cycle, but Loyola is by no means unique. The only problem is deciding just what this actually means in social, political and economic terms.Against the backdrop of recent political bickering over the fate of the country's extensive government-backed student loan program, the "free market" in college offers and acceptances provides an intriguing contrast to the stilted platitudes that often get trotted out when talking about the merits of university education.
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