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I had a teacher once who called his students "idiots" when they screwed up. He was our orchestra conductor, a fierce Ukrainian immigrant named Jerry Kupchynsky, and when someone played out of tune, he would stop the entire group to yell, "Who eez deaf in first violins!?" He made us rehearse until our fingers almost bled. He corrected our wayward hands and arms by poking at us with a pencil.My finest teachers were certainly the toughest. Of course, they also knew the curriculum inside and out.Today, he'd be fired. But when he died a few years ago, he was celebrated: Forty years' worth of former students and colleagues flew back to my New Jersey hometown from every corner of the country, old instruments in tow, to play a concert in his memory. I was among them, toting my long-neglected viola. When the curtain rose on our concert that day, we had formed a symphony orchestra the size of the New York Philharmonic.
I was stunned by the outpouring for the gruff old teacher we knew as Mr. K. But I was equally struck by the success of his former students. Some were musicians, but most had distinguished themselves in other fields, like law, academia and medicine. Research tells us that there is a positive correlation between music education and academic achievement. But that alone didn't explain the belated surge of gratitude for a teacher who basically tortured us through adolescence.
We're in the midst of a national wave of self-recrimination over the U.S. education system. Every day there is hand-wringing over our students falling behind the rest of the world. Fifteen-year-olds in the U.S. trail students in 12 other nations in science and 17 in math, bested by their counterparts not just in Asia but in Finland, Estonia and the Netherlands, too. An entire industry of books and consultants has grown up that capitalizes on our collective fear that American education is inadequate and asks what American educators are doing wrong.
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Erika Dietz was overwhelmed when she started teaching English at T.C. Williams High School two years ago. Not because the 24-year-old struggled to connect with students or to handle the workload. Relentless, yet also patient and charming, she quickly became one of the most popular teachers at the Alexandria school, and in June 2012 she received a state-funded Titan Transformer Award for "outstanding work toward the goal of transformation" of T.C.What bothered her was everything that went along with that goal: the consultants, the jargon, the endless stream of new reform initiatives. "It felt like every buzzword or trend in education was being thrown at us at once," she told me over the summer, shortly after moving to Texas. "When something didn't work right away, it was discarded the next year or even midyear."
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As far as Xia Zuhai is concerned, Mao Zedong is more than a desperately missed, great leader. The Henan province school principal thinks of the late chairman as a Buddha-like figure.When the rain eases on the morning of September 9, the 37th anniversary of Mao's death, Xia, 49, leads a Buddhist ceremony in honour of the Great Helmsman at his village school, on the outskirts of Sitong town, in Zhoukou city, 900 kilometres south of Beijing. In front of a huge painting of Mao on a tiled wall in the centre of the campus, he has set up a shrine with offerings of snacks, fruit and Mao's favourite red chillies, as well as a small stack of publications, including a copy of the People's Daily, a Southern Weekend weekly newspaper and a Yanhuang Chunqiu monthly magazine. The latter two are known for having a liberal stance.
"You should never underestimate Chairman Mao. He wouldn't be annoyed by the criticisms inside," Xia says, with a chuckle. After lighting a cigarette for Mao and putting it on the edge of the incense burner, Xia is joined by his 15-year-old daughter, Yuanyuan, and the two kneel side by side on a bamboo mat and kowtow 81 times.
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High school seniors with poor grades and even worse SAT scores, you may be just what one of the nation's most prestigious liberal arts colleges is looking for.You need not be president of the debate club or captain of the track team. No glowing teacher recommendations are required. You just need to be smart, curious and motivated, and prove it with words -- 10,000 words, in the form of four, 2,500-word research papers.
The research topics are formidable and include the cardinal virtue of ren in Confucius's "The Analects," "the origin of chirality (or handedness) in a prebiotic life," Ezra Pound's view of "The Canterbury Tales," and how to design a research trial using microbes transplanted from the human biome. If professors deem the papers to be worthy of a B+ or better by the college's standards, you are in.
The college is Bard, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., and it says the new option, which has not previously been announced but is to begin this fall, is an attempt to return the application process to its fundamental goal: rewarding the best candidates, rather than just those who are best able to market themselves to admissions committees.
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Colorado State University has seen the future of higher education, and it has goal posts and end zones.Faced with declining state funding, CSU is raising money to build a $246 million, 40,000-seat football stadium on its Fort Collins campus. University President Tony Frank says the new facility will help build a winning football team while advancing one of the school's highest priorities: attracting more out-of-state students paying higher tuition.
Skeptics, including some alumni and faculty, see the project as a boondoggle--especially for a team that plays in a relatively low-profile athletic conference and doesn't sell out its current 32,500-seat stadium off campus. The debate has sparked dueling websites, animated letters to the editor and arguments about the role of sports at a university.
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As we all prepare for the Napolitano era, the Regents are heading to their favorite meeting place at UCSF (safe from undergraduates) with time to stop off at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There are any number of items to be discussed but first and foremost is the question of the UC budget. There the crucial meeting is Wednesday's Finance Committee Session. Among other items, the Finance Committee is to hear about the long-range budget plan, the expected 2014-2015 budget, and the wondrous accomplishments of the "working smarter initiative." Although we won't know in detail what UCOP is proposing until they actually make their presentations, it is possible to see the general strategies and narratives that UCOP is proposing for budgetary planning and decision-making.As ever, UCOP appears not to know what it wants to say; as a result it continues to alternate in what it is asking of the State and from the University community. But appearances can be deceiving.
If you turn the budget presentations into a narrative it would go something like the following:
After long years of budgetary cuts, Governor Brown has, through his handling of the state's debt, his success in achieving passage of proposition 30, and his willingness to commit to a series of funding increases over the next several years succeeded in staunching the bleeding of budget cuts. In the new state budget UC's general fund increases total $256M in unrestricted funds although $125M of those go for a tuition buy-out. In this way, the state is now in the words of OP: "signify the welcome, necessary return of the State to being a true partner with UC." (3) BUT this "true partnership" is, notable for its stability more than its adequacy. Indeed, at the heart of OP's narrative is the argument that although the State has agreed to helpful increases in funding it is also preventing the University from functioning properly by restricting its ability to raise tuition.
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ZIRP, which Yellen ardently supports, is trickle-down economics: Money, searching for yields higher than bonds offered under ZIRP, floods into stocks, the rising value of which supposedly creates a "wealth effect" -- feelings of prosperity that stimulate spending and investing among the 10 percent who own about 80 percent of all stocks.Interestingly, the Madison School Board recently passed a 2013-2014 budget that features a 4.5% property tax increase, after a 9% increase two years ago.
ZIRP also makes the Fed an indispensable enabler of big government. By making borrowing, and hence deficits, cheap, ZIRP facilitates the political class's bipartisan strategy of delivering current benefits while deferring costs. ZIRP also provides cheap credit to big government's partner, big business.Originally, in 1913, the Fed's mission was price stability -- preserving the currency as a store of value. In 1977,Congress created the "dual mandate," instructing the Fed to maximize employment. This supposedly authorizes the Fed to manipulate the stock market, part of Bernanke's inflation of the dual mandate into "promoting a healthy economy." Is a particular distribution of income unhealthy? The Fed will tell us.
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What do you suggest I do about it?I'm sick of feeling self-conscious every time someone brings up the burden of student loans. I dread being asked what I plan to do after graduation about paying them back. Sometimes I lie. Sometimes I make up a line about praying I find a great job or can pay off my loans by working for the government.
But I'm sick of lying. I'm sick of feeling ashamed for being privileged.
I am in graduate school and am debt free. I have Baby Boomer parents who work hard and did much better than they ever expected in their careers. They wanted to pay for my college and graduate school. They demanded to pay for my college and graduate school.
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Khan Academy is primarily known as an online portal of videos and exercises (we have delivered over 207 million lessons to date). We believe that online learning goes hand in hand with hands-on, project-based learning -- and that's why we decided to run a summer camp, the Discovery Lab, to try out the deeper explorations that can be done in a physical space. As we fine-tune the lessons that work in this setting, we will try to integrate them more deeply into the core Khan Academy platform, so students and teachers around the world have the infrastructure and tools to fully explore their creativity.The Discovery Lab summer camp had 66 campers, ranging from those entering 5th grade all the way to those entering 8th. They participated in a variety of different activities across the two-week camps. We were so glad that we could share our excitement about the topics with them!
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Taxpayers send nearly $2 billion a year to cyber schools that let students from kindergarten through 12th grade receive a free public education entirely online.The schools, many managed by for-profit companies, are great at driving up enrollment with catchy advertising. They excel at lobbying. They have a knack for making generous campaign donations.
But as new state report cards coming out now make clear, there's one thing they're not so good at: educating kids.
In state after state, online school after online school posts dismal scores on math, writing and science tests and mediocre scores on reading. Administrators have long explained their poor results by saying students often come to their schools far behind and make excellent progress online, even if they fall short of passing state tests.
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When other preschool parents bragged that their children had aced the admission test for New York City private schools with a top score of 99 in every section, Justine Oddo stayed quiet. Her twin boys had not done as well."It seemed like everyone got 99s," recalled Ms. Oddo as her sons, now 7, scampered around a playground near Fifth Avenue. "Kids you thought weren't that smart got 99s. It was demoralizing. It made me think my kids are not as smart as the rest of the kids."
Her sons' scores? Between them, they had one 99 and the rest 95s, which would still put them in the top 5 percent of all children nationwide.
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What have I become?" 23-year-old Andrew Jones asked his mom shortly before he died. "What's happened to me?" A star high school athlete who went on to play Division I football for Missouri State University, Andrew was an honors student whom friends described as outgoing, charismatic, and loyal. He was also a heroin addict.Never even a recreational drug user, Andrew had been the first to discourage friends at his Catholic high school from smoking pot. But his story is frighteningly typical of the current heroin epidemic among suburban American youth. It's an issue made all the more timely by the recent heroin-related death of Glee star Cory Monteith, best known and beloved for playing squeaky-clean high school football star Finn Hudson.
What Cory and Andrew expose is that heroin isn't at all what it used to be. Not only is the drug much more powerful than before (purity can be as high as 90 percent) but it's also no longer limited to the dirty-needle, back-alley experience so many of us picture. Now it's as easy as purchasing a pill, because that's what heroin has become: a powder-filled capsule known as a button, designed to be broken open and snorted, that can be purchased for just $10. And it regularly is--on varsity sports teams, on Ivy League campuses, and in safe suburban neighborhoods.
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Last April, when the Yale College Council asked then-President Richard Levin to publicly support lowering the drinking age, the student body laughed. It was absurd, silly, ill-timed. It wouldn't happen, we thought -- and if it did, our voice would certainly sink in the big pond of national politics.But after the inauguration of Peter Salovey -- who has since used his pulpit to speak out on federal issues like immigration, research funding and wealth inequality -- we should no longer laugh too hard.
The YCC's proposal was not preposterous; in fact, it is now right. If our president is indeed serious about making Yale "a leader in reducing high-risk drinking" -- which he said just this past week -- then he cannot duck when it comes to fully committing our school to the big fight on the national stage.
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Six years ago, at a Foxconn plant in Guangdong, China, Mr. Chang used data analysis to figure out that the unusually cold weather outside had led to a high failure rate of the computer chips on the factory floor. The finding saved the company from significant revenue losses.Today, he runs a hedge fund in Cambridge, Mass., that analyzes not only weather, but news and shipping reports, to make investment decisions.
To find more math whizzes who can apply their knowledge of other fields to the financial world, BattleFin's co-founders, Tim Harrington and Brian Tomeo, have created a start-up that they hope will grow into an incubator that organizes finance tournaments and provides capital to "give the little guys a chance.""By creating a tournament, we're able to find these guys who are not on the radar screen of the larger seeders," Mr. Tomeo said.
Hedge funds have long sought out super brains who could apply mathematical concepts to financial markets. The "quant" approach was made famous in the 1970s by Robert C. Merton, Fischer Black and Myron S. Scholes. Their Black-Scholes model, which predicts the future value of stocks and bonds, spawned the growth of hedge funds.
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Teenagers know a lot more about privacy than we think, so what are they trying to tell us when they post?I know which of my teenage students smokes weed in the park after class on Fridays, and which other students are with him. I know which ones are struggling with making friends in their first few weeks at college, and which ones aren't. I know which of my students chafe against overly strict parents on a regular basis. I know which one spends every weekend in the hospital due to a chronic condition. I know which ones got arrested last night.
I know all these things because I follow them all on various social media services. And they know I know; this isn't some kind of stolen glance into the online life of teenagers that no one is supposed to see. Contrary to popular belief among adults, these teenagers are not oblivious to privacy settings and do care a good amount about who can see what online. If anything, most of them have consciously chosen what they want to show to me and the rest of the world through social media. And what they're telling us is who they are and what they need from us as mentors.
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Of the 1.66 million high school students in the class of 2013 who took the SAT, only 43 percent were academically prepared for college-level work, according to this year's SAT Report on College & Career Readiness. For the fifth year in a row, fewer than half of SAT-takers received scores that qualified them as "college-ready."The College Board considers a score of 1550 to be the "College and Career Readiness Benchmark." Students who meet the benchmark are more likely to enroll in a four-year college, more likely to earn a GPA of a B- or higher their freshman year, and more likely to complete their degree.
"While some might see stagnant scores as no news, the College Board considers them a call to action. These scores can and must change -- and the College Board feels a sense of responsibility to help make that happen," the report said.
The report also offered insights into why some students graduated high school prepared for college and others didn't. Students in the class of 2013 who met or exceeded the benchmark were more likely to have completed a core curriculum, to have taken honors or AP courses, and to have taken higher-level mathematics courses, like precalculus, calculus, and trigonometry.
Although the SAT takers in the class of 2013 were the most diverse group of test takers ever, the report showed that minority students' scores have only slightly improved in the past year.
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isconsin State Superintendent of Instruction Tony Evers used the platform of his annual State of Education speech Thursday to respond to skeptics of Common Core standards, whose ranks Republican Gov. Scott Walker joined just a few days earlier.Related: Wisconsin's oft-criticized WKCE assessment and wisconsin2.org"We cannot go back to a time when our standards were a mile wide and an inch deep, leaving too many kids ill prepared for the demands of college and a career. We cannot pull the rug out from under thousands of kids, parents and educators who have spent the past three years working to reach these new, higher expectations that we have set for them. To do so would have deep and far reaching consequences for our kids, and for our state," Evers said in remarks at the State Capitol that also touched on accountability for voucher schools. "We must put our kids above our politics. And we owe it to them to stay the course."
Evers signed on to national Common Core curriculum standards for reading and math in 2010, making Wisconsin one of the first states to adopt them. School districts across the state, including Madison Metropolitan School District, are in the process of implementing them. Madison schools Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham has called Common Core standards "pretty wonderful," and says they are about critical thinking and applying skills to practical tasks.
Walker had been pretty low-key about Common Core until a few days ago, when he issued a statement calling for separate, more rigorous state standards. Republican leaders of both houses of the state Legislature quickly announced special committees to weigh the Common Core standards, and public hearings on not-yet-adopted science and social studies standards will be held, according to one report.
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A couple years ago, Rutgers historian David Greenberg noticed a defect endemic to books about social, political and economic problems: The last chapter always sucks. "Practically every example of that genre, no matter how shrewd or rich its survey of the question at hand, finishes with an obligatory prescription that is utopian, banal, unhelpful or out of tune with the rest of the book," Greenberg noted.And it's not just books. I'll be the first to admit that the possible fixes with which I finished off my series on the alarming rise in college tuition were pretty vague and utopian. But helpfully, the good folks at Third Way have noticed that the conversation about how to reign in tuition has gotten a little too small-minded. "For both parties, in particular Democrats, our solution to the problem of rising cost of college has been to subsidize the rising cost," the think tank's president, Jonathan Cowan, says. "That's been our official policy, to subsidize the rising cost, and that has to be seen as a fairly intellectually bankrupt approach. We need a dramatically different approach that is about driving down the rising price."
To that end, Third Way is publishing a new report by Anya Kamenetz, one of the most interesting writers on higher ed innovation in the game, that lays out a detailed plan for pushing the total cost of a public bachelor's degree down to $10,000. Not $10,000 a year, mind you: $10,000 total. She's not the first to have this idea, as Govs. Rick Perry (R-Tex.), Scott Walker (R-Wis.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) have all proposed $10,000 degrees.
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Wealthy Chinese are hiring American women to serve as surrogates for their children, creating a small but growing business in $120,000 "designer" American babies for China's elite.Surrogacy agencies in China and the United States are catering to wealthy Chinese who want a baby outside the country's restrictive family planning policies, who are unable to conceive themselves, or who are seeking U.S. citizenship for their children.
Emigration as a family is another draw - U.S. citizens may apply for Green Cards for their parents when they turn 21.
While there is no data on the total number of Chinese who have sought or used U.S. surrogates, agencies in both countries say demand has risen rapidly in the last two years.U.S. fertility clinics and surrogacy agencies are creating Chinese-language websites and hiring Mandarin speakers.
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"The idea that suddenly at 18 you're an adult just doesn't quite ring true," says child psychologist Laverne Antrobus, who works at London's Tavistock Clinic."My experience of young people is that they still need quite a considerable amount of support and help beyond that age."
Child psychologists are being given a new directive which is that the age range they work with is increasing from 0-18 to 0-25.
"We are becoming much more aware and appreciating development beyond [the age of 18] and I think it's a really good initiative," says Antrobus, who believes we often rush through childhood, wanting our youngsters to achieve key milestones very quickly.
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The bipartisan education reform movement sweeping the nation calls for opening up public schools to free-market competition. That has meant sending billions of tax dollars to private, for-profit companies to educate kids.But the companies do more than pay teachers, develop curriculum and buy supplies with all that revenue.
They use it as a launchpad for new products, new brands and new markets.
Consider K12 Inc
Posted by Jim Zellmer at 12:09 AM | Comments (0) Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom:
I sat down last week in Washington with Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, and Mitch Daniels, the former Indiana governor and current Purdue University president, after they had met with several dozen chief executives of big companies to talk about education. Their meeting was at the office of the Business Roundtable, the corporate lobbying group, and joining us for the conversation was John Engler, the former Michigan governor who runs the Business Roundtable.Related: Madison's long time disastrous reading scores and wisconsin2.orgNeilson Barnard/Getty Images, for The New York Time Education Secretary Arne Duncan
Mr. Duncan is a Democrat, of course, and Mr. Daniels and Mr. Engler are Republicans. But they all sympathize with many of the efforts of the so-called education reform movement. I asked them whether the country's education system was really in crisis and what mistakes school reformers had made. A lightly edited version of the first part of our conversation follows; the second part will appear on Economix on Thursday.Leonhardt: You always hear we're in crisis. But what is the bad news, and what is the good news, and are we making any progress?
Duncan: I do think we have a crisis. I do feel tremendous urgency. If you look at any international comparison - which in a global economy is much more important than 30 or 40 years ago - on no indicator are we anywhere near where we want to be. Whether it's test scores or college graduation rates, whatever it is, we're not close. So we've got a long way to go. That's the challenge.
Why I am hopeful is we have seen some real progress. Some things are going the right way. The question is how do we accelerate that progress. College graduations rates are up some. High school graduation rates are up to 30-year highs, which is a big step in the right direction.
The African-American/Latino community is driving much of that improvement, which is very, very important. There is a huge reduction in the number of kids going to dropout factories. We are seeing real progress. The question is how do we get better faster.
Daniels: I am glad that the secretary didn't pull any punches. I don't know any other way to read it. In Indiana, we just had, by far, the best results we've ever seen in our state. Everything was up. The high-school graduation rate is up 10 percent in just four years. Test scores, advanced-placement scores too. But we're just nowhere near where we need to be. And the competition is not standing still. So we need many more years of progress at the current rate, and it still maybe too slow. I'm afraid this is a half-empty analysis, but I think it's an honest one.
Engler: The president of Purdue and the president of the Business Roundtable - we are the consumer groups here at the table. All the products of K-12 system are either going to go to the university or they are going to the work force. The military is not here, but they're not very different.
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COULD America survive the end of the American Dream? The idea is unthinkable, say political leaders of right and left. Yet it is predicted in "Average is Over", a bracing new book by Tyler Cowen, an economist. Mr Cowen is no stranger to controversy. In 2011 he galvanised Washington with "The Great Stagnation", in which he argued that America has used up the low-hanging fruit of free land, abundant labour and new technologies. His new book suggests that the disruptive effects of automation and ever-cheaper computer power have only just begun to be felt.It describes a future largely stripped of middling jobs and broad prosperity. An elite 10-15% of Americans will have the brains and self-discipline to master tomorrow's technology and extract profit from it, he speculates. They will enjoy great wealth and stimulating lives. Others will endure stagnant or even falling wages, as employers measure their output with "oppressive precision". Some will thrive as service-providers to the rich. A few will claw their way into the elite (cheap online education will be a great leveller), bolstering the idea of a "hyper-meritocracy" at work: this "will make it easier to ignore those left behind".
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The New Jersey Department of Education has proposed raising the required college GPA for new teachers to 3.0, or a "B" average. The higher cut-off -- NJ currently requires a 2.5 -will "ensure [that] all novice teachers meet a minimum bar for knowledge and pedagogical skills before entering the classroom," explained the DOE in a memo circulated last week.Simple, right? Raise the bar for selection of teachers and, thus, raise teacher quality.
It should be so easy. The DOE's proposal is not simple but simplistic, a facile sound-bite, (remember, it's election silly-season) that does nothing to elevate the teaching profession.
Of course we all want to recruit and retain great teachers. But can we glean the potential of prospective educators from their college transcripts? Is a 3.0 at an undistinguished school that liberally distributes "A's" equivalent to a 3.0 at, say, Rutgers or College of New Jersey? Are GPAs lenses for discerning teacher potential? And, given all the slings and arrows thrust by the Christie Administration towards public school staff -- stiffening of tenure laws, data-driven evaluations, Common Core implementation -- is the timing right for a gratuitous barb?
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The scene at home football games here at the University of Georgia is almost perfect. The tailgate lots open at 7 a.m. Locals brag of the bar-per-capita rate. The only commodities in greater abundance than beer are the pro-Bulldogs buttons that sorority girls wear.There's just one problem: Some students can't be bothered to come to the games.
Declining student attendance is an illness that has been spreading for years nationwide. But now it has hit the Southeastern Conference, home to college football's best teams and supposedly its most fervent fans, giving athletics officials reason to fret about future ticket sales and fundraising.
As it turns out, Georgia students left empty 39% of their designated sections of Sanford Stadium over the last four seasons, according to school records of student-ticket scans. Despite their allocation of about 18,000 seats, the number of students at games between 2009 and 2012 never exceeded 15,000.
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Wisconsin spends approximately $3.1 billion annually in health care costs related to obesity, the state's adult obesity rate has doubled since 1990, and one in four Wisconsin high school students are overweight or obese, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.Rep. Chad Weininger, R-Green Bay, is drafting a bill that he said could help change these "unfortunate" statistics by increasing the amount of physical activity required of students during the school week as early as the 2014-2015 school year.
Currently, students in kindergarten through sixth grade have scheduled physical education classes three times a week while students in seventh and eighth grade have the class once a week. High schoolers must earn 1.5 credits of physical education in order to graduate.
"What we're seeing is that's really not working anymore. Society is changing," Weininger said.
Weininger said pickup games of basketball, like the ones he used to have after school, are a thing of the past because parents work longer days and children go home, grab a snack and sit in front of the television until their parents arrive, contributing to the current obesity rate.
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Listen up children: Cheating on your homework or cribbing notes from another student is bad, but not as bad as sharing a music track with a friend, or otherwise depriving the content-industry of its well-earned profits.That's one of the messages in a new-school curriculum being developed with the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America and the nation's top ISPs, in a pilot project to be tested in California elementary schools later this year.
A near-final draft of the curriculum, obtained by WIRED, shows that it comes in different flavors for every grade from kindergarten through sixth, to keep pace with your developing child's ability to understand that copying is theft, period.
"This thinly disguised corporate propaganda is inaccurate and inappropriate," says Mitch Stoltz, an intellectual property attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who reviewed the material at WIRED's request.
"It suggests, falsely, that ideas are property and that building on others' ideas always requires permission," Stoltz says. "The overriding message of this curriculum is that students' time should be consumed not in creating but in worrying about their impact on corporate profits."
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Revenues from state and local individual income taxes, general sales and gross receipt taxes, motor fuel taxes, motor vehicle taxes and taxes on alcoholic beverages each hit all-time highs in the second quarter of this year, according to data released today by the Census Bureau.That means that in no quarter of any year since the Census Bureau first started tracking state and local tax revenues in 1962 have Americans paid more in each of these categories of state and local taxes then they did in the quarter that ran from April through June of 2013.
Americans paid a record of $114.032 billion in state and local individual income taxes in the second quarter of this year, according to the Census Bureau. That was up $7.787 billion--or 7.3 percent--from the previous all-time record of $106.245 billion in state and local individual income taxes that Americans paid in the second quarter of 2008.
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The College Board, sponsor of the SAT, says that roughly six out of 10 college-bound high school students who took the test were so lacking in their reading, writing and math skills, they were unprepared for college level work.
The College Board is calling for big changes to better prepare students for college and career.
Stagnant Scores
The average SAT score this year was 1498 out of a possible 2400. It's been roughly the same for the last five years.
"And we at the College Board are concerned," says David Coleman, the board's president.
In a conference call with reporters, Coleman said his biggest concern is the widening gap in scores along racial and ethnic lines. This year Asian students had the highest overall average scores in reading, writing and math, followed by whites, and then Latinos. Black students had the lowest average scores. Coleman said it's time to do something about it, not just sit back and report how poorly prepared students are for college and career.
"Simply put, the College Board will go beyond simply delivering assessments to actually transforming the daily work that students are doing," Coleman says.
Coleman wants to work with schools to make coursework tougher and make sure students have access to more demanding honors and advanced placement courses, because right now, most students don't. Most worrisome of all, Coleman says, "minority students, underrepresented students, have less access." more
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Ratan Dey, Yuan Ding & Keith Ross (PDF):
The authors investigate three high schools' student bodies' presence on social media; one of the more interesting findings, in a nutshell: Because some kids lie about their age to get Facebook accounts early, Facebook incorrectly perceives them as adults, while they're still minors in high school... that provides others with more access to information about them than FB would normally reveal for a child, including information about other minor friends who hadn't misstated their ages.
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Why pay thousands of dollars to sit in a stuffy university lecture hall as a professor drones away in front of bored students when you could instead take some of the world's greatest courses online? For free?A handful of startups and university-backed nonprofits are starting to deliver on that proposition--one that could upend higher education, not to mention the plans of millions of students who are aiming to position themselves for employment in today's digital economy. Of course, the trend is still in its infancy, with big challenges ahead where student retention, university cooperation and business models are concerned.
But proponents of the online-education revolution aren't shy about their ambitions. Sebastian Thrun, a former Stanford professor who co-founded the startup Udacity two years ago, reportedly believes that in 50 years, there will only be 10 institutions in the world providing higher education--with Udacity, of course, potentially one of them.
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What separates the high achievers from the also ran's, the scorers from the mediocre, the successful from the ordinary. The answer greatly lies in the habits practiced by them over and over again so much so that they become intertwined with their personality.Do you find it difficult sometimes to even achieve your most conservative goals? Have you worked really hard for a goal, burnt the midnight oil and toiled for months over it and still didn't achieve it. It's a horrible feeling to have tried and failed, it really sucks but the important takeaway is to know what you lacked and identify the stone you left unturned to make sure your next effort meets success.
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Norm Augustine, former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, former Pentagon official, former just about everything defense-related, was invited earlier this month to tackle the topic of the greatest threats to the United States. Speaking to the Johns Hopkins Rethinking Seminar Series, he delivered a forceful critique of the U.S. education system.Related: www.wisconsin2.orgFor the most part, he cited the figures we have oft heard but choose to not think about due to the herculean nature of reform. Test scores this year have reached a record low. U.S. students from the Class of 2011 ranked 32nd out of 34 OECD countries participating in the international PISA test. California has raised tuition and fees for higher education by 65 percent in the past three years.
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Smiley and seven other district leaders will head to China next month to continue developing relationships with schools there. Their goal is to recruit students and fill open desks due to declining enrollment over the last decade in the district.Fascinating."Last year was the first year that we started to trend upward just a little bit. But declining enrollment means declining funds," said Dr. Karen Schulte, Janesville School District superintendent.
The international students would help the district financially because the students would pay tuition to the district instead of paying a private company to come to the United States.
"Out tuition for the School District of Janesville is around $9,000, between $9,000 and $10,000. So if we're charging upwards of $20,000-$30,000, you can see the possibility of generating some revenue," said Schulte.
Board member Bill Sodemann said he supports the program because it will help graduates compete in a global economy. The district currently has 400 students enrolled in Chinese language courses.
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Aidan's father, Tim Clark, told WAVY.com what happened next lacks commons sense. The children were suspended for possession, handling and use of a firearm. On Tuesday, that offense was changed by school officials to possession, handling and use of an airsoft gun.Khalid's mother, Solangel Caraballo, thinks it is ridiculous the Virginia Beach City Public School System suspended her 13-year-old son and his friends because they were firing a spring-driven airsoft gun on the Caraballo's private property.
"My son is my private property," she said. "He does not become the school's property until he goes to the bus stop, gets on the bus, and goes to school."
The bus stop in question is 70 yards from the Caraballo's front yard.
Solangel Caraballo was not at home when this incident occurred. She was taking her younger son to a Head Start class. She left her 16-year -old daughter in charge.
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Do we really need more science grads?It's an easy question to answer for politicians, university officials, conference speakers, and just about anybody whose job is to talk about American competitiveness for money. It's rote that we need more STEM students - more science, technology, engineering and math grads - sprinting off American campuses into the labor force. But according to the data, employers don't like paying science grads quite as much as we like talking about them.
Is STEM one letter too long?
Wage data in several states show that employers are paying more -- often far more -- for techies (i.e.: computer science majors), engineers, and math grads. But no evidence suggests that biology majors, the most popular science field of study, earn a wage premium. Chemistry graduates earn somewhat more than biology grads, but still don't command the wages that are quite TEM-quality.
This conclusion is based on detailed information from Texas, Colorado and Virginia. All three states have linked data about graduate programs with wage data from their unemployment insurance systems through College Measures. Very important to note upfront is that these wages are early career earnings. Many science students go on to medical school or continue with doctoral studies. Biology majors that go on to become, for example, anesthesiologists will be very rich, indeed. But the number of advanced degrees in these fields is dwarfed by the flood of science bachelor's (and associate's and master's degrees).
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Max Russell had always been a conscientious student, but when his father died during his junior year of high school, he had to take on a 25-hour-per-week job to help his family pay the bills. The gig inevitably ate into the time he spent on homework, and Russell's G.P.A. plummeted from 3.5 to 2.5, which complicated his ability to get the aid he needed to attend a four-year college. So he ended up at Ivy Tech Community College in Indianapolis. Last year, after finally qualifying for student loans and cobbling together some grant money, he transferred to Purdue University, one of the state's top public schools.At Purdue, Russell reconnected with Christopher Bosma, a friend from high school. Bosma's family was considerably wealthier, but his entire tuition was free -- as will be medical-school costs. An outstanding high-school student, he received a prestigious merit scholarship that covered both. Russell told me that he believed the two friends are about "equivalent in intelligence" but acknowledged that Bosma studied much harder in high school. He was unusually driven, he said, but it probably didn't hurt that Bosma had the luxury of not having to help support his family.
Over the years, many state-university systems -- and even states themselves -- have shifted more of their financial aid away from students who need it toward those whose résumés merit it. The share of state aid that's not based on need has nearly tripled in the last two decades, to 29 percent per full-time student in 2010-11. The stated rationale, of course, is that merit scholarships motivate high-school achievement and keep talented students in state. The consequence, however, is that more aid is helping kids who need it less. Merit metrics like SAT scores tend to closely correlate with family income; about 1 in 5 students from households with income over $250,000 receives merit aid from his or her school. For families making less than $30,000, it's 1 in 10.
Schools don't seem to mind. After years of state-funding cuts, many recognize that wealthy students can bring in more money even after getting a discount. Raising the tuition and then offering a 25 percent scholarship to four wealthier kids who might otherwise have gone to private school generates more revenue than giving a free ride to one who truly needs it. Incidentally, enticing these students also helps boost a school's rankings. "The U.S. News rankings are based largely on the student inputs," said Donald Heller, dean of Michigan State University's College of Education. "The public universities in general, and the land grants in particular, are moving away from their historical mission to serve a broad swath of families across the state."
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With their relentless pursuit of prestige and revenue, the nation's public and private four-year colleges and universities are in danger of shutting down what has long been a pathway to the middle class for low-income and working-class students. This report presents a new analysis of little-examined U.S. Department of Education data showing the "net price" -- the amount students pay after all grant aid has been exhausted -- for low-income students at thousands of individual colleges. The anal- ysis shows that hundreds of colleges expect the neediest students to pay an amount that is equal to or even more than their families' yearly earnings. As a result, these students are left with little choice but to take on heavy debt loads or engage in activi- ties that lessen their likelihood of earning their degrees, such as working full-time while enrolled or dropping out until they can afford to return.
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To determine if a college degree is worth the money, states, private companies and the federal government are looking less to diplomas and more to pay stubs.The Obama administration and a growing number of states have embraced the idea that graduates' earnings in the years after graduation can measure the quality of a college or major. Systems to display wages by college and program are gaining steam and growing in sophistication. They could transform how Americans evaluate the value of a college education -- and, eventually, whether state and federal governments will pay for it.
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Johns Hopkins avoids controversy.We reaffirmed this fact two weeks ago when the University attempted to remove faculty member Matthew Green's blog post regarding the National Security Administration, an act of censorship to which Johns Hopkins students responded with negligible dialogue. While the incident occurred on September 9, the campus newspaper The News-Letter did not publish a related article until September 12, a shameful four days after the story surfaced, and failed to write an editorial response for yet another day. In an age in which we are accustomed to news access as it unfolds, delayed and limited coverage is dangerous, as it perpetuates a problem on our campus whereby students do not recognize the actions of the administration, and as a result become complicit in them.
Beyond this act of academic censorship, the University has a disturbing record of evading controversy. For many years, the administration deliberately reported zero cases of sexual assault in the Annual Campus Security Report, a claim that is statistically impossible given that the Department of Justice estimates that one in four college women will be victims of rape or attempted rape before graduation. The University does not publicize the Report out of its own volition; it is federally mandated to do so under the Clery Act.
Only in the past academic year did the University begin to publish any evidence of sexual assault in its report. The sole case reported that year was perpetrated by a University non-affiliate. As such, the incident did not reflect poorly on campus dynamics; the administration was able to cast blame onto the surrounding city.
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A midday nap can help pre-school children remember what they learned in the morning, according to a study by psychologists in the US.The research suggests that carers and nurseries that phase out after-lunch sleeps may be harming children's ability to learn, by disrupting the way their brains store memories.
Pre-schoolers who went without a midday sleep fared worse on memory tests than those who napped. They also failed to improve their scores even after a good night's sleep, the researchers found.
The findings highlight the crucial role of sleep in consolidating memories, a process that underpins the brain's ability to learn new information.
The children who benefited most were "habitual nappers" who would sleep when carers encouraged them to, rather than more mature children who had outgrown the need for a nap.
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Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said Tuesday that regardless of what the Department of Justice is claiming, his state is no closer to a resolution in a school voucher lawsuit that has appalled high-profile conservative school choice advocates.The Justice Department sent a letter Tuesday to House Speaker John Boehner, saying the state has agreed to hand over information that the federal government has wanted for a while about the voucher program's effect on the racial makeup of participating schools. That move might bring both parties closer to a resolution over the August suit, the letter said.
"...Louisiana agreed to provide information on the voucher program that the department had originally requested in May 2013 and that the state had, up until now, largely withheld. This is thus a major step forward and puts the parties on a path to resolving the primary issue that motivated the department's court filing in the first place," the DOJ letter to Boehner reads. "We are pleased that Louisiana finally has agreed to provide the necessary information to the department. It is only regrettable that the department had to resort to court involvement in this case in order to obtain it."
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A Florida high school student made a stand against bullying and is now in the hot seat with school officials. For months, 18-year-old Stormy Rich witnessed a girl with special needs being bullied by her peers on the way to school. "They would be mean to her, tell her she couldn't sit on certain spots on the bus...just because she doesn't understand doesn't mean that should be happening to her," Rich told WOFL-TV.Rich says she reported the incidents to the bus driver and school officials. When they didn't take action, she stepped in and confronted the bullies; but instead of being praised for her efforts, Rich ended up being labeled as a bully, and her bus-riding privileges were revoked. A spokesperson for the school district said, "Two wrongs don't make a right" and that the girl with special needs never complained about being bullied.
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While the British summer sun was shining more brightly than it had in years, a stormy email arrived about English grammar."The whole downward process could well be becoming virtually irreversible," my correspondent said. "My experience is very much that the teachers, anyway in England (and I expect it is even worse in the US), now are incapable of teaching grammar and the proper writing of English, having themselves never been taught it."
Commenting on a column I wrote asking why parents were not more worried about their children's poor writing, he said: "I am not really surprised . . . So many of them - probably virtually all of them - will not have been taught grammar and writing, possibly at all but anyway properly, when they were at school, and therefore will have little or no idea of the importance and benefits of it."
My emailer was NM Gwynne, author of a popular book called Gwynne's Grammar. A former businessman, Mr Gwynne is now a teacher of everything from Latin to starting your own business, but is particularly in demand to teach English grammar to pupils aged "from two years old to over 70".
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The four-point gains D.C. public school students achieved citywide on the most recent annual math and reading tests were acclaimed as historic, as more evidence that the city's approach to improving schools is working.But the math gains officials reported were the result of a quiet decision to score the tests in a way that yielded higher scores even though D.C. students got far fewer math questions correct than in the year before.
The decision was made after D.C. teachers recommended a new grading scale -- which would have held students to higher standards on tougher math tests -- and after officials reviewed projections that the new scale would result in a significant decline in math proficiency rates.
Instead, city officials chose to discard the new grading approach and hold students to a level of difficulty similar to previous years', according to city officials as well as e-mails and documents obtained by The Washington Post.
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Madison Teachers, Inc., via a kind Jeannie Bettner email:
MTI prevailed last year in a Circuit Court decision in which Judge Juan Colas found much of Act 10, what Governor Walker referred to as his "bomb" on public employee unions, to violate the Constitution. That decision is on appeal to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the Walker administration and his appointed Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission has simply thumbed their nose at Colas' ruling and vowed to continue forcing unions to conduct annual elections, wherein a union is decertified if it does not receive 50%+1 of those eligible to vote, not just 50%+1 of those voting as in every other election.In a September 17, 2013 ruling, Judge Colas told Governor Walker and the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission's commissioners that a Circuit Court decision, while they may not like it or agree with it, is precedential and must be followed throughout the State. Colas said, "The question here is not whether other courts or non-parties are bound by this court's ruling. It is whether the defendants are bound by it." WERC was a named defendant in MTI's suit, so as all defendants to a lawsuit are, and in a case in which the statute was found facially unconstitutional, they (WERC) are barred from enforcing Act 10 under any circumstances, against anyone.
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If college professors spent less time lecturing, would their students do better?
A three-year study examining student performance in a "flipped classroom" -- a class in which students watch short lecture videos at home and work on activities during class time -- has found statistically significant gains in student performance in "flipped" settings and significant student preference for "flipped" methods.The study, provided exclusively toThe Atlantic, is one of the first to examine a "flipped" classroom in the current state of its technology. Russell Mumper, a Vice Dean at the University of North Carolina's Eshelman School of Pharmacy, conducted the study, and two separate articles based on its findings are now in press in the journals Academic Medicine and The American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education. The education technology company Echo360, whose technology was used in the classes examined, funded the study with a $10,000 grant.
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Once upon a time, all children were homeschooled. But around 150 years ago states started making public school mandatory and homeschooling eventually became illegal. It wasn't until the 90's that all states made it legal again. Today, with more than 2 million homeschoolers making up 4% of the school-aged population, it's the fastest growing form of education in the country.HOMESCHOOL HISTORY
1840: 55% of children attended primary school while the rest were educated in the home or by tutors.
1852: The "Common School" model became popular and Massachusetts became the first state to pass compulsory attendance law. Once compulsory attendance laws became effective, America eventually relied entirely on public and private schools for educating children. Homeschooling then became something only practiced by extremely rural families, and within Amish communities.
1870: All states had free primary schools.
1900: 34 states had compulsory attendance laws.
1910: 72% of children attended primary school.
1960: Educational reformers started questioning public schooling's methods and results.
1977: "Growing Without Schooling" magazine was published, marking a shift from trying to reform public education to abandoning it.
1980: Homeschooling was illegal in 30 states.
1983: Changes in tax law forced many Christian Schools to close which led to soaring homeschooling rates.
1993: Homeschooling become legal in all 50 states and saw annual growth rates of 15-20%.
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Rajashri Chakrabarti and Max Livingston
A key institution that was significantly affected by the Great Recession is the school system, which plays a crucial role in building human capital and shaping the country's economic future. To prevent major cuts to education, the federal government allocated $100 billion to schools as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), commonly known as the stimulus package. However, the stimulus has wound down while many sectors of the economy are still struggling, leaving state and local governments with budget squeezes. In this post, we present some key findings on how school finances in New York State fared during this period, drawing on our recent study and a series of interactive graphics. As the stimulus ended, school district funding fell dramatically and districts across the state enacted significant cuts across the board, affecting not only noninstructional spending but also instructional spending--the category most closely related to student learning.
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On Sept. 1, Margaret Mary Vojtko, an adjunct professor who had taught French at Duquesne University for 25 years, passed away at the age of 83. She died as the result of a massive heart attack she suffered two weeks before. As it turned out, I may have been the last person she talked to.On Aug. 16, I received a call from a very upset Margaret Mary. She told me that she was under an incredible amount of stress. She was receiving radiation therapy for the cancer that had just returned to her, she was living nearly homeless because she could not afford the upkeep on her home, which was literally falling in on itself, and now, she explained, she had received another indignity -- a letter from Adult Protective Services telling her that someone had referred her case to them saying that she needed assistance in taking care of herself. The letter said that if she did not meet with the caseworker the following Monday, her case would be turned over to Orphans' Court.
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The most obvious and well-reported casualties of the last decade in program-slashing educational policy include traditional elective courses like art, music, and physical education. But these are not the only subjects being squeezed out or eliminated entirely from many public K-12 curriculums.Social studies--a category that includes courses in history, geography, and civics--has also found itself on the chopping block. Whereas in the 1993-1994 school year students spent 9.5 percent of their time in social studies, by 2003-2004 that percentage had dropped to 7.6, despite an increase of total instructional time.
Why has a traditionally "core subject", which was ranked in the same academic hierarchy as English, science, and math for decades, been sidelined in thousands of American classrooms?
The shift in curriculum began in the early years of the Cold War. While U.S. military and technological innovation brought World War II to a close, it was a later use of technology--the Soviet launching of Sputnik in 1957--that historian Thomas A. Bailey called the equivalent of a "psychological Pearl Harbor" for many Americans. It created deep feelings of inadequacy and a belief that the U.S. was falling behind in developing new technology and weapons, which led to the passage of the 1958 National Defense Education Act. This legislation pumped $1 billion over four years into math and science programs in both K-12 schools and universities.
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athryn Fishnick said she has more empathy for her Horizon Elementary School students who are not native English speakers after taking a trip to Myanmar this summer to help evaluate the country's educational system."We can talk to our students about putting yourself in other people's shoes," added Ali Armstrong, a school counselor and another participant on the trip.
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Alison Gopnik
Changes in our environment can actually transform the relation between our traits and the outside world.
We all notice that some people are smarter than others. You might naturally wonder how much these differences in intelligence depend on genes or upbringing. But that question, it turns out, is impossible to answer. That's because changes in our environment can actually transform the relationship among our traits, our upbringing and our genes.
The textbook illustration of this is a dreadful disease called PKU. Some babies have a genetic mutation that makes them unable to process an amino acid in their food, and it leads to severe mental retardation. For centuries, PKU was incurable. Genetics determined whether someone suffered from the syndrome, which gave them a low IQ. Then scientists discovered how PKU works. Now, we can immediately put babies with the mutation on a special diet. Whether a baby with PKU has a low IQ is now determined by the food they eat--by their environment.
We humans can figure out how our environment works and act to change it, as we did with PKU. So if you're trying to measure the relative influence of human nature and nurture, you have to consider not just the current environment but also all the possible environments that we can create. This doesn't just apply to obscure diseases. In the latest issue of Psychological Science, Timothy C. Bates of the University of Edinburgh and colleagues report a study of the relationship among genes, SES (socio-economic status, or how rich and educated you are) and IQ. They used statistics to analyze the differences between identical twins, who share all DNA, and fraternal twins, who share only some.
When psychologists first started studying twins, they found identical twins much more likely to have similar IQs than fraternal ones. They concluded that IQ was highly "heritable"--that is, due to genetic differences. But those were all high SES twins. Erik Turkheimer of the University of Virginia and his colleagues discovered that the picture was very different for poor, low-SES twins. For these children, there was very little difference between identical and fraternal twins: IQ was hardly heritable at all. Differences in the environment, like whether you lucked out with a good teacher, seemed to be much more important.
In the new study, the Bates team found this was even true when those children grew up. IQ was much less heritable for people who had grown up poor. This might seem paradoxical: After all, your DNA stays the same no matter how you are raised. The explanation is that IQ is influenced by education. Historically, absolute IQ scores have risen substantially as we've changed our environment so that more people go to school longer.
Richer children have similarly good educational opportunities, so genetic differences among them become more apparent. And since richer children have more educational choice, they (or their parents) can choose environments that accentuate and amplify their particular skills. A child who has genetic abilities that make her just slightly better at math may be more likely to take a math class, so she becomes even better at math.
But for poor children, haphazard differences in educational opportunity swamp genetic differences. Ending up in a terrible school or one a bit better can make a big difference. And poor children have fewer opportunities to tailor their education to their particular strengths. How your genes shape your intelligence depends on whether you live in a world with no schooling at all, a world where you need good luck to get a good education or a world with rich educational possibilities. If we could change the world for the PKU babies, we can change it for the next generation of poor children, too.
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The blue on that map should represent areas where you can exercise your right to free speech. Unfortunately, for many college students, their "Free Speech Zone" shrinks considerably when on campus. One out of every six major colleges have designated "Free Speech Zones" where students are "permitted" to "enjoy" this Constitutional right, and even then there are restrictions. In these colleges, exercising your right to free speech means asking permission at least a couple of days in advance as well as having the administration "approve" your speech.
The latest example of confined and controlled speech comes to us courtesy of Modesto Junior College. As FIRE.org reports, a student found his exercise of free speech shut down on one of the worst days of the year for a college to assert its negative attitude towards the First Amendment.
In a stunning illustration of the attitude taken towards free speech by too many colleges across the United States, Modesto Junior College in California told a student that he could not pass out copies of the United States Constitution outside the student center on September 17, 2013--Constitution Day. Captured on video, college police and administrators demanded that Robert Van Tuinen stop passing out Constitution pamphlets and told him that he would only be allowed to pass them out in the college's tiny free speech zone, and only after scheduling it several days or weeks ahead of time.After 10 minutes of handing out these pamphlets, Van Tuinen was approached by a campus police officer. After some discussion regarding the ridiculousness of shutting down free speech on Constitution Day and Van Tuinen's repeated assertion of his rights, the campus cop tells him to take it up with administration.
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Results of a study in a Swedish population have linked grandpa's age to an increased risk of autism in grandchildren. More specifically, the study authors found that men who sired children at age 50 or older were almost twice as likely as younger fathers to have an autistic grandchild.According to the report, published in JAMA Psychiatry (full text here), lead author Emma Frans and colleagues looked at births in Sweden beginning in 1932. Among the tens of thousands of births, the database they used had information about grandparental age for almost 6000 autism cases and for almost 31,000 controls (families with no autistic children). Grandpas who had a daughter when they were 50 or older were 1.79 times more likely to have an autistic grandchild, and if they had a son at age 50 or older, the grandfathers were 1.67 times more likely to have an autistic grandchild. It didn't seem to matter if grandpa was on the mother's side or the father's side of the family.
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Half of US college students are the first in their family to go to university. We asked them to tell us about their experiences.Last week, Julia James wrote about the challenges of being a first-generation college student - and how being the first in her family to attend university shaped her academic experience. As a part of our growing series Opening Up,we asked other first generation college students to weigh in, and tell us about their struggles, and what support colleges need to provide students like them.
Here are their stories:
'The idea of going to college was alien'
Name: Kyle Brown
Degree: Computer Science, California State University, Chico
Age: 47
Challenges: Getting started was the biggest single issue - the idea of going to college was alien. Problem number one was the idea of going to school for an extended time. It was just not in my family's culture. My mom suggested it while I was on disability, wondering what next. Community college was an easy first step. From there, I transferred to Chico for a four-year degree. All very new and alien.
Financial assistance: Finances worked themselves out. It was never a serious issue, even though my family was quite poor. Financial aid covered maybe 50% of costs, disability payments maybe 30%, and family members (thanks grandma!) helped with the rest.Benefits: I make comfortably more money than anyone else in my family. Secondarily, it has changed the culture in the family. Extended education is not alien anymore, and is an option that gets serious consideration by everyone.
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Imagine you're a brand-new Porsche in 2011. You're sitting in a dealership, being test-driven by many enamored consumers but never purchased. Later you hear that the 2011 Toyota Camry outsold the Lexus 1.5 to 1, the Cadillac 2 to 1, and the Porsche 10 to 1. You ask yourself: Was it worth being an impressive, expensive car, if no one ever buys you?That ironic situation is very real for many Ph.D.'s. I faced it myself after getting my master's and doctorate in computer science from Stanford University, where I built software that revolutionized the study of human movement, became an early expert and core developer of software featured inScientific American, and was one of four Ph.D.'s chosen from Stanford's engineering school for a research award.
Having learned after numerous discussions with professors that an academic career wasn't realistic for my area of focus, I turned my attention to industry. Stanford's tech-oriented departments drill into their students the idea that they will have no trouble getting a job in industry: The average Ph.D. student gets three job offers.
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It is something about human nature.An individual does fabulously well in some endeavor, often gaining great wealth and power, and they assume their competencies extend to other areas. Like education. And as I will show, a bunch of wealthy folks are determined to ensure that the Seattle School Board follows their "corporate-ed" ideas.
A critical race is now occurring for an opening in the Seattle School Board. On one hand there is Suzanne Estey, with very little experience in Seattle School affairs, but enjoying the deep support of the ultra wealthy and powerful interests. On the other, there is Sue Peters, with a decade-long record of working in Seattle Public Schools, a stellar background in pushing for better math curriculum, a record of independence, and grass roots financial support. For reasons described below, I am strongly supporting Sue Peters, with whom I have worked for several years.
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Soon, you'll be able to learn zombie apocalypse survival skills from AMC's The Walking Dead. The University of California at Irvine is offering an eight-week online course in partnership with the series. AMC isn't the first media company to push into education. At least two dozen others have tried before. They won't be the last, either. Forbes and Atlantic Media, which owns The Atlantic, are also gearing-up to launch online learning programs.Most media companies getting into education wind up learning some hard lessons themselves: Education is a very different business from media. And succeeding takes a lot more than having a well-known brand, built-in audience and high-quality content.
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Boston Teachers Union Contract (PDF) Wordcloud: 
Long Beach Teachers Union Contract (PDF) Wordcloud: 
Madison Teachers Union Contract (PDF) Wordcloud: 
Boston Teachers Union
Teachers Association of Long Beach
Madison Teachers, Inc.
Related: Comparing Madison, Boston & Long Beach Public Schools, Part 1: Student/Teacher Ratio
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Last week, two of my neighbors sent their 5-year-olds on the school bus for the first time. The families were excited but also mildly terrified. I look back fondly on kindergarten--I remember soaring around the playground as an eagle with my friend Kathleen--but kindergarten today is a vastly different beast than it was 30 years ago. Many schools have ditched play-based exploratory programs in favor of direct instruction and regular testing, in part thanks to the pressure to improve grade-school test scores. As many experts I spoke to for this column told me, kindergarten is the new first grade.Perhaps it's unsurprising, then, that an estimated 9 percent of parents don't send their 5-year-olds to kindergarten anymore. They wait a year so that their savvy 6-year-olds can better handle the curriculum. This so-called "academic redshirting," a nod to the practice of keeping young athletes on the bench until they are bigger and more skilled, is highly controversial. The National Association of Early Childhood Specialists and the National Association for the Education of Young Children fiercely oppose it, saying that redshirting "labels children as failures at the outset of their school experience." Studies that have evaluated how well redshirted kids fare compared to their schooled-on-time peers conclude that redshirting provides no long-term academic or social advantages and can even put kids at a disadvantage.
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I have followed William in my therapy practice for close to a decade. His story is a prime example of the type of brainy, mentally gifted, single-minded, willful boys who often are falsely diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder when they are assessed as young children. This unfortunate occurrence is partly due to defining autism as a "spectrum disorder," incorporating mild and severe cases of problematic social communication and interaction, as well as restricted interests and behavior. In its milder form, especially among preschool- and kindergarten-age boys, it is tough to distinguish between early signs of autism spectrum disorder and indications that we have on our hands a young boy who is a budding intellectual, is more interested in studying objects than hanging out with friends, overvalues logic, is socially awkward unless interacting with others who share identical interests or is in a leadership role, learns best when obsessed with a topic, and is overly businesslike and serious in how he socializes. The picture gets even more complicated during the toddler years, when normal, crude assertions of willfulness, tantrums, and lapses in verbal mastery when highly emotional are in full swing. As we shall see, boys like William, who embody a combination of emerging masculine braininess and a difficult toddlerhood, can be fair game for a mild diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, when it does not apply.
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The drumbeat is hard to miss: Our schools are failing. Public education is in crisis. Our students are falling further and further behind.The rhetoric comes from the left and right, from educators and politicians and lobbyists and CEOs and even Education Secretary Arne Duncan. The deep dysfunction of our public schools is said to threaten not only America's economy but also its national security.
But a vocal group of contrarians is challenging that conventional wisdom. The latest weapon in their arsenal: A new book out this week by education historian Diane Ravitch, who argues that the biggest crisis facing public education is the relentless message that public education is in crisis.It's a debate with broad power to shape the nation's $600-billion-a-year investment in public education. Where's the truth? That's not always easy to discern. Here's a look at four key talking points -- and the facts (and spin) behind them.
1. China is eating us for lunch
A a new video about the failures of public schools making the rounds on social media starts by introducing viewers to "the most important number in all of education...32!"Why 32?
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Any parent who has fought a local school or school system, or thought about doing so, can learn from Bill Horkan and his battle with the transportation department of the Loudoun County Public Schools.In June, schools notified the parents of 3,500 children that they were not eligible for bus service. They did not qualify under LCPS manual section 6-21: "Transportation shall be provided for all elementary students living more than eight-tenths (0.8) of a mile walking distance from their assigned elementary schools."
Horkan, a Fairfax County high school math teacher with a love of precision, researched the matter and concluded that the rule does apply to many of those children, but not to his fifth-grade daughter and several other Algonkian Elementary School children in his Sterling neighborhood. It appeared the shortest route his child could walk from his house to the school was 0.93 miles, with six street crossings.
He was slightly off. The measurement had to be from the closest point on the parent's property to the closest point on the school's property, and not where the student would be dropped off. That distance was still more than eight-tenths of a mile. A transportation department official he called said the district's data put it at exactly 0.8221 miles.
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Two Arlington County ninth-graders told Washington-Lee High School Principal Gregg Robertson they had made a mistake. Advanced Placement world history, a college-level course, was too much for them. They wanted to switch to the regular world history course.Robertson pointed to a banner in his office: "The only way out is through," it said, inspired by an Alanis Morissette song. He made a deal with the students. If they stuck with AP through the end of the first semester, they could switch if they still wanted to. When the time came, they had adjusted to the heavy writing and reading load. They stayed and did well in the course.
With such stories in mind, Washington-Lee teachers, counselors and administrators are attempting something never done in any non-magnet suburban Washington school. If they succeed in their efforts, next spring every Washington-Lee graduating senior will have taken at least one AP or International Baccalaureate course and test.
This is exceptionally ambitious. A few magnets, such as Fairfax County's Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, and private schools, such as Washington International in the District, have full participation in college-level courses. But I know of only one neighborhood school in the country in which that's the case.
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Hong Kong schools worried that falling pupil numbers will force them to close are courting children across the border in a bid to avoid the axe.The move comes despite the children facing an hours-long commute to and from school each day - something that puts off many parents.
Schools in North district, where commuting is easier, have little trouble filling their classrooms and even struggle to accommodate pupils from nearby Shenzhen.
But with Hong Kong's low birth rate leading to falling enrolments, those elsewhere without enough pupils face closure.
Yesterday schools in old urban areas further south such as Pokfulam and Chai Wan - at the far western and eastern ends of Hong Kong Island - were chasing potential entrants in Shenzhen. The schools are among more than 20 Hong Kong kindergartens, primary and secondary schools attending a three-day exhibition in the border city this weekend to promote themselves to parents with Hong Kong-born children living on the mainland.
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Moving in time to a steady beat is closely linked to better language skills, a study suggests.People who performed better on rhythmic tests also showed enhanced neural responses to speech sounds.
The researchers suggest that practising music could improve other skills, particularly reading.In the Journal of Neurosciencea the authors argue that rhythm is an integral part of language.
"We know that moving to a steady beat is a fundamental skill not only for music performance but one that has been linked to language skills," said Nina Kraus, of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University in Illinois.
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When the Harvard sociologist Hilary Levey Friedman was expecting her first child, one thing worried her: her due date, January 3rd. It was uncomfortably close to January 1st, an often-used age cutoff for enrollment in academics and sports. "I was determined to keep him in until after January 1st," she said. And if the baby came early? "I actively thought about redshirting," she said. Given the choice, she wanted him to be the oldest kid in his class, not the youngest.Redshirting is the practice of holding a child back for an extra year before the start of kindergarten, named for the red jersey worn in intra-team scrimmages by college athletes kept out of competition for a year. It is increasingly prevalent among parents of would-be kindergartners. In 1968, four per cent of kindergarten students were six years old; by 1995, the number of redshirted first- and second-graders had grown to nine per cent. In 2008, it had risen to seventeen per cent. The original logic of the yearlong delay is rooted in athletics: athletes who are bigger and stronger tend to perform better, so why not bench the younger, smaller ones for a year? The logic was popularized in "Freakonomics," in which the authors, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, pointed out that élite soccer players were much more likely to have birthdays in the earliest months of the year--that is, they would have been the oldest in any group of students that used a January 1st cutoff for enrollment.
On the surface, redshirting seems to make sense in the academic realm, too. The capabilities of a child's brain increase at a rapid pace; the difference between five-year-olds and six-year-olds is far greater than between twenty-five-year-olds and twenty-six-year-olds. An extra year can allow a child to excel relative to the younger students in the class. "Especially for boys, there is thought to be a relative-age effect that persists across sports and over time," said Friedman. "Early investment of time and skill developments appears to have a more lasting impact." Older students and athletes are often found in leadership positions--and who can doubt the popularity of the star quarterback relative to the gym-class weakling?
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American Promise, via a kind reader email:
The film will be shown at MMoCA on Thursday, October 10, at 7:00. Admission is free for MMoCA members, $7 for non-members.
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Infographic, via a kind reader email:
After two years of operation, we are setting a new level of academic and behavioral expectations for our nearly 500 students. Today, our school environment promotes an atmosphere of rigor and joy and leads students to internalize important, positive lifelong values. We are proud of the progress that we have made, as we have many achievements to celebrate.Related: Comparing Boston, Long Beach and Madison schools, and the rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.While we are excited about the work of our students and teachers in year two, we are poised to move from a turnaround school to a truly excellent school. Our mission is still alive: We will work with urgency until all of our students acquire the knowledge, skills and strength of character necessary to succeed on the path to college and to achieve their full potential. The 2013-2014 school year will be an extraordinary and critical one for our school community, as UP Academy aspires to do whatever it takes to create responsible and independent scholars.
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Ryan Ekvall, via a kind reader email:
Some kindergartners, first-graders and second-graders in Madison public schools are apparently preparing for futures in either political cartooning or time on a psychiatrist's couch.Remarkable. I am in favor of a wide ranging, free thinking education for our future generations, after they have mastered reading..... Some teachers deal with ideology very well, others not so much.Kati Walsh, an elementary art teacher at the Madison Metropolitan School District in July posted some of her students' drawings of Gov. Scott Walker in jail. Walsh suggests her young Rembrandts' ideas for their sketches popped up out of thin air.
"One student said something to the effect of 'Scott Walker wants to close all the public schools'... So the rest of the class started drawing their own cartoons and they turned very political. They have very strong feelings about Scott Walker," the teacher wrote on her blog.
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Last week, Megan Twohey of Reuters published a major investigation about how American families use Internet message boards to abandon difficult children adopted from other countries. Twohey showed how exasperated families use Yahoo and Facebook groups to find new parents for the children they swore to take care of. And far too often, these children end up in homes where the guardians have not been approved to take care of children, where they can be sexually abused or put in surroundings that are dangerous for their well-being.ProPublica reporter Marshall Allen sat down with Twohey to get the story behind the story of piecing "The Child Exchange" together. Asked to describe how she got started, Twohey said, "One of the most valuable things I think about this project is I worked with our database team. We basically did a deep dive on one of the Yahoo groups where this - it's called re-homing - activity takes place. And we scraped all 5,000 messages going back five years and built a database where we were able to quantify what was going on. We logged every single offer of a child that was being made over a 5-year period and we found that on average a child was being offered up once a week."
Twohey added, "It's interesting to note too that the term 're-homing' was first used to describe people seeking new owners for their pets. And some of the ads read remarkably similar to the ads that you'd see for people trying to find a new home for their pet. Some of the ads would describe kids as being obedient, eager to please, or talk about them being pretty."
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Despite cuts to state school aid in 2010, and slower growth of school revenue limits in 2010 and 2011, Wisconsin per student spending increased 2.6% in 2010 and 3.6% in 2011. Wisconsin school spending averaged $11,774 per student in 2011, 15th highest nationally and 11.5% above the national average ($10,560).Related: A Look at Property Taxes Around the World and Madison's 16% increase since 2007; Median Household Income Down 7.6%; Middleton's 16% less and Madison School Board Passes 2013-2014 Budget, including a 4.5% Property Tax Increase.What is not yet known (since federal data have a two year lag) is how Wisconsin will stack up with other states in light of state budget actions in 2011-13. However, researchers from the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance (WISTAX) estimate that the 5.5% cut in 2012 Wisconsin school revenue limits will trim spending to $11,126 per student, potentially shrinking the gap between school spending here and nationally. WISTAX is a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization dedicated to policy research and citizen education.
The new federal figures for 2011 show that, unlike Wisconsin, many states saw declining combined aid (state and federal) to schools during 2009-11; 11 states in 2009, 17 in 2010, and 22 in 2011. By contrast, state-federal support in Wisconsin rose 3.3% in 2009, 0.4% in 2010, and 2.7% in 2011.
The difference in aid trends between Wisconsin and the nation was reflected in per pupil expenditures. U.S. school spending grew 2.3% in 2009 and 1.1% in 2010, before falling 0.5% in 2011. In Wisconsin, however, per student spending during those years rose 3.7%, 2.6%, and 3.6%, respectively.
Many states trimmed school spending during 2009-11. Two states made cuts in all three years, and another seven cut spending in both 2010 and 2011. As national figures have already suggested, retrenchment did not occur in Wisconsin until 2012.
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The residents of Belmonte, a poor neighbourhood on the northern outskirts of Brazilian mining city Belo Horizonte, have heard and seen it all. Between May and July, police arrested 14 gang members suspected of operating a "dial-a-drug" delivery business in the region. One of the gang was a military police officer, who allegedly used the code word "barbecue" to warn the others when his colleagues were planning a raid.But when workers started erecting a "flat-pack" school among the neighbourhood's makeshift houses early this year, curiosity got the better of even the most world-weary of locals, says Danilo Andrade, the project's chief engineer. "Many people came to see what was going on," he says, casting his eye over the angular red and turquoise structure, topped with a distinctive cone spire.
The building is the first of 32 state nursery schools, known by the abbreviation Umei (municipal infant education units), to be delivered over the next 16 months under a new public-private partnership (PPP) scheme.
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New research sponsored by the National Academy of Education seeks a deeper understanding of why there are so few black male teachers in U.S. public schools.The backdrop for the work by Travis Bristol of Teachers College, Columbia University and Ron Ferguson of the Harvard Achievement Gap Initiative is the startling fact that black males, who are six percent of the U.S. population, makeup less than two percent of the nation's public school teachers.
In LA Unified, the numbers are slightly above the national average. Here, black male teachers accounted for 2.9 percent of all teachers in the 2012-13 school year, a total of 743, according to district data. With 31,320 black male students, that's a ratio of 42 to 1, compared with the ratio of white male students to white male teachers of 9 to 1.
Noting the efforts of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and his department's "Black Men to the Blackboard" recruitment campaign begun in 2011, Bristol and Ferguson hypothesize that this dearth of black male teachers, especially in urban areas, is as much an issue of retainment as recruitment.
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Memorization, not rationalization. That is the advice of my 13-year-old daughter, Esmee, as I struggle to make sense of a paragraph of notes for an upcoming Earth Science test on minerals. "Minerals have crystal systems which are defined by the # of axis and the length of the axis that intersect the crystal faces." That's how the notes start, and they only get murkier after that. When I ask Esmee what this actually means, she gives me her homework credo.Esmee is in the eighth grade at the NYC Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies, a selective public school in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. My wife and I have noticed since she started there in February of last year that she has a lot of homework. We moved from Pacific Palisades, California, where Esmee also had a great deal of homework at Paul Revere Charter Middle School in Brentwood. I have found, at both schools, that whenever I bring up the homework issue with teachers or administrators, their response is that they are required by the state to cover a certain amount of material. There are standardized tests, and everyone--students, teachers, schools--is being evaluated on those tests. I'm not interested in the debates over teaching to the test or No Child Left Behind. What I am interested in is what my daughter is doing during those nightly hours between 8 o'clock and midnight, when she finally gets to bed. During the school week, she averages three to four hours of homework a night and six and a half hours of sleep.
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I first met Diane Ravitch when she was in Boston to promote her last book: The Death and Life of the Great American School System. The editor of a newspaper for AFT Massachusetts, I planned to interview Ravitch for the final issue of the school year. But I harbored a shameful secret: I had not read the book. You see, "editor" doesn't quite describe the job that I held. I was responsible for producing a monthly newspaper-entirely by myself. By the time Ravitch arrived, I was on my ninth paper of the school year, and completely fried.But I had a plan. I'd skim the book on the train then, channeling my many years of graduate school, I'd wing it. Except that Ravitch turned out to be rather more formidable than I'd expected. This had the effect of causing the few questions I'd prepared to tumble out in a nervous rush, while her answers seemed to be of the short, definitive variety. When one of the event organizers poked her head into our conference room, summoning me out into the hall, I breathed a sigh of relief. There'd been a change of plans, she explained, and Ravitch's next interview had been canceled. Did I mind keeping her entertained for the next two hours?
Reader: I can assure you that I have read her latest book, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools. I tore through it, and I predict that you will too. I followed the man to whom I'm *technically* married around our house, reading aloud from Ravitch's fiercely clear account and for once he didn't pretend to be on a conference call. In fact, he asked to read the book when I'd finished. But it's too late.Reign is even now hurtling towards southern Illinois where my sister has just begun her 23rd year as an elementary school teacher. She asked me to send it overnight mail.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeannei Bettner email (PDF):
As school resumes, The Progressive Magazine is revving up the movement to save public schools. On their new web site, created specifically for the anti-voucher/save public schools project, www.publicschoolshakedown.org, The Progressive is pulling together education experts including Diane Ravich (education historian and former Assistant Secretary of Education), activists, bloggers, and concerned citizens from across the country.PUBLIC SCHOOL SHAKEDOWN is dedicated to EXPOSING the behind-the-scenes effort to privatize public schools, and CONNECTING pro-public school activists nationwide.
"Public School Shakedown will be a fantastic addition to the debate", says Diane Ravitch. "The Progressive is performing a great public service by helping spread the word about the galloping privatization of our public schools.""Free public education, doors open to all, no lotteries, is a cornerstone of our democracy. If we allow large chunks of it to be handed over to private operators, religious schools, for-profit enterprises, and hucksters, we put our democracy at risk", Ravitch adds.
That's where Public School Shakedown comes in. While there are already groups such as the National Education Policy Center doing terrific research on education privatization and its effects, and bloggers writing pointed, hilarious reports, there is still not a great deal of understanding in the general population of how the education privatization movement works.
Teachers understand that the attack on public education is an attack on the very heart of our democracy. Yet the "school choice" movement has succeeded in setting the terms of the conversation. To the unknowing layperson, "school choice" and "education reform" sound like benign policy goals that aim to improve children's access to high-quality education.
The time is right for a journalistic platform like The Progressive to put the pieces together.
From its base in Madison, The Progressive has made the attack on public schools a primary focus of its reporting.
Wisconsin is ground-zero for the school voucher movement. The first school voucher program started in Milwaukee back in 1990. But the last few years of the Walker Administration really brought home the importance of this issue.
The 2011 protests called attention to the public as to how much is at stake - a great public school system, open to all, and a democracy - not just a pay-as-you-go system of winners and losers that leaves the poor and middle classes behind.
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Every year, thousands of teenagers move to the United States from all over the world, for all kinds of reasons. They observe everything in their new country with fresh eyes, including basic features of American life that most of us never stop to consider.More here.One element of our education system consistently surprises them: "Sports are a big deal here," says Jenny, who moved to America from South Korea with her family in 2011. Shawnee High, her public school in southern New Jersey, fields teams in 18 sports over the course of the school year, including golf and bowling. Its campus has lush grass fields, six tennis courts, and an athletic Hall of Fame. "They have days when teams dress up in Hawaiian clothes or pajamas just because--'We're the soccer team!,' " Jenny says. (To protect the privacy of Jenny and other students in this story, only their first names are used.)
By contrast, in South Korea, whose 15-year-olds rank fourth in the world (behind Shanghai, Singapore, and Hong Kong) on a test of critical thinking in math, Jenny's classmates played pickup soccer on a dirt field at lunchtime. They brought badminton rackets from home and pretended there was a net. If they made it into the newspaper, it was usually for their academic accomplishments.
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African-American students in the Madison Metropolitan School District were eight times more likely to get an out-of-school suspension than white students last school year, according to district data.Multiracial students were four times more likely to be suspended than white kids and Hispanic students were nearly twice as likely. Asian students, though, were only half as likely to be suspended as white kids.
Of the 3,863 out-of-school suspensions last year, 53 percent involved students from low-income families and nearly 24 percent involved students in special education programs, according to a district report on student behavior last school year.
Racial disparity in expulsions is evident too. African-Americans, who made up 19 percent of the school district population last year, were the subject of 60 percent of the 146 expulsion recommendations eventually resulting in 24 expulsions.
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An all-digital public library is opening today, as officials in Bexar County, Texas, celebrate the opening of the BiblioTech library. The facility offers about 10,000 free e-books for the 1.7 million residents of the county, which includes San Antonio.On its website, the Bexar County BiblioTech library explains how its patrons can access free eBooks and audio books. To read an eBook on their own device, users must have the 3M Cloud Library app, which they can link to their library card.
The app includes a countdown of days a reader has to finish a book -- starting with 14 days, according to My San Antonio.
The library has a physical presence, as well, with 600 e-readers and 48 computer stations, in addition to laptops and tablets. People can also come for things like kids' story time and computer classes, according to the library's website.
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On Sept. 21, concerned Milwaukeeans will gather for the Public Education is a Civil Right March and Rally. Participants will assemble at Milwaukee High School of the Arts and then march to Forest Home Avenue School for a rally.It's been nearly 60 years since the Supreme Court's landmark Brown vs. Board of Education ruling. That decision declared "separate but equal" was not a valid construct when it came to public education. In that case, the separation was between racial groups.
Apartheid, the government-enforced system of racial segregation in South Africa, endured for almost 50 years until the election of the African National Congress led by Nelson Mandela.
So, why is it that in 2013, we in Milwaukee can't grasp the fact that many of our city's students, often the most needy ones, do not have the same access to a free, quality education as their peers in the suburbs? In other words, separation by socioeconomic status.
President John F. Kennedy spoke to the vital importance of truly public education.
"Modern cynics and skeptics ...see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing."
Kennedy unknowingly presaged the current budget battles when he added: "Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource."
Milwaukee is a city where public schools once were nearly as much a given as the right to exist or even to breathe. The native language of many of Milwaukee's first residents contributed the idyllic word "kindergarten," meaning "children's garden," to our vocabulary.
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The idea here seems to be that the U.S. government is taking on a lot of debt. True, the typical American family also takes on lots of debt through mortgages and the like -- the median debt burden is about $70,000 -- but U.S. government borrowing is even more massive than that.Fair enough. This analogy seems incomplete, though. We should take it further. If the typical family -- let's call them the Smiths -- really did spend like the federal government, a few other things would also be true:
-- The Smiths would spend 20 percent of their budget, or $12,800 each year, on an arsenal of guns, tanks and drones to defend their house against threats or to invade the occasional neighbor over lawn-pesticide disputes and access to the gas station.
-- The Smiths would spend another third of their income financing retirement and health care for Grandma and Grandpa. Part of that would have been prepaid by money that Grandma and Grandpa socked away while they were working, but some of it would be paid for by the parents and kids who are chipping in.
-- Actually, come to think of it, the Smiths spend nearly half their money -- 43 percent -- operating a massive insurance conglomerate whose main beneficiaries are family members.
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Google has partnered with EdX, the platform founded by Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to develop an online education site where anyone can create and post courses.Open EdX will allow businesses, governments and individuals, as well as universities, to build massive open online courses, known as MOOCs, where tens of thousands of students from anywhere in the world can enrolin the same class.
Anant Agarwal, president of EdX, compared the new site, which will launch next year, to YouTube, Google's online video platform. The technology company's developers would assist with building the site, host it on its cloud computing service and help the organisation work out how to generate revenue, he said.
"It is very exciting that the leader inthe MOOC movement and the leader in the web space are teaming up to help online education. I think it is a really good thing for the world," he added.
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As virtual education continues to expand, teachers, administrators, and principals are constantly seeking ways to improve rapidly changing programs. While virtual schools provide students the opportunity to learn at an individualized pace, to attend school at a flexible location, and to fill in gaps in learning, educators are still working to decipher the best way to ensure academic integrity and to combat cheating.In-person exams are one safeguard for academic integrity. Another safeguard is requiring students to have a licensed proctor facilitate major assessments for virtual courses.
Surprisingly, students are not the only ones culpable for the lack of academic integrity in virtual learning. While virtual schools often require parent involvement and guidance, there is a fine line between monitoring and "dishonest intervention." Some schools require parents to have their own login, allowing them to follow children without actually submitting work for them.
"If you look across the range of full-time online learning programs ... there are different parent roles, and some programs involve the learning coach and parent at a much higher level, said International Association for K-12 Online Learning President Susan Patrick. "Each of those programs is developing their own guide for parents in terms of [their] role."
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The Oregon Board of Education (OBE) has directed the Portland school system to remove four so-called "seclusion cells," says Northwest Public Radio. The rooms are used as a place to calm down students who are out of control. Oregon lawmakers this year voted to ban the starkest versions of these roomsSupporters of the legislative restrictions specifically point to the seclusion cells at Pioneer School in northeast Portland, which serves students with severe behavioral and mental health issues. The Portland school system had previously decided not to use the seclusion cells during the current academic year.
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An area English language arts teacher has been named Wisconsin's middle school teacher of the year.Jane McMahon was honored on Monday in a surprise ceremony at Jack Young Middle School in Baraboo.
McMahon will receive $3,000 from the Herb Kohl Educational Foundation.
"For our students to succeed, we need great educators in our schools," said Tony Evers, state superintendent of schools, in a news release from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
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A suburban Los Angeles school district is now looking at the public postings on social media by middle and high school students, searching for possible violence, drug use, bullying, truancy and suicidal threats.The district in Glendale, California, is paying $40,500 to a firm to monitor and report on 14,000 middle and high school students' posts on Twitter, Facebook and other social media for one year.
Though critics liken the monitoring to government stalking, school officials and their contractor say the purpose is student safety.
As classes began this fall, the district awarded the contract after it earlier paid the firm, Geo Listening, $5,000 last spring to conduct a pilot project monitoring 9,000 students at three high schools and a middle school. Among the results was a successful intervention with a student "who was speaking of ending his life" on his social media, said Chris Frydrych, CEO of the firm.
That intervention was significant because two students in the district committed suicide the past two years, said Superintendent Richard Sheehan. The suicides occurred at a time when California has reduced mental health services in schools, Sheehan said.
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This report aims to inform current policies as well as policies under debate at the federal and state levels. We hope that lessons conveyed here will encourage the adoption of the positive steps taken in a few states and districts and help states navigate challenges as they enter their final year of Race to the Top. These lessons pertain as well to the many more states that are beginning to implement requirements to attain waivers from No Child Left Behind. Finally, the lessons can help guide a stronger, more thoughtful rollout of the Common Core State Standards. President Obama would like to leave as part of his legacy substantial improvements in U.S. education. Recognizing the flaws inherent in Race to the Top, reversing the damage it has done, and enacting more comprehensive education policies in the administration's second term could make that legacy a proud one.
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A headteacher in the London borough of Camden has come under fire by bloggers for reporting one of his students to police after reading the student's blog, which criticised the school and revealed the student's 'enchantment' with the philosophies of anarchism and individualism. The student, named Kinnan Zaloom, 19, operated the 'Hampstead Trash' blog as an outlet for his and his classmates' dissatisfaction with the practices of the Hampstead School and the conduct of its employees, lambasting the school's overspending on promotional material, lack of investment in musical instruments and gym equipment, insincere attempts to listen to pupils' views about the school, and a failure to raise GCSE results to a higher level.The headteacher, in addition to reporting Zaloom to the police, phoned Glasgow University, where the student had applied to study, in an attempt to dissuade them from accepting him.
While the headteacher's actions may certainly be described as an overreaction, what is more worrying is his own justification for them.
Asked what had first inclined him to contact the police, Mr. Szemalikowski said "the fact that Kinnan has mentioned the ideologies of anarchism and individualism on this blog." Digging himself even deeper, the headteacher added, "I must do something. In the last year he has become more and more enchanted by antiestablishment ways of thinking and has even said that there is an inherent risk that every government is corrupt."
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It occurs to me that our new era requires new words to describe new conditions, so herewith follows a quick useful lexicon for 2013.The first modern condition that springs to mind is one described by the word: smupidity (n.) smart + stupidity
Smupidity defines the mental state wherein we acknowledge that we've never been smarter as individuals and yet somehow we've never felt stupider. We now collectively inhabit a state of smupidity. Example: "Yes, I know I was able to obtain a list of all Oscar winners from 1952 in three tenths of a second, yet it makes me feel smupid that I didn't waste two hours visiting the local library to obtain that list." In our newly smupid world, the average IQ is now 103 but it feels like it's 97.
One possible explanation for smupidity is that people are generally far more aware than they ever were of all the information they don't know. The weight of this fact overshadows huge advances made in knowledge-accumulation and pattern-recognition skills honed by online searching.
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I recently appeared on MSNBC's The Cycle to discuss the new edition of my book The War Against Boys. The four hosts were having none of it. A war on boys? They countered with the wage gap and the prominence of men across the professions. One of them concluded, "I don't think the patriarchy is under any threat."The MSNBC skeptics are hardly alone in dismissing the plight of boys and young men. Even those who acknowledge that boys are losing in school argue that they're winning in life. But the facts are otherwise. American boys across the ability spectrum are struggling in the nation's schools, with teachers and administrators failing to engage their specific interests and needs. This neglect has ominous implications not only for the boy's social and intellectual development but for the national economy, as policy analysts are just beginning to calculate.
As the United States moves toward a knowledge-based economy, school achievement has become the cornerstone of lifelong success. Women are adapting; men are not. Yet the education establishment and federal government are, with some notable exceptions, looking the other way.
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American parents show up at their children's schools. A lot. Nearly nine out of 10 attended at least one PTA or other school meeting in the 2011-12 school year, according to data released last week by the Department of Education's National Household Education Surveys Program. Six out of 10 participated in at least one school fundraiser. American parents stay up late baking cookies for bake sales, and they leave work early for football games. It's a remarkable investment of time and heart.Yet over the past couple of years, as I traveled around the world visiting countries with higher-performing education systems while researching my new book The Smartest Kids in the World, I noticed something odd. I hardly saw parents at schools at all.
"My daughters' school does not ask me or anyone else to do anything," says Susanne Strömberg, a journalist and mother of twin daughters in public elementary school in Finland--the country where 15-year-olds rank No. 1 in the world in science and No. 2 in reading. She sounds almost wistful as she considers the absence of such solicitations. "No money donations--never!"
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Nearly a year after voters trounced Tom Luna's Students Come First proposals in a referendum, the state schools superintendent acknowledged he did not do enough to make the plan transparent or to involve Idahoans."Our plan under Students Come First was a legislative plan," Luna said Monday in a meeting with the Idaho Statesman Editorial Board. "We had 105 (legislators) and one governor to convince."
Voters saw it differently, and after lawmakers passed three sweeping laws that narrowed collective bargaining, instituted merit pay and would have put laptops in the hands of all Idaho high-schoolers, they knocked all three down last fall.
"What I learned ... is that we should have been far more aware of a more broad discussion amongst the general public and not just focus on a strategy that would have legislative success," Luna said.
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He outlined his proposal in a letter to Barhorst's successor, Jack Daniels III."I understand that the college is facing a budget shortfall and I have a proposal that will help alleviate that situation. I propose to purchase the naming rights to the newly constructed welcome center at the Truax Campus for $100,000.00. As such, the new name shall be: MADISON COLLEGE WELCOME CENTER. The name change shall occur by November 15 of the current year with the stipulation that I take physical possession of the discarded letters, BETTSEY L. BARHORST, that are currently used in the display."
In an email to the Cap Times, Peterson called the Welcome Center a "decadent display of self-promotion," at the expense of area taxpayers. Ideally, he says, the Welcome Center's name should be "functional, not personal."
But, he points out, if it is to be named after an MATC leader, why should it be Barhorst, whose seven year tenure, was relatively short when compared to her predecessors?
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Nathan Bomey and John Gallagher:
Detroit is broke, but it didn't have to be. An in-depth Free Press analysis of the city's financial history back to the 1950s shows that its elected officials and others charged with managing its finances repeatedly failed -- or refused -- to make the tough economic and political decisions that might have saved the city from financial ruin.Instead, amid a huge exodus of residents, plummeting tax revenues and skyrocketing home abandonment, Detroit's leaders engaged in a billion-dollar borrowing binge, created new taxes and failed to cut expenses when they needed to. Simultaneously, they gifted workers and retirees with generous bonuses. And under pressure from unions and, sometimes, arbitrators, they failed to cut health care benefits -- saddling the city with staggering costs that today threaten the safety and quality of life of people who live here.
The numbers, most from records deeply buried in the public library, lay waste to misconceptions about the roots of Detroit's economic crisis. For critics who want to blame Mayor Coleman Young for starting this mess, think again. The mayor's sometimes fiery rhetoric may have contributed to metro Detroit's racial divide, but he was an astute money manager who recognized, early on, the challenges the city faced and began slashing staff and spending to address them.
And Wall Street types who applauded Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's financial acumen following his 2005 deal to restructure city pension debt should consider this: The numbers prove that his plan devastated the city's finances and was a key factor that drove Detroit to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy in July.
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By the city's own count, about one fourth of all 911 calls made from New York City public schools are for "emotionally disturbed persons," as first responders call it. In one year, 2011-12, schools made more than 3,800 calls that, in turn, led to an ambulance trip to a hospital emergency room, a mismatched solution in the eyes of many mental health experts and children's advocates.Dr. Michael Falk, a pediatrician in the pediatric emergency room of St. Luke's hospital in Harlem, said there were about 136 psychiatric behavioral evaluations between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. last year for children under the age of 18 coming from public schools. He said some were sent to his emergency room because they were suicidal or assaulted a teacher. But he says many more cases aren't nearly so dramatic.
"It's usually involving they get into an altercation with one of the other students and then the staff tries to restrain them, and then the staff person gets hit or threatened," he said, adding that "a fair number" are anywhere between the ages of six and 10. He said the E.R. also sees a "significant number" of kids with learning disabilities or A.D.H.D.
Very few children were admitted, he said. Instead, most were evaluated and sent home - which mental health experts say is typical. But they believe it still takes a lot of time on the part of doctors and nurses, plus the use of an ambulance that should be reserved for true emergencies.
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I have such conflicted feelings about the war.No, not Syria. Also not Iraq, Afghanistan or even Grenada (we won that one, remember?)
The Great Education War rages all around us. If anything, it seems to be getting more intense, and cooperation and goodwill seem to be in shorter supply.
The war has many fronts:
War, of course, is too strong a term, if you take it literally. There is no physical fighting (thank goodness). But there are passions and intensity, and the stakes are high and the advocacy is often conducted with bare-knuckled rhetoric and uncompromising strategy. It sort of has the feeling of war.
- Standardized testing, how much should there be, what uses should the results be put to.
- Private school voucher programs (the battle royal, especially in places such as Wisconsin).
- Charter schools (actually, a hotter fight in many places than around here).
- Teachers' collective bargaining powers. Also teachers' pay and pensions. Also funding and tax issues overall
- Anything that some people see as "privatization."
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The Alexandria school board voted Thursday night to support a lawsuit waged by the Norfolk City School Board against Gov. McDonnell's school takeover law.In a unanimous vote, the board adopted a resolution stating that the "Opportunity Education Institution" legislation "usurps the role of local school boards in supervising and managing the public schools."
Under the law, any school that is denied state accreditation or accredited with warning for three consecutive years can be taken into a statewide school district.
Norfolk would be the hardest hit school district initially -- with as many as three schools in jeopardy of a state takeover.
In Alexandria, Jefferson Houston School would also be eligible for a state takeover.
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Sally Hurd Smith, a veteran teacher, held up her brand-new tablet computer and shook it as she said, "I don't want this thing to take over my classroom." It was late June, a month before the first day of school. In a sixth-grade classroom in Greensboro, N.C., a dozen middle-school social-studies teachers were getting their second of three days of training on tablets that had been presented to them as a transformative educational tool. Every student and teacher in 18 of Guilford County's 24 middle schools would receive one, 15,450 in all, to be used for class work, homework, educational games -- just about everything, eventually.There was, as educators say, a diverse range of learners in the room. Some were well on the way to mastering the tablet. Ben Porter, for instance, a third-year teacher who previously worked as an operations manager for a Cold Stone Creamery franchiser, was already adept at loading and sharing lesson materials and using the tablet's classroom-management tools: quick polls, discussions, short-answer exercises, the function for randomly calling on a student and more. Other teachers, including a gray-bearded man who described himself as "technologically retarded," had not progressed much further than turning it on.
Smith, the most outspoken skeptic among the trainees, was not a Luddite -- she uses her Web site to dispense assignments and readings to her students -- but she worried about what might be lost in trying to funnel her teaching know-how through the tablet. "I just don't like the idea of looking at a screen and not at the students," she said.
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The 13-year-old author of The Reason I Jump invites you, his reader, to imagine a daily life in which your faculty of speech is taken away. Explaining that you're hungry, or tired, or in pain, is now as beyond your powers as a chat with a friend. I'd like to push the thought-experiment a little further. Now imagine that after you lose your ability to communicate, the editor-in-residence who orders your thoughts walks out without notice. The chances are that you never knew this mind-editor existed, but now that he or she has gone, you realize too late how the editor allowed your mind to function for all these years. A dam-burst of ideas, memories, impulses, and thoughts is cascading over you, unstoppably. Your editor controlled this flow, diverting the vast majority away, and recommending just a tiny number for your conscious consideration. But now you're on your own.Now your mind is a room where 20 radios, all tuned to different stations, are blaring out voices and music. The radios have no off-switches or volume controls, the room you're in has no door or window, and relief will come only when you're too exhausted to stay awake. To make matters worse, another hitherto unrecognized editor has just quit without notice--your editor of the senses. Suddenly, sensory input from your environment is flooding in, too, unfiltered in quality and overwhelming in quantity. Colors and patterns swim and clamor for your attention. The fabric softener in your sweater smells as strong as air freshener fired up your nostrils. Your comfy jeans are now as scratchy as steel wool. Your vestibular and proprioceptive senses are also out of kilter, so the floor keeps tilting like a ferry in heavy seas, and you're no longer sure where your hands and feet are in relation to the rest of you. You can feel the plates of your skull, plus your facial muscles and your jaw; your head feels trapped inside a motorcycle helmet three sizes too small which may or may not explain why the air conditioner is as deafening as an electric drill, but your father--who's right here in front of you--sounds as if he's speaking to you from a cellphone, on a train going through lots of short tunnels, in fluent Cantonese. You are no longer able to comprehend your mother tongue, or any tongue: From now on, all languages will be foreign languages. Even your sense of time has gone, rendering you unable to distinguish between a minute and an hour, as if you've been entombed in an Emily Dickinson poem about eternity, or locked into a time-bending sci-fi film. Poems and films, however, come to an end, whereas this is your new ongoing reality. Autism is a lifelong condition. But even the word autism makes no more sense to you now than the word 自閉症 or αυτισµός or .
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When I saw her for the first time, a very newborn child, and I looked into her eyes, and I fell in love with her, believe me." These are the words of a proud father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, speaking about his daughter, Malala, in Class Dismissed. The extraordinary 2009 New York Times documentary follows Mr Yousafzai's courageous efforts to keep his school in Pakistan's Swat Valley open after Taliban leaders ordered an end to girls' education. In the film, Malala, then an articulate 11-year-old with a Harry Potter backpack, says she dreams of becoming a doctor. She seems today to be following a different path.Still 16, she has become a global campaigner for girls' education. She is one of the world's most recognised people - famous enough to be known only by her first name - and a remarkable survivor.
On October 9 last year, fighters from the Taliban forces in the Swat Valley district in the Northwest Frontier Province boarded her school bus. They shot her in the head and wounded two friends. Ms Yousafzai was flown to the UK, where she received emergency treatment in Birmingham. She recovered - she has a titanium plate in her skull - and her campaigning goes on. She was well enough to speak in front of 1,000 youth delegates at the UN on her birthday in July, telling them nothing had changed in her life since the attack, except that "weakness, fear and hopelessness died".
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When the high school class of 2014 graduates this spring, it will mark the beginning of a new era for Texas public schools.The current crop of seniors will likely be among the last not containing a majority of Hispanic students. It will also, based on preliminary enrollment data from the 2012-13 school year, probably fall among the last without a majority of students from impoverished backgrounds.
Neither milestone is a surprise -- they come as a result of longstanding demographic shifts in Texas public schools.
Hispanics became the majority of total public school students for the first time in 2011, growing by about 10 percentage points over the decade since 2000. Since that same year, the overall percentage of economically disadvantaged students has also grown, from less than half to 60 percent of all public school students -- more than double a 20 percent increase in the public school population as a whole. But the bulk of those students are concentrated in the younger grades, with the percentage from economically disadvantaged backgrounds steadily declining to a low of 46 percent in the class of 2012, the latest year data is available. That is soon set to change as the population of students in the lower grades make their way through the school system.
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Bahiya Nasuuna hasn't even started college, but she's already got some academic credits in the bank that will save her time and money and give her a jump on graduating--as she hopes to--within four years."My parents need as much help as they can get" to cover her tuition, said Nasuuna, who lives in the outskirts of Boston, in Chelsea. She passed an Advanced Placement test in English at her public high school that she's cashed in for college credit, using it to forgo a required introductory writing course.
In all, Nasuuna passed seven AP exams in high school, and is ready to use those, too, to keep her studies on track at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she plans to begin this fall on a path to an eventual degree in public health.
She's one of a record number of students getting a head start on college credits while still in high school, cutting costs and speeding toward degrees--and jobs--as quickly as possible to avoid dragging out costly higher educations.
"Everyone is looking for a leg up," said Dave Taylor, principal of the Dayton Early College Academy in Ohio, a charter high school whose students simultaneously enroll in classes at nearby Sinclair Community College to get some college credits out of the way.
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Rose threw out a number of sobering statistics during his talk.Related: Credit for non Madison School District Courses.He said one-third of merit scholars in the Hathaway Scholarship Program need remedial work when they enter college. However, the prospects for a student who takes a remedial courses in college isn't that bright, he noted.
Rose said only two of five remedial students go on to complete a credit course in their remedial subject within one year.
He said dual and concurrent enrollment, or high school students taking college courses, is one remedy to the students' need for remedial courses.
Some high school students already take remedial classes at community colleges to experience the secondary-level work that will be required.
Rose said the ability for high school students to earn credits for college classes can be motivational -- providing a way to avoid the traditional "wasted senior year."
Last month, Rose returned his focus toward community college commission director full-time after having pulled double-duty as interim director of the Wyoming Department of Education.
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Nick Sunderland-Saied, via a kind reader email:
A Madison School District official said discipline would be handed down "as quickly as possible" for athletes and students who were involved in fights at the conclusion of a football game Thursday between West and Memorial high schools at Mansfield Stadium.Video.Alex Fralin, the new assistant superintendent for secondary schools, said his office was "extremely disappointed" by the show of violence, but added that he was hopeful the fights were an "isolated incident."
At least 27 officers responded after a scuffle in the postgame handshake line following Memorial's 28-20 victory escalated into a fight between the two teams at about 10:15 p.m. on the field at Memorial High School, 201 S. Gammon Road.
Madison police spokesman Joel DeSpain said referees, coaches and school staff quickly broke up the fighting, which an officer described as "the result of an intense game where emotions were high."
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James J. HeckmanWhat's missing in the current debate over economic inequality is enough serious discussion about investing in effective early childhood development from birth to age 5. This is not a big government boondoggle policy that would require a huge redistribution of wealth. Acting on it would, however, require us to rethink long-held notions of how we develop productive people and promote shared prosperity.
Everyone knows that education boosts productivity and enlarges opportunities, so it is natural that proposals for reducing inequality emphasize effective education for all. But these proposals are too timid. They ignore a powerful body of research in the economics of human development that tells us which skills matter for producing successful lives. They ignore the role of families in producing the relevant skills They also ignore or play down the critical gap in skills between advantaged and disadvantaged children that emerges long before they enter school.
While education is a great equalizer of opportunity when done right, American policy is going about it all wrong: current programs don't start early enough, nor do they produce the skills that matter most for personal and societal prosperity.
Read more here.
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A highly contested bill that potentially would make it quicker and less costly to dismiss teachers has risen from legislative purgatory with significant changes that could lead to passage by the Legislature this week.When last we left AB 375, in July, the author, Assembly Education Committee Chairwoman Joan Buchanan, D-Alamo, was one vote shy of getting the bill out of the Senate Education Committee; the bill appeared bottled up for the year. But Buchanan has been negotiating with Sen. Carol Liu, chairwoman of the education committee, and agreed to three key amendments. With Liu's support and crucial vote, AB 375 passed the Senate Education Committee on Tuesday and, after a visit to Senate Appropriations Committee, is likely headed to the Senate floor. The deadline for passing all bills is Friday.
Spurring calls for change was the case of elementary school teacher Mark Berndt, now awaiting trial on multiple molestation charges against students. Los Angeles Unified paid Berndt $40,000 in back pay and legal fees in 2012 on the condition that he not contest the district's dismissal charges against him. Since then, the district hasagreed to pay $30 million in settlements to dozens of children whose families have filed claims against it.
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What did the English ever do for us? Unlike the Romans in The Life of Brian, not much in the way of aqueducts or wine. But even the stoutest anti-imperialist in any former British colony has to admit that the empire left us a rather wonderful language. The Man Booker prize may be one of the last shadows of that empire, evoking as it does an imagined community unchanged since 1921, when Irish independence began its demise. But the 2013 shortlist is startling evidence of what happened to the language the empire left behind. It is the great triumph of British culture - because it no longer belongs to Britain.There is nothing new, of course, about the Man Booker list featuring novelists from the former colonies. This year's list, though, makes a definitive statement that such writers are no longer the exotic outsiders that add colour (literally as well as figuratively) to the British norm. They are the new normal.
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The median household income in July was $52,113, according to a report by Sentier Research. That's 6.2 percent lower than the median in September 2008, the start of the financial crisis. And there hasn't been much growth since 2011.Related: Madison Schools' 2013-2014 budget includes a 4.5% property tax increase after 9% two years ago.That jibes with Saez's research, which notes that incomes of the bottom 99 percent have fallen 12 percent in the recession and have grown just 0.4 percent in the recovery.
"Plenty of resources" and "the Madison School District has the resources to close the achievement gap".
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The UK now boasts six of the world's top 20 universities, according to a new global table.Edinburgh and King's College London have edged into the top 20 of the QS World University rankings.
Cambridge, UCL, Imperial and Oxford all made it into the top 10.
But John O'Leary, of QS, warned that unless the UK puts more funding into higher education its leading position could slip.
Edinburgh rose to 17th place from 21st last year and King's College London to 19th from 26th in 2012.US domination.
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Days before I was to meet Battushig Myanganbayar at his home in Mongolia, he sent me an e-mail with a modest request: Would I bring him a pair of tiny XBee wireless antennas? Electronic parts are scarce in Mongolia (he used components from old elevators for some of his projects), and packages ordered online take weeks to show up.When I arrived, antennas in hand, at his apartment in the middle-class neighborhood of Khan Uul, in Ulan Bator, Battushig, 16, led me down a steep incline into the building's underground garage to show me what they were for. Many children in the city play in their apartment buildings' driveways, but this one seemed oriented in a particularly dangerous way. Battushig worried about his 10-year-old sister and her friends being hit by an exiting car. Standing in the concrete space, its aqua walls nicked, he pointed overhead to a white box containing a sensor from which he had run wires to a siren with a flashing red light outside in the building's driveway. His Garage Siren gave his sister and the other children time to get out of the way when a car was coming.
Battushig, playing the role of the car, moved into the sensor's path to show me how it worked, but it was clear he was not entirely satisfied with his design. "The use of the long wires is very inconvenient for my users," he said, almost apologetically, clasping his hands together in emphasis. He realized that contractors would be reluctant to install the siren in other buildings if they had to deal with cumbersome wiring, so he was developing a wireless version. Thus, the antennas.
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It was just a primary -- and the results aren't even final yet, with mail-in ballots still being counted to determine if there will be a runoff.But advocates for traditional public education are jubilant that Bill de Blasio came out on top Tuesday in the Democratic mayoral race in New York City after a campaign in which he promised to yank support from charter schools, scale back high-stakes standardized testing and tax the wealthy to pay for universal preschool and more arts education.
De Blasio's education platform boiled down, in effect, to a pledge to dismantle the policies that Mayor Michael Bloomberg enacted over the past decade in the nation's largest school district.
Those policies, emphasizing the need to inject more free-market competition into public education and weaken the power of teachers unions, are not unique to New York City; they're the backbone of a national education reform movement that has won broad bipartisan support. Yet the reform movement has also triggered a backlash from parents and teachers who see it as a threat to their schools, their jobs and the traditional concept of public education as a public trust.
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Madison School Board President Ed Hughes
Rick Esenberg has responded to my last blog post, which was critical of a short article he had written about the difference between supporters and opponents of school vouchers.The ongoing Madison School Board voucher rhetoric is ironic, given the disastrous reading scores.I wrote that Esenberg's analysis was superficial and his characterization of voucher opponents insulting. While decrying the unflattering terms I employed, Esenberg writes that my analysis of his piece is sophomoric, cartoonish and simplistic. Okay, fine. Let's move on.
Esenberg writes that I overlooked his principal point, which is that people's views on vouchers are heavily influenced by their predispositions. That seems to me to be obvious. What I found more interesting about his article is that it suggested the challenge of discussing whether vouchers represent sound public policy without resorting to arguments about whether public schools or voucher schools lead to better learning outcomes or which end up costing taxpayers more. It's not that these aren't important considerations, but the various rhetorical thrusts and parries along these lines have been repeated almost ad nauseum and neither side is going to convince the other on either basis. Let's explore some other arguments.
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As I regularly pass by the former Malcolm X Academy that has been vacant for years, the words of a legendary African-American educator comes to mind:The City of Milwaukee: Put Children First!"No schoolhouse has been opened for us that has not been filled."
Booker T. Washington said that in 1896 during an address to urge white Americans to respect the desire by most African-American parents to seek the best possible education for their children.
Fast-forward to 2013 in Milwaukee, and the issue of vacant school buildings gives a pecular spin to Washington's words. Back then, he could never have imagined the combination of bureaucracy and politics that has some educators scrambling to find spaces to fill with African-American students.
The campaign by a local private school funded by taxpayers to buy the former Malcolm X Academy at 2760 N. 1st St. has caused some in town to question why Milwaukee Public Schools hasn't done more to turn closed school buildings into functioning houses of learning.
In particular, some conservatives question why MPS hasn't been willing to sell valuable resources to school choice entities that are essentially their main competition for low-income minority students.
Actually, that stance seems valid from a business standpoint; why help out the folks trying to put you out of business?
St. Marcus is at capacity.WILL Responds to MPS on Unused Schools IssuesHundreds of children are on waiting lists.
Over the past decade, St. Marcus Lutheran School in Milwaukee's Harambee neighborhood has proven that high-quality urban education is possible. The K3-8th grade school has demonstrated a successful model for education that helps children and families from urban neighborhoods break the cycle of poverty and move on to achieve academic success at the post-secondary level and beyond.
By expanding to a second campus at Malcolm X, St. Marcus can serve 900 more students.
On Tuesday, Milwaukee Public Schools responded to WILL's report, "MPS and the City Ignore State Law on Unused Property." Here is WILL's reply:Conservative group says MPS, city not selling enough empty buildings1. MPS' response is significant for what it does not say. WILL's report states that, right now, there are at least 20 unused school buildings that are not on the market - and practically all of these buildings have attracted interest from charter and choice schools. As far as its records reveal, MPS refuses to adopt basic business practices, such as keeping an updated portfolio of what is happening with its facilities. How is the public to know where things stand when it is not clear that MPS keeps tabs on them?
2. MPS thinks everything is okay because it has sold four buildings since 2011 and leases to MPS schools. MPS' response is similar to a football team (we trust it would be the Bears) celebrating that they scored two touchdowns in a game - only to end up losing 55-14. Our report acknowledged that MPS had disposed of a few buildings, but when there are at least 20 empty buildings - and substantial demand for them - claiming credit for selling a few is a bit like a chronic absentee celebrating the fact that he usually comes in on Tuesdays. Children and taxpayers deserve better.
A conservative legal group says that Milwaukee Public Schools is stalling on selling its empty school buildings to competing school operators that seek school facility space, and that the City of Milwaukee isn't acting on a new law that gives it more authority to sell the district's buildings.Bill BoelterThe Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which supports many Republican causes, says its new report shows that MPS is preventing charter schools and private schools in the voucher program from purchasing empty and unused school buildings.
But MPS fired back yesterday, saying the legal group's information omits facts and containts false claims.
For example, MPS Spokesman Tony Tagliavia said that this year, five previously unused MPS buildings are back in service as schools.
He said MPS has also sold buildings to high-performing charter schools. Charter operators it has sold to such as Milwaukee College Prep and the Hmong American Peace Academy are operating schools that are under the MPS umbrella, however, so the district gets to count those students as part of its enrollment.
My entire career of close to 50 years has been focused on growing a business in and close to the city of Milwaukee. This is where I have my roots. I have followed education closely over these years.The Aug. 17 Journal Sentinel had an interesting article about conflicting opinions on what the most viable use is for the former Malcolm X School, which closed over six years ago.
The Milwaukee School Board has proposed to have the city convert the site into a community center for the arts, recreation, low-income housing and retail stores. The cost to city taxpaying residences and businesses has not been calculated. Rising tax burdens have been a major factor in the flight to the suburbs and decline of major cities across our country.
St. Marcus Lutheran School is prepared to purchase Malcolm X for an appraised fair market value. St. Marcus is part of Schools That Can Milwaukee, which also includes Milwaukee College Prep and Bruce-Guadalupe Community School. Other participating high performing schools are Atonement Lutheran School, Notre Dame Middle School and Carmen High School of Science and Technology. Support comes from private donations after state allowances for voucher/choice students.
Their students go on to graduate from high school at a rate of over 90%, compared to approximately 60% at Milwaukee Public Schools. The acquisition of Malcolm X would give an additional 800 students the opportunity to attend a high performing school and reduce waiting lists at St. Marcus.
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We've been hearing for decades about all the ways our public school system is failing our children. They're falling further and further behind on international academic assessments, and it's not clear that efforts to remedy the situation are succeeding. Indeed, we pretty much know things have gotten worse. But all the focus on failing schools and failing students ignores the other consequence of American public education reform: The failing parents. Because if last night's open house night at my son's middle school was any indication of the inexorable decline of the American parent, we are truly doomed.Now, to be clear, I am a big fan of public education. Maybe not quite as much as some of my colleagues, but I remain fundamentally sold on the public schools enterprise. But somewhere along the line I started failing. First in small, unnoticeable ways, and then in more irremediable ones. Until it became completely clear to me that I can no longer comprehend what happens in my children's schools.
It is now a distinct possibility that the unintended casualty of No Child Left behind is the parents who have been left behind in their stead.
I used to believe that public school open houses required little more than the obligatory clean shirt with buttons and a swipe of lip gloss. Possibly a list of semi-aspirational questions. A pen. As a parent you'd strive to show your child's teachers that they were inheriting your charming young scion and listen attentively to their plans for the year. But at this year's back to school night for my fifth-grader, I think it's fair to say that I failed on every single testable metric. Starting with not knowing it was back to school night in the first place. That sin was quickly followed by tardiness, lost-ness, and also failure to ask probing questions. But all of these minor failings were soon swallowed up by a complete and total inability to show mastery of either curriculum or academic goals. The evening passed in a blur of acronyms, test names, and emendations to last year's system. Which I also didn't understand. In fact, I think it's fair to say that I understood significantly less at this open house than I did at my sons' open house during a sabbatical last year, when it took place overseas and in a foreign language.
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Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham recently cited the Boston and Long Beach Schools for "narrowing their achievement gap" during a July, 2013 "What Will be Different This Time" presentation to the Madison Rotary Club.
As time permits, I intend to post comparisons between the Districts, starting today.
Student / Teacher Ratio
Per Student Annual Spending
Boston Schools' budget information was, by far the easiest to find. Total spending is mentioned prominently, rather than buried in a mountain of numbers.
Finally, after I noticed that Madison's student / teacher ratio is significantly lower than Boston, Long Beach and the Badger state average, I took a look at the Wisconsin DPI website to see how staffing has changed over the past few years. Madison's licensed staff grew from 2,273 in 2007-2008 to 2,492 in 2011-2012.
What are the student achievement benefits of Madison's very low ratio?
Related: Madison Schools' 2013-2014 budget includes a 4.5% property tax increase after 9% two years ago.
"Plenty of resources" and "the Madison School District has the resources to close the achievement gap".
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Madison School District 500K PDF
Experience and research tell us that effective educators are the single most important school based factor determining student success. The DPI Educator Effectiveness Team is dedicated to guiding the training, piloting, and implementation of a Wisconsin Educator Effectiveness System that will support and improve professional practice leading to improved student outcomes. This includes assuring that educators have access to quality data identifying individual areas of strength, as well as areas of needed improvement. The work of the Educator Effectiveness Team is grounded in the belief that every child in every classroom deserves to have excellent teachers and excellent building leaders who are supported in their ongoing professional growth.Additional background at the Wisconsin DPI website and via duckduckgo.
Educator Effectiveness System: A Holistic Tool to Improve Professional Practice and Student OutcomesDPI has worked with stakeholders to design the Wisconsin Educator Effectiveness System to improve educator professional practice in order to improve student outcomes. Several states have successfully implemented similar systems, and initial results indicate these Systems represent a vast improvement over typical educator evaluation practices. However, in order to make sure the System most positively impacts educator practice throughout Wisconsin, it is essential that educators and the public understand key aspects of the system.
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1. Both out-of-school and in-school suspensions were less common in 2012-13 than in 2011-12. In particular, the reduction in out-of-school suspensions led to nearly 600 fewer days of instruction lost to suspensions.Related: Madison School Board discipline presentation (PDF) and a Wisconsin DPI FAQ (PDF).2. Large disproportionalities exist between suspensions and demographics in MMSD. For example, African- American students make up 19% of MMSD's population but received 60% of out-of-school suspensions. Low- income students make up 48% of MMSD but received 85% of suspensions.
3. There are large disparities in discipline practices between schools. For example, among elementary schools, out-of-school suspensions ranged between 0 and 98, and behavior referrals ranged between 25 and 2,319.
Related: Gangs & School Violence Forum (2005) audio & video and Police calls to and near Madison schools: 1996-2006.
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The largest bank in the United States will stop making student loans in a few weeks.JPMorgan Chase has sent a memorandum to colleges notifying them that the bank will stop making new student loans in October, according to Reuters.
The official reason is quite bland."We just don't see this as a market that we can significantly grow," Thasunda Duckett tells Reuters. Duckett is the chief executive for auto and student loans at Chase, which means she's basically delivering the news that a large part of her business is getting closed down.
The move is eerily reminiscent of the subprime shutdown that happened in 2007. Each time a bank shuttered its subprime unit, the news was presented in much the same way that JPMorgan is spinning the end of its student lending.
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Nearly fifty years have passed since Richard Feynman taught the introductory physics course at Caltech that gave rise to these three volumes, The Feynman Lectures on Physics. In those fifty years our understanding of the physical world has changed greatly, but The Feynman Lectures on Physics has endured. Feynman's lectures are as powerful today as when first published, thanks to Feynman's unique physics insights and pedagogy. They have been studied worldwide by novices and mature physicists alike; they have been translated into at least a dozen languages with more than 1.5 millions copies printed in the English language alone. Perhaps no other set of physics books has had such wide impact, for so long.This New Millennium Edition ushers in a new era for The Feynman Lectures on Physics (FLP): the twenty-first century era of electronic publishing. FLP has been converted to eFLP, with the text and equations expressed in the LaTeX electronic typesetting language, and all figures redone using modern drawing software.
The consequences for the print version of this edition are not startling; it looks almost the same as the original red books that physics students have known and loved for decades. The main differences are an expanded and improved index, the correction of 885 errata found by readers over the five years since the first printing of the previous edition, and the ease of correcting errata that future readers may find. To this I shall return below.
The eBook Version of this edition, and the Enhanced Electronic Version are electronic innovations. By contrast with most eBook versions of 20th century technical books, whose equations, figures and sometimes even text become pixellated when one tries to enlarge them, the LaTeX manuscript of the New Millennium Edition makes it possible to create eBooks of the highest quality, in which all features on the page (except photographs) can be enlarged without bound and retain their precise shapes and sharpness. And the Enhanced Electronic Version, with its audio and blackboard photos from Feynman's original lectures, and its links to other resources, is an innovation that would have given Feynman great pleasure.
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FABRICIO FERREIRA, a 17-year-old from Brockley, in south-east London, is not a typical student of the ancient world. But his enthusiasm is infectious. "The Greeks were so messed up," he opines, grinning beneath his thick glasses and afro. "I love Odysseus, because he's so dodgy. He lies all of the time, he cheats, but he's still the hero--like Batman."Mr Ferreira is a student at Brooke House Sixth Form College (known as BSix) in Hackney, a school where 65% of students are on some sort of government financial support. He spoke to your correspondent while attending a week-long summer school hosted by Wadham College, Oxford, but arranged by BSix as part of its East End Classics Centre programme. There, he and 17 other A-level classics students spent four full days--9am to 6pm--learning about ancient societies and practising their Greek. The students then wrote a 1,500-word essay and attended a one-to-one tutorial with an Oxford academic.
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Born in 1925, I started at Boston Latin School -- both the first U.S. public school, founded in 1635, and also our oldest school -- in the late 1930s for middle school. The teachers were called -- and addressed as -- "masters," and discipline was tight, with a large percentage of expulsions.But our disciplinary data was not shared with the police or the FBI (which got its name in 1935).
During these days, however, as constitutional attorney and head of the Rutherford Institute, John Whitehead, writes in "America's Schools: Breeding Grounds for Compliant Citizens" (Rutherford.org, Oct. 12, 2012):
"Once looked upon as the starting place for imparting principles of freedom and democracy (in our government) to future citizens, America's classrooms are becoming little more than breeding grounds for compliant citizens.
"The moment young people walk into school, they increasingly find themselves under constant surveillance; they are photographed, fingerprinted, scanned, X-rayed, sniffed and snooped on.
"Between metal detectors at the entrances, drug-sniffing dogs in the hallways (during police raids) and surveillance cameras in the classrooms and elsewhere, many of America's schools look more like prisons than learning facilities."
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The union representing Kenosha teachers has been decertified and may not bargain base wages with the district.Because unions are limited in what they can do even if they are certified, the new status of Kenosha's teachers union -- just like the decertification of many other teachers unions in the state that did not or could not pursue the steps necessary to maintain certification in the new era of Act 10 -- may be a moral blow more than anything else.
Teachers in Milwaukee and Janesville met the state's Aug. 30 deadline to apply for recertification, a state agency representative says. Peter Davis, general counsel for the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, said the Milwaukee and Janesville districts will hold recertification votes in November.
To continue as the recognized bargaining unit in the district, 51% of the union's eligible membership must vote in favor of recertification, according to the controversial Act 10 legislation passed in 2011.
With contracts that were in place through the end of June, teachers in the three large southeastern Wisconsin districts were protected the longest from the new legislation, which limits collective bargaining, requires unions to hold annual votes to be recognized as official entities, and mandates that teachers and other public employees pay more out-of-pocket for their health care and retirement costs.
.....
"It seems like the majority of our affiliates in the state aren't seeking recertification, so I don't think the KEA is an outlier or unique in this," Brey said.
She added that certification gives the union scant power over a limited number of issues they'd like a voice in.
Sheronda Glass, the director of business services in Kenosha, said it's a new experience for the district to be under Act 10.
Contrary to some published media reports, however, the union did not vote to decertify.Interestingly, Madison School District & Madison Teachers to Commence Bargaining. Far more important is addressing Madison's long standing, disastrous reading results.In fact, no such election was ever held, according to KEA Executive Director Joe Kiriaki, who responded to a report from the Conservative Badger blog, which published an article by Milwaukee radio talk show host Mark Belling, who said he had learned that just 37 percent of the teachers had voted to reauthorize the union.
In a prepared statement, Kiriaki criticized the district for "promoting untrue information" to Belling.
Union chose to focus on other issuesKiriaki said the union opted not to "jump through the hoops," such as the recertification requirement, created by Act 10, the state's relatively new law on collective bargaining.
The law, among other things required the annual re-certification of unions if they want to serve as bargaining representatives for teachers and other public workers. It also prohibits most public employees from negotiating all but base wages, limiting them to the rate of inflation.
Kiriaki cited a ruling by a Dane County Circuit Court judge on the constitutionality of Act 10, saying he believed it would be upheld.
In my view, the unions that wish to serve their membership effectively going forward would be much better off addressing new opportunities, including charters, virtual, and dual enrollment services. The Minneapolis Teachers Union can authorize charters, for example.
Much more on Act 10, here.
A conversation with retired WEAC executive Director Morris Andrews.
The Frederick Taylor inspired, agrarian K-12 model is changing, albeit at a glacial pace. Madison lags in many areas, from advanced opportunities to governance diversity, dual enrollment and online opportunities. Yet we spend double the national average per student, funded by ongoing property tax increases.
An elected official recently remarked to me that "it's as if Madison schools have been stuck in a bubble for the past 40 years".
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As students in New York City return to school for the fall, a coalition of youth and legal advocacy groups, including the New York Civil Liberties Union, has launched a campaign to address disciplinary policies that they argue criminalize students, making them less likely to graduate and more likely to end up ensnared in the criminal justice system. The "New Vision for School Safety" presented by the campaign calls for a citywide reduction of the use of police and NYPD school safety officers in schools and an increase in the power of educators, parents and students to shape the safety policies in their school communities.Advocates argue that strict disciplinary practices, including police presence, metal detectors and "zero tolerance" policies, disproportionately target students of color, especially black and Latino youth. Although only a third of students in New York City are black, they received over half (53 percent) of the suspensions over the past decade, according to the Dignity in Schools Campaign. Of the students suspended for "profanity," 51 percent were black, and 57 percent of those suspended for "insubordination" were black. Students with disabilities are also four times as likely to be suspended than their non-disabled peers. (A representative for New York's Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment.) The creeping criminalization of school spaces targeting already marginalized populations is not limited to the city of New York - as The New York Times reported earlier this year, hundreds of thousands of students around the country face criminal charges, as opposed to school-based disciplinary measures, each year. A civil suit filed earlier this year in Texas alleges that misdemeanor ticketing disproportionately targeted African American students.
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Paul Peterson & Eric Hanushek:
Americans are aware of public education's many failures--the elevated high-school dropout rates, the need for remedial work among entering college students. One metric in particular stands out: Only 32% of U.S. high-school students are proficient in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. When the NAEP results are put on the scale of the Program on International Student Assessment (PISA), the world's best source of information on student achievement, the comparable proficiency rates in math are 45% in Germany, 49% in Canada, and 63% in Singapore, the highest performing independent nation.The subpar performance of U.S. students has wide ramifications--and not just for individuals. On an individual level, of course, the connection between education and income is obvious. Those with a college degree can expect to earn over 60% more in the course of their lifetime than those with a high-school diploma, according to U.S. Census data. But there is a nexus between educational achievement and national prosperity as well.
According to our calculations, raising student test scores in this country up to the level in Canada would dramatically increase economic growth. We estimate that the additional growth dividend has a present value of $77 trillion over the next 80 years. This is equivalent to adding an average 20% to the paycheck of every worker for every year of work over this time period.
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IT SOUNDS as uncontroversial as apple pie. Teach for America (TFA), a not-for-profit organisation founded in 1990, places young "corps members" at schools in poor areas to teach for two years. Recruits work in 35 states, most come fresh from college, and they learn mainly on the job. Fair enough; but TFA has many critics, particularly among teachers who have spent years becoming qualified and whose jobs are now contested.Minnesota's Board of Teaching caused a furore this summer when it refused to give a band of TFA members group permission to teach in the state. It had done so every year since the organisation first arrived there, in 2009. The state assessed 35 applicants individually instead--eventually granting licences to all of them.
Ryan Vernoush, a board member and a former Minnesota teacher of the year, believes placing inexperienced young people in front of "marginalised students" only serves "to perpetuate the status quo of inequity". Elisa Villanueva Beard, the co-chief executive officer of TFA, counters that her organisation is just "one source" of teachers among others. She wants principals to have a choice when looking for employees.
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Push and pull between administrators and faculty unions during contract negotiations is to be expected. But some faculty members at the University of Oregon say administrators in their contract negotiations are attempting to gut a particularly sacred university policy: academic freedom.Oregon's existing policy calls free inquiry and free speech "the cornerstones of an academic institution committed to the creation and transfer of knowledge." The belief that an opinion is "pernicious, false, and in any other way despicable, detestable, offensive or 'just plain wrong' cannot be grounds for its suppression," it says.
In the spring, Oregon's Faculty Senate approved a new policy on academic freedom, a near-identical version of which the United Academics, a union affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors, soon adopted for negotiation purposes. Oregon faculty voted to unionize last year and they are working on their first contract. The Senate statement on academic freedom has yet to be finalized, pending its own negotiations with the administration.
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THE cab driver boasted that his daughter had just graduated. But then he admitted that her journalism degree from the University of Wisconsin had cost $140,000. Since journalism is an ill-paid job that requires no formal qualification, this sounds like a waste of money.Barack Obama worries that too few students are getting value for money from college. Graduates earn more than non-graduates, of course, but how much of this is because they were cleverer to begin with, rather than because college stretched their minds or taught them something useful? The average American graduate finishes college with $26,600 of debt; some with far more (see article). The proportion of student loans at least 90 days in arrears has risen from 8.5% in 2011 to 11.7% today. Many graduates are struggling.
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THERE was plenty of red meat on offer to the 5,000 delegates at this week's AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles. Speakers proclaimed class war, bashed corporations and trade deals, and demanded fresh taxes on the rich. One, to much cheering, threatened to punch the conservative Koch brothers in the face.America's largest trade-union grouping, with 57 affiliated unions and 12m members, convenes just once every four years; such jamborees are an opportunity to let off steam. But this year there was furrowed-brow introspection mixed with the tub-thumping. Richard Trumka, the AFL-CIO president, said the labour movement was in "crisis" and urged delegates to avoid the temptation of blaming outsiders.
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AS THE new term starts across England, schools are chewing over this summer's results in the 16-plus exams. One trend is clear--the coalition's emphasis on pupils achieving five core academic subjects, including a language, in its new EBACC (English Baccalaureate) qualification has raised the number of candidates taking language exams.This marks a reversal of a long period in which English schools turned out a rising number of monoglots (see chart). The past two decades have witnessed a sharp decline in the numbers of teenagers poring over French verbs, let alone the oddities of German, which as Mark Twain, a 19th-century American writer, observed, renders a girl neuter but a turnip feminine.
In 1993 over 315,000 pupils sat the 16-plus exam in French, compared with just over 177,000 this year. German had 108,000 entrants in 1993; there are fewer than 63,000 now. Only Spanish fared better, with 91,000 GCSE entrants this year, rising from 32,000 in 1993. Largely to blame for the slump was a decision by the Labour government in 2002 to end the compulsory status of a language in secondary schools. That accelerated a longer period of modern-languages decline, as pupils switched to subjects perceived to be easier or more practical. Now the coalition is claiming that the rise in this year's exam entries at 16 marks the first step to correcting the resulting monolingualism. Yet progress has been modest--the number of GCSE French entrants, for example, merely returned to 2010 levels, around half the numbers of the 1990s.
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STARTING pre-school poses tests for any four-year-old: sitting still, the risk of a yucky lunch, missing home. The stakes are still higher for 700 small Texans due to enter pre-kindergarten centres being opened by the city of San Antonio on August 26th. They are pioneers who will be watched all the way to the White House.Not so long ago there was broad, bipartisan support for government provision of pre-school (called "pre-K", since it precedes kindergarten): a year of classes and play designed to ensure that children are ready for the serious business of learning. Alas, pre-K has joined the long list of issues capable of provoking partisan rage. Critics include shrink-the-government types growling about expensive "babysitting", joined by social conservatives arguing that young children are best off when cared for by married mothers, at home.
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BAMA Companies has been making pies and biscuits in Oklahoma since the 1920s. But the company is struggling to find Okies with the skills to fill even its most basic factory jobs. Such posts require workers to think critically, yet graduates of local schools are often unable to read or do simple maths. This is why the company recently decided to open a new factory in Poland--its first in Europe. "We hear that educated people are plentiful," explains Paula Marshall, Bama's boss.Poland has made some dramatic gains in education in the past decade. Before 2000 half of the country's rural adults had finished only primary school. Yet international rankings now put the country's students well ahead of America's in science and maths (the strongest predictor of future earnings), even as the country spends far less per pupil. What is Poland doing right? And what is America doing wrong? Amanda Ripley, an American journalist, seeks to answer such questions in "The Smartest Kids in the World", her fine new book about the schools that are working around the globe.
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ANDREW, an unemployed graduate in religious studies and creative writing, lives in Oregon with his parents. He is not alone. Some 21.6m Americans aged 18 to 31--36% of the total--still languish in the parental home, according to the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank. This figure is slightly misleading, since it includes students, who may live at home only during the holidays. Nonetheless, the share of youngsters stuck with mom and pop is the largest since surveys began in 1968.Andrew hates his situation with "an intense passion". It is safe and dry and warm, of course, and he appreciates his parents' help. But he is bored and frustrated and his love life has become "limited" since he moved back in with them. (The fact that his mother won't let him cook makes preparing romantic meals for two a challenge.)
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The cost of US higher education is at the forefront of the national consciousness. Tuition has more than doubled in real dollars since 1980, growing far faster than inflation, and total student loan debt finally cracked the $1 trillion threshold. Meanwhile, demand for higher education only continues to grow, prompted by the needs of a 21st-century economy and political rhetoric seeking to make the United States the most educated nation in the world. To meet this demand, higher education reformers must develop a bold vision for how to reduce costs. Harvard Education Press's just-released volume Stretching the Higher Education Dollar: How Innovation Can Improve Access, Equity, and Affordability aims to explain why college has become so expensive, to offer solutions at both existing schools and via a raft of new providers, and to give policymakers new ideas for nurturing reform.Key points in this Outlook:
US higher education has grown increasingly expensive, primarily because of a misaligned incentive structure that enables colleges to continue to raise money and because of an increasingly outdated vision of what "college" means.
Nascent reforms such as university-online partnerships, massive open online courses, and competency-based education seek to rethink the delivery of information and credentials.
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The U.S. Department of Justice has entered into a lawsuit opposing Louisiana's voucher system. The state's program, passed into law in 2012, offers a voucher to attend a private school to students from families with incomes below 250% of the poverty line attending low performing public schools. Parents apply for the vouchers and to date about 90% of the recipients are black.The DOJ is not intervening as you might naively expect because of concerns about the constitutionality of voucher programs, or because they believe that private schools in Louisiana discriminate, or because they think the state has designed its voucher program in a way that discriminates against minorities. No. Their argument is that the voucher program will have an impact on federal desegregation orders that require certain school districts to achieve a racial distribution in each of their schools that mirrors the racial composition of the district as a whole. So, if 40% of the school-aged population in these districts is black then each school has a target of 40% black enrollment.
Here is an example the DOJ provides of the harm caused by the voucher program they are intervening to halt:
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It is no surprise that parents struggle to make sense of data about schools: there is just so much of it. School league tables are among the most frequently viewed official datasets, but few of us use them to make decisions.The Open Public Services Network aims to make the vast amounts of data now available about education, healthcare, policing and social care more useful to the people who rely on those services. Too often, the information makes sense to managers or professionals, but leaves the general public confused.
Our first project has been to look at schools and ask the question: how well does the information available to parents and children help them understand the education provided by a school? How might it be improved? We brought together a group of experts to consider this. The results of their deliberations can be found here.
One thing became clear early on in the discussions - there were some large gaps. For example the "culture of learning" within a school was seen as crucial but the information available gave limited insight into this. There was a desire to know much more about the views of parents, staff and pupils.
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Shauniqua Epps was the sort of student that so many colleges say they want.She was a high achiever, graduating from high school with a 3.8 GPA and ranking among the top students in her class. She served as secretary, then president, of the student government. She played varsity basketball and softball. Her high-school guidance counselor, in a letter of recommendation, wrote that Epps was "an unusual young lady" with "both drive and determination."
Epps, 19, was also needy.
Her family lives in subsidized housing in South Philadelphia, and her father died when she was in third grade. Her mother is on Social Security disability, which provides the family $698 a month, records show. Neither of her parents finished high school.
Epps, who is African-American, made it her goal to be the first in her family to attend college.
"I did volunteering. I did internships. I did great in school. I was always good with people," said Epps, who has a broad smile and a cheerful manner. "I thought everything was going to go my way."
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The Atlantic published a great article today about the hollowness of the college rankings compiled by US News and World Report. Written by retired Boston College professor John Tierney, the piece highlights the problems that plague the US News system--dubious data, arbitrary rules, and a one-size-fits-all approach, to name a few.
Of course, these were the same problems that persuaded Reed's then-president Steve Koblik to pull out of the USN rankings back in 1995. It's a shame to see that matters haven't gotten much better.Reed still doesn't participate in USN, although the magazine insists on ranking us anyway. Which is too bad--as Tierney points out, the USN system remains surprisingly popular, despite an unrelenting stream of criticism through the decades. On the other hand, the last several years have witnessed the rise of more comprehensive alternatives. Perhaps one day they'll supplant the USN juggernaut. In the meantime, USN has released its latest report. Like Tierney, I'll probably peek at the rankings, but--as they say in the ads for the Oregon lottery--for entertainment purposes only.
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One of the lesser-broadcast features of the most recent jobs report is that unemployment for African-Americans actually ticked higher, to 13 percent, even as the rest of the country held even at 7.3 percent.Related: English 10 & Connected Math.Unemployment for Hispanics was 9.3 percent and for Asians 5.1 percent. Also worrisome, the number of African-American adults who held jobs actually declined last month, and fewer than 61 percent of blacks are working--the lowest participation rate since 1982.
While New York's Mayor Bloomberg sees racism in the campaign of Bill deBlasio and Jay Z finds racism in the Trayvon Martin decision, I perceive racism in these jobs figures. Blacks are increasingly left behind, at least in part because their leaders do not demand better schools. The greatest source of "disparate impact" in this country, to borrow a phrase currently popular with the Justice Department, is that most black kids can't read or write. Upward mobility for the African-American community, tenuous at best, is squashed the minute they enter kindergarten.
Too harsh? Not by half. Consider the results from the recent Common Core testing in New York, one of the first to measure how students meet the new nation-wide standards. Statewide, 31 percent of public school students in grades 3 through 8 were considered proficient in English; only 16 percent of blacks met that test, compared to 50 percent of Asians and 40 percent of whites - results which the state's education department says reveals "the persistence of the achievement gap."
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CCollege seniors who thought their days of taking standardized tests were behind them might have another think coming next spring.More than 200 schools, including some in the Texas and California state systems, have signed on to offer students the new voluntary Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus (CLA+) test, designed to give employers an objective way to measure entry-level candidates.
Proponents of the CLA+ say the test scores are a better way of measuring student performance and career readiness than Grade Point Averages (GPAs), which have become so inflated they're no longer as useful to employers as they once were. The average college GPA has risen over the past few decades from 2.3 to 3.2, according to Gallup.
The compromised value of a high GPA has little impact on students from highly selective, well known colleges who are likely to land a job regardless of their GPA. But it has hurt hard-working students at schools without a marquis name, says Robert Benjamin, executive director of the nonprofit Council for Aid to Education, which administers the CLA+.
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The average retirement payout for new retirees in California's biggest public pension system doubled between 1999 and 2012, according to CalPERS data, and initial monthly payments for one group nearly tripled in that period.State and local cops and firefighters benefited the most.
In the 14 years covered by the data analyzed by The Sacramento Bee, average first-month pensions to state police and firefighters went from $1,770 to $4,978. California Highway Patrol officers' first-month retirement payments doubled from $3,633 to $7,418, and local government safety employees' pensions went from $3,296 to $6,867.
The figures from CalPERS' internal annual reports, obtained by The Bee through a Public Records Act request, show how upgraded pension formulas that became fashionable during the late 1990s and early 2000s amplified the impact of pay raises to boost retirement allowances.
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Stephanie Banchero & Kris Maher:
As Philadelphia students returned to school this week facing larger class sizes and slimmed-down arts programs, a fight raged over how to keep the district from sinking further into financial and academic distress.One of the nation's most troubled school districts, Philadelphia is buckling under financial pressure and has been unable to squeeze concessions from the teachers union. Teachers started the school year Monday without a contract after failing to reach agreement by Aug. 31, and state leaders are threatening to hold up additional funding unless teachers agree to pay cuts and other changes, such as performance-based pay and a longer school day.
Wanda Cantres, whose 7-year-old son reported to Henry C. Lea Elementary School for the first time after his school was closed, said she is worried about ballooning class sizes and the financial uncertainty.
"They can build prisons and put up high rises, but they can't get school right," she said. "There are going to be a lot of children that slip through the cracks."
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Scientists at The Neuro find important time factor in second-language acquisitionThe age at which children learn a second language can have a significant bearing on the structure of their adult brain, according to a new joint study by the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital - The Neuro at McGill University and Oxford University. The majority of people in the world learn to speak more than one language during their lifetime. Many do so with great proficiency particularly if the languages are learned simultaneously or from early in development.
The study concludes that the pattern of brain development is similar if you learn one or two language from birth. However, learning a second language later on in childhood after gaining proficiency in the first (native) language does in fact modify the brain's structure, specifically the brain's inferior frontal cortex. The left inferior frontal cortex became thicker and the right inferior frontal cortex became thinner. The cortex is a multi-layered mass of neurons that plays a major role in cognitive functions such as thought, language, consciousness and memory.
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ould public colleges be free?Yes, says the head of the union for University of California's 4,000 instructors and librarians.
How?
Trim non-essential functions, redirect a bunch of money and end tax breaks that mostly benefit wealthy college-goers' families, argues University Council-American Federation of Teachers President Bob Samuels. Of course, not everyone would agree with his definition of non-essential, particularly researchers.
Samuels' new book says students have become "slaves to debt" because colleges have decided to get into "expensive and disorienting" endeavors - research labs funded by external dollars, luxury dorms and athletics - that have little to do with instructing students. He says American higher education costs more than it should and undergraduates are forced to pick up the tab for university mission creep. On top of that, undergrads are suffering through large, impersonal classes and left in the hands of graduate students. While Samuels wants all of public higher education to be free, many of his examples of spending cuts are generally found at research universities with big-time athletics and don't exist at, say, community colleges, which already charge bare-bones rates.
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The case for market-driven reforms in education rests on two key premises: The public school system is in crisis, and the solution is to let the market pick winners and losers. Market strategies--high-stakes teacher accountability, merit pay, shuttering "failing" schools--are believed to be essential if public schools are ever going to get better. And these maxims underlie the commitment to charter schools and vouchers. Freed from the dead hand of bureaucracy and the debilitating effects of school board politics, the argument runs, schools are free to innovate.If you follow education debates, you've heard that again and again. Here's what's new: A spate of new books undercuts both propositions, simply decimating the argument for privatizing education.
Since The Death and Life of the Great American School System, her 2010 best-seller, Diane Ravitch has been the most prominent critic of the market-minded reformers. Americans love apostates, and the fact that, as assistant secretary of education in the first Bush administration, Ravitch acknowledged that she had "fallen for the latest panaceas and miracle cures and drunk deeply of the elixir that promised a quick fix," has given her considerable credibility. Now she pops up everywhere, keynoting national conventions, urging on teachers at an Occupy the Department of Education rally, being profiled flatteringly in The New Yorker, deluging her supporters with emails, and sparring with ex-D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, the darling of the privatizers, about how to "fix" education.
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Given MTI's victory in Circuit Court, wherein Judge Juan Colas found Act 10 unconstitutional, MTI and the District have agreed to commence Contract negotiations (PDF).I wonder what the sentiment across the teacher population might be? Perhaps there have been surveys?Details of this were announced in a joint letter to all District employees last Friday from Superintendent Jen Cheatham and MTI Executive Director John Matthews. Their letter stated that, "... to be successful this year and in the years to come, District employees must have a work environment that is both challenging and rewarding, and one which includes economic and employment security". Matthews complimented the Superintendent and Board members for their progressive philosophy in recognizing the essentials in positive employment relations.
Contracts existed in all 423 school districts at the time Act 10 was passed in 2011. Currently, workers in only four school districts enjoy the wages, benefits and rights which a Collective Bargaining Agreement provides. The current Contracts for MTI's five bargaining units expire June 30, 2014.
The State has appealed Judge Colas' decision. The matter will be heard by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in November or December. In his ruling, Judge Colas stated that Act 10 was passed in a very controversial manner, skipping several steps mandated by legislative rules and Wisconsin law, and that it violated public workers' Constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, as well as the Constitutional guaranteed Equal Protection Clause.
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A major new study has found that new students at Northwestern University learn more when their instructors are adjuncts than when they are tenure-track professors.The study -- released this morning by the National Bureau of Economic Research (abstract available here) -- found that the gains are greatest for the students with the weakest academic preparation. And the study found that the gains extended across a wide range of disciplines. The authors of the study suggest that by looking at measures of student learning, and not just course or program completion, their work may provide a significant advance in understanding the impact of non-tenure-track instructors.
Many adjuncts will no doubt be pleased by the study's conclusions on their teaching ability. But the study does not call for an end to the two-tiered system of academic employment between those on and off the tenure track. Rather, it says that the study may provide evidence that research universities benefit from more teaching by those who don't have research obligations.
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1.1MB PDF: Background information on the Madison School District's 2013-2014 budget (PDF District Overview), which includes a 4.5% property tax increase, after 9% two years ago.
Middleton's property taxes on a "typical" $230,000 home is 16% less than Madison's.
Much more on the 2013-2014 Madison School District budget, here.
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Hedge funder Whitney Tilson argues that a new generation of young Navy SEAL-like teachers can club the achievement gap out of existence.
Can a new generation of young, Navy SEAL-like teachers finally club the achievement gap out of existence? That is today's fiercely urgent question, reader, and believe it or not, I do not ask it in jest. The call to send in the SEALs comes from hedge fund manager and edu-visionary extraordinaire Whitney Tilson. When Tilson read this recent New York Times story about high turnover among young charter school teachers, he went ballistic, to use a military metaphor. After all, turnover among Navy SEALs is also very high, notes Tilson, and no one complains about that.
Bigger rigor
So how exactly is the young super teacher in an urban No Excuses charter school like a Navy SEAL? Better yet, how are such teachers NOT like SEALs? Both sign onto an all-consuming mission, the SEAL to take on any situation or enemy the world has to offer, the teacher to tackle the greatest enemy our nation has ever known: teacher union low expectations. But as Tilson has seen second-hand, being a "bad a**" warrior is exhausting, which is why SEALs, like young super teachers, enjoy extraordinarily short careers.
But the work is incredibly intense and not really compatible with family life, so few are doing active missions for their career--they move on into management/leadership positions or go into the private sector (egads!). Could you imagine the NY Times writing a snarky story about high turnover among SEALs?!
Cream of the crop
Egads! indeed, reader. In fact, now that I think of it, *crushing* the achievement gap in our failed and failing public schools is almost exactly like delivering highly specialized, intensely challenging warfare capabilities that are beyond the means of standard military forces. For one thing, the SEALs are extremely choosy about who they let into their ranks, just as we'll need to be if we're going to replace our old, low-expectations teachers with fresh young commandos. Only the cream of the crop make it to SEALdom, and by cream, I mean "cream" colored. The SEALs are overwhelmingly white; just 2% of SEAL officers are African American.
See the world
And let's not forget that SEALs and new urban teachers both get plenty of opportunities to experience parts of the world they haven't seen before. The elite Navy men train and operate in desert and urban areas, mountains and woodlands, and jungle and arctic conditions, while members of the elite teaching force spend two years combating the achievement gap in the urban schools before they receive officer status. And while Frog Men live on military bases, our commando teachers increasingly live in special encampments built just for them.
And here is where our metaphor begins to break down ever so slightly....
Of course, there are a few teeny tiny areas where the SEALs differ from the young teachers who will finally club the achievement gap out of existence. There is, for instance, the teeny tiny matter of the training that the SEALs receive: 8-weeks Naval Special Warfare Prep School, 24-weeks Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/s) Training, 3-weeks Parachute Jump School, 26-weeks SEAL Qualification Training (SQT), followed by 18-months of pre-deployment training, including 6-month Individual Specialty Training, 6-month Unit Level Training and 6-month Task Group Level Training before they are considered deployable. TFA, which Tilson praises for its "yeoman" work in recruiting and grooming the next generation of urban teacher hot shots, relies upon an, ahem, somewhat different approach...
Send tips and comments to tips@edushyster.com.
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"Teach by Example"
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When she rolled out of bed on the morning of Aug. 31, University of Iowa student Samantha Goudie probably didn't expect to end the day as a national Bluto Blutarsky-style college binge drinking mascot. But after Goudie was arrested trying to run on the field during an Iowa football game, she blew an astounding .341 into a police Breathalyzer -- more than four times the legal limit.Yet Goudie (whose now-defunct Twitter handle was, appropriately, "@Vodka_samm") was coherent enough to tweet while being arrested. Sitting in the police station, she imparted wisdom like "I'm going to get .341 tattooed on me because its so epic." Not exactly "Letters From a Birmingham Jail."
Not to be outdone, one 19-year old woman with a blood-alcohol content of .33 was found staggering outside Camp Randall Stadium in Madison on Saturday before the Badgers football game. Another 19-year old female with a .37 blood alcohol level was found passed out on campus. "If no one called for help, this student may have died," said University of Wisconsin-Madison police Chief Susan Riseling.
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Charlie Eaton and Jacob Habinek:
With growing student debt in the headlines, Washington DC policymakers have focused on the interest rates students pay on the loans they take out to cover college costs. But student loan interest payments are a symptom more than the underlying cause of rising student debt. Colleges have steadily hiked tuition, to heights that now make attendance unaffordable for many students from families of modest means.Tuition increases have been especially sharp at public research universities that once provided an affordable world-class education. The increases have been going on for a long time, but they have accelerated recently. Average tuition and fees at public research universities increased 56% between 2002 and 2010 from $5,011 to $7,824 a year. As the cost of going to college has escalated, so has student indebtedness. According to data from the Institute for College Access and Success, student debt at graduation from public four-year colleges increased by 32% between 2004 and 2010, when it hit an average of $21,605 per student.
Why are tuition and fees at public universities rising so sharply? Universities face higher costs to pay for all of their activities, while the public funding they receive has plummeted. Tuition hikes help make up the difference. Yet there is another factor at work, especially recently - because public universities are going into debt. Working with major Wall Street players like J.P. Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and Bank of America, they issue bonds and make substantial interest payments to investors, many of whom also trade in university debt. Like their students, in short, public universities have developed a debt problem - indeed, the rising burden on the students is partly driven by the indebtedness universities have taken on.
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NINE OF 10 Louisiana children who receive vouchers to attend private schools are black. All are poor and, if not for the state assistance, would be consigned to low-performing or failing schools with little chance of learning the skills they will need to succeed as adults. So it's bewildering, if not downright perverse, for the Obama administration to use the banner of civil rights to bring a misguided suit that would block these disadvantaged students from getting the better educational opportunities they are due.The Justice Department has petitioned a U.S. District Court to bar Louisiana from awarding vouchers for the 2014-15 school year to students in public school systems that are under federal desegregation orders, unless the vouchers are first approved by a federal judge. The government argues that allowing students to leave their public schools for vouchered private schools threatens to disrupt the desegregation of school systems. A hearing is tentatively set for Sept. 19.
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Following this Labor Day weekend, virtually all of the nation's students in grades K-12 will be back in school. Unfortunately, fewer of them will be participating in physical education classes and intramural sports programs.It's mind-boggling that at a time when overweight and obesity levels are sky-high among our young people, and physical activity levels are down, our schools are cutting physical education classes, recess and intramural sports programs.
Due to No Child Left Behind mandates and the pressures of standardized state assessment tests, many schools are cutting back on physical education and recess under the mistaken belief that kids need more desk time to improve test scores. Based on the latest research on exercise and the brain, that's the direct opposite approach that schools should be taking.
"Overall, I don't think there's any doubt that schools are feeling pressure from No Child Left Behind and standardized tests," according to Brenda VanLengen, Vice Chair of PE4life, a physical education advocacy organization.
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After voting to approve yet another tuition increase in 2011, University of California regent Bonnie Reiss lamented, "Faced with enormous financial cuts forced on us by political leaders, we only have a handful of options open to us, and all are horrible options." Andrea Newman, a regent at the University of Michigan, agrees. Justifying her vote for higher tuition, Newman explained, "The budget cuts passed by the legislature are impossible to make up otherwise."The budget cuts are real. Some states, such as Arizona and New Hampshire, have cut as much of 50 percent of their per-student state spending on education since the financial crisis hit, according to a report by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:
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Thanks to digital media, the Internet and new advances in understanding how students learn, educators are beginning to appreciate the importance of breaking out of the classroom and into the wider world. There's a growing understanding that learning should not just be preparation for life, but is actually "life itself."Is School Enough? documents vivid examples of where new modes of learning and engagement are taking hold and flourishing. Featuring nationally recognized educators and researchers, Stephen Brown's powerful stories show that when students have the opportunity to explore real interests and problems, they step up and perform at the highest level. This new approach reaches motivated students as well as kids that educators call "the bright and bored," helping these learners tune in rather than drop out.
Is School Enough? introduces parents, educators, and everyone passionate about learning to:
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Renowned social psychologist Claude Steele will visit Beloit College to give a lecture on Monday, Sept. 9. Free and open to the public, the lecture titled "Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do" takes place at 7:30 p.m. in Eaton Chapel.Steele, the I. James Quillen Dean for the School of Education at Stanford University, will speak on the issues he presented in his 2010 book of the same name. Published by W.W. Norton & Company, the book provides an inside look at his research and groundbreaking findings on stereotypes and identity.
During his visit to campus, Steele will also participate in a panel discussion of teaching and advising at Beloit and facilitate a discussion with students regarding social identity.
Steele, who previously served as the Provost of Columbia University, earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Ohio State University. His research focuses on the psychological experience of the individual and on the experience of threats to the self and the consequences of those threats. He has published articles in numerous scholarly journals, including the American Psychologist, the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Review of "Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotype Affect Us" (Harvard Educational Review)Why are students of color not graduating from college at the same rate as white students? Why might white students be reluctant to take courses with a substantial number of students of color in them? What can educators do to address these problems?
In his new book, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us, social psychologist Claude Steele helps us find answers to these questions based on findings from social psychology experiments. Steele's book sets forth an argument for understanding how contextual factors--not individual characteristics or personal beliefs motivated by prejudice or malice--help explain so-termed "racial achievement gaps" in education and ongoing societal racial and ethnic segregation.
In an accessible, page-turning account written for a general audience, Steele explains how identity contingencies--the conditions that a given social identity forces us to face and overcome in a particular setting--affect our everyday behavior and perpetuate broader societal problems. Expanding on his prior work, he focuses on a specific type of identity contingency: stereotype threat, or the fear of what people could think about us solely because of our race, gender, age, etc. An African American male walking down the street at night, for example, faces the threat of being seen as potentially violent. Steele recounts how, to deflect this stereotype threat, African American New York Times writer Brent Staples whistled Vivaldi while walking the streets of Hyde Park at night to signal to white people that he was educated and nonviolent. Another example of stereotype threat would be a white student in a class that is predominantly nonwhite facing the threat of being perceived as racist. Steele explains how such threats follow us like a "cloud."
Read more here.
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On the one hand, it's nice to see Wisconsin's public schools finally moving toward a human resources model that most of the rest of the working world has been using for years -- i.e., rewarding or sanctioning employees based on how well they do their jobs.On the other, given that public education isn't exactly inventing the wheel here, it's puzzling that the state would need to spend so much time and money coming up with and implementing ways to gauge how well educators do their jobs.
Then there's the question of whether the new teacher evaluations -- expected to cost about $6.9 million this school year and $6.7 million the next -- will produce data that's any more useful than that produced by the old, largely pro forma teacher evaluations.
Two systems have been approved for use so far. One was created by the Department of Public Instruction, the other by the publicly supported Cooperative Educational Service Agency for region 6, or CESA 6.
To my untrained eye, they seem fair and on point. Among the highlights:
Evaluators complete a series of announced and unannounced classroom observation visits.
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Since Michaela Cross's experience was part of a study abroad program conducted annually by the University of Chicago, and I was part of the program - for three years as a graduate student assistant (for the Fall quarters of 2007-2009), and one year as faculty in the program (Fall of 2010) - I think I could most usefully contribute by highlighting a few facts about the program itself. In the process I would think aloud about some of the issues that have come up in the reception of Cross's experience in India, especially in the responses of Rajyashree Sen and Ameya Naik. I choose Sen's and Naik's responses partly because they have been the most recent, but also because between them they represent the spectrum of possible positions that one could usefully take about this issue. Needless to add, there have been other responses, such as the one posted by another fellow University of Chicago student on the trip, an article titled 'In Defence of Rose Chasm (Michaela Cross) and countless other comments, criticisms, and responses that have flooded the Internet world.However, between Sen and Naik, the basic ends of the spectrum are quite clear. Sen contends that it is not only a white woman's problem but an issue for all women and that some self-regulation and discipline would have gone a long way to avert the unsavory experiences if not completely eliminate their possibility. Naik, at the other end of the spectrum, points out that the expectation of preparedness or caution urged by Sen belies the possibility of questioning the pervasive culture of sexual violence, in which any cautionary attempt to be safe, is to pay merely lip service to acknowledging the crime of sexual violence, instead of combating more difficult questions about such a culture.
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To attend the three central city schools in the Milwaukee College Prep system is to immerse yourself in a message: I may be 5 or 7 or 9 years old, but I'm here to get ready for college.The classrooms and hallways in the charter schools feature pennants from the colleges that teachers graduated from. Banners identify each class by the year the students would enroll in college in the normal sequence of things. The new first-graders are the Class of 2025. In fifth grade, students begin making visits to colleges.
It's a highly ambitious message and a highly ambitious school, with results to back up its goals. (Disclosure: I have a family member who works for the schools now, but I said the same things before that was true.) And pushing the college message to students who are predominantly black and low income is in line with what is being done at the best and most ambitious schools in many other central cities.
So is it a good idea to push the college so hard so young? In my mind, the answer is almost entirely yes. There are so many kids, families and schools with lower expectations, so many students who are already on a path at a young age to stay at the bottom of the economic spectrum.
If one of the goals of education is to open doors of opportunity, a crucial element is inculcating expectations and giving kids the capacity to pursue those expectations. Milwaukee College Prep and a few comparable schools in the city are doing that.
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Last week's post (The truth about vaccinations: Your physician knows more than the University of Google) sparked a very lively discussion, with comments from several people trying to persuade me (and the other readers) that their paper disproved everything that I'd been saying. While I encourage you to go read the comments and contribute your own, here I want to focus on the much larger issue that this debate raised: what constitutes scientific authority?It's not just a fun academic problem. Getting the science wrong has very real consequences. For example, when a community doesn't vaccinate children because they're afraid of "toxins" and think that prayer (or diet, exercise, and "clean living") is enough to prevent bacterial infection, outbreaks happen.
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There's a widely shared image on the Internet of a teacher's note that says: "Dear students, I know when you're texting in class. Seriously, no one just looks down at their crotch and smiles."College students returning to class this month would be wise to heed such warnings. You're not as clever as you think--your professors are on to you. The best way to stay in their good graces is to learn what behavior they expect with technology in and around the classroom.
Let's start with the million-dollar question: May computers (laptops, tablets, smartphones) be used in class? Some instructors are as permissive as parents who let you set your own curfew. Others are more controlling and believe that having your phone on means your brain is off and that relying on Google for answers results in a digital lobotomy.
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Outside of research, few people even mention the science of teaching and learning. When research is mentioned, it's often flatly wrong. Psychologists Paul Kirschner and Jeroen van Merriënboer reviewed three "urban legends" in education that have no solid basis in the research literature.The first myth reviewed has two related parts. The myth claims that modern children are "digital natives" who can learn easily from technological sources (e.g. computers). Children now have become independent and creative learners who can communicate, learn, and solve problems easily with technology. Relatedly, children are thought to be able to multitask with technology efficiently (e.g. doing homework like using social media). With regard to the digital natives claim, the authors review research that questions how tech-savvy young people are according to research. Students in many Western countries were found to have low or limited knowledge of information technology. Their skills were resticted to email, mobile phones, and basic software programs. Another study claims that students demonstrate the butterfly defect, where they click through hyperlinks without delving into the content deeply. Researchers in Finland surveyed the technological knowledge of young student teachers and also found their knowledge to be limited. Technology was used primarily for passive consumption, not active creation.
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At the 2007 American Educational Research Association (AERA) convention, scholars of education and the learning sciences debated the usefulness of constructivist versus explicit instruction. The debate inspired the writing of the book Constructivist Instruction: Success or Failure? by educational psychologists Sigmund Tobias and Thomas Duffy. Each week, a post will summarize and comment on the 18 chapters in this book. By the end of this series, we'll develop some nuance on this contentious debate.The book's pedagogy is itself worth noting. In most chapters, one or several researchers argue in favor or contructivism or explicit instruction. At the chapters' end, dissenting researchers question and critique the chapter's authors. The main authors then reply to these critiques. This cycle of critiques and replies digs more deeply into the contructivist/instructivist debate than do scholarly articles.
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It happens a lot: I'll introduce myself to a group of people I don't know well, explaining that I'm a high school English teacher. And someone will invariably respond, "But you're smart, what do you really want to do?" As backhanded compliments go, that one really rankles. What I find most irksome isn't even the implication that my colleagues and I are typically mundane or that my work of the last decade has been a waste of my time. The most frustrating thing about hearing that I'm "too smart" for teaching is the counter-productive mentality about my profession that such a comment underscores.In the early half of the 20th century, a bright woman's best career option was to be a teacher. Now, thankfully, most every path is open to women, the only downside of which is the inevitable matriculation of top female graduates away from the field of teaching due to a plethora of other choices. This trend is compounded by the fact that teaching is now seen as a B-list job: Most top graduates of my college went into law, medicine, business, or academia. Those who did go into teaching, myself included, constantly encountered the assumption that this would be a short-term gig, the ubiquitous two-year foray (through Teach for America or the like) that would ultimately pad graduate school applications. For many, it was. Teaching wasn't, and - 10 years later - still isn't, seen as a "prestigious" career, even by liberal university graduates who would all agree that strong public education is an inviolable social good.
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Public schools in Dane County poured nearly $3 million into security upgrades over the summer, continuing a trend that began nearly 15 years ago with a school shooting in Columbine, Colo.Related: Police calls near Madison High Schools: 1996-2006.Almost all school buildings in the county will have secure entrances when classes begin this week, even in the small, rural districts of Belleville and Wisconsin Heights. All outside doors in both districts will be locked after the start of the school day, a first for both districts but a standard precaution now across much of the county.
Several districts, including Sun Prairie, added a layer of security beyond an intercom system, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to reconfigure entrances so that visitors walk directly into an office or a locked vestibule before being let into any other part of the school. At two schools in
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Aniruddh Chaturvedi came from Mumbai to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Penn., where he is majoring in computer science. This past summer he interned at a tech company in Silicon Valley.
During two years in the U.S., Chaturvedi has been surprised by various aspects of society, as he explained last year in a post on Quora.Chaturvedi offered his latest thoughts on America in an email to Business Insider.
The most surprising things about America:
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Efforts to keep Connecticut schools safe have escalated since a lone gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown last year and shot to death 20 first-graders and six adults. But not all threats to school safety come from outside the building.Related: Police calls near Madison High Schools: 1996-2006.A Courant examination of state records, coming in Sunday's Hartford Courant and on courant.com, revealed that hundreds of Connecticut public schools reported incidents involving weapons in the 2011-2012 school year. The weapons included at least 16 handguns and at least two rifles or shotguns.
Sunday's report will include an online database of every school that reported an incident involving a weapon and a list of weapons reported at each school.
In the 2011-2012 school year, more than 400 knives were confiscated. There were also at least 37 box cutters, 20 razor blades, 17 switchblades, eight swords or machetes and six stun guns.
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Summary The Federal Pell Grant Program was created to improve the access of low-income students to postsecondary edu- cation. Grant recipients enroll at a variety of educational institutions, including four-year colleges and universities, for-profit schools, two-year community colleges, and institutions that specialize in occupational training. Grants are awarded on the basis of financial need and aca- demic course load, and the maximum grant a student can receive for the 2013-2014 award year is $5,645. During the most recent award year for which data are available (July 1, 2011, to June 30, 2012), the program provided $33.6 billion in grants to some 9.4 million students at U.S. educational institutions. The cost of the program has risen dramatically in recent years.From 2006-2007 to 2010-2011, real (inflation-adjusted) spending on Pell grants increased by 158 percent. That change resulted from an 80 percent rise in the number of recipients and a 43 percent real increase in the amount of the average grant during those four years (see Figure 1). Spending for the program declined in 2011-2012 because of a reduction in the amount of the average grant.
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IN OLDEN TIMES, the most an ambitious young tinkerer could hope for in a toy was to be able to stick one funny-shaped piece onto another. Kids built airplanes with Tinkertoys and spaceships with Erector Sets. In large part, the joy was in the building.But recreational tinkering has since taken a quantum leap forward. Once motors and computer processors got less expensive and the smartphone became ubiquitous, suddenly, toys could be programmed--not just remote-controlled, but given orders, even missions. Sure, it's fun to scare your sister by hiding a toy spider in her dresser, but that's nothing compared to outfitting a jerry-built arachnid with LED eyes and a motion-activated vibrating motor. Today, mini robots can be made to zigzag down the hall, patrol a home, greeting siblings with a friendly hello or a barrage of plastic missiles.
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Madison leaders say trimming city workers' pay might be necessary:
Scheduled pay raises for union-represented city employees may need to be trimmed to help balance the 2014 city budget, Madison Mayor Paul Soglin and City Council President Chris Schmidt said Friday.Andrea Anderson:Schmidt said he didn't relish the step -- calling city workers "already underpaid for the jobs they do" -- but he argued there could be no other choice.
Revenue limits under state law, rising city costs for fuel and health insurance, and a steadfast goal to protect funding for basic city services increasingly tie the city's hands, he said.
"It's understandable why it's on the table, why we're discussing it," he said about the possible action, in which a 3 percent raise scheduled to start in the last pay period in December could be scaled back or eliminated for many employees in March.
Contract talks for Madison School District employees set to start this month, letter says contract negotiations for Madison School District employees are set to begin later this month, according to a letter sent Friday to district staff by superintendent Jennifer Cheatham and Madison Teachers Inc. executive director John Matthews.Much more on the Madison School District's 2013-2014 budget (including a 4.5 property tax increase, after 9% two years ago), here.Cheatham said in a phone interview that she and employee unions will be negotiating "as soon as we can" in order to create collective bargaining agreements that will take effect after the current contracts end in June 2014.
MTI asked the district to begin collective bargaining in May, but the new superintendent wanted to adjust to her role, become acquainted with the staff and hear their requests before bargaining with the teachers union and other employee unions.
Although the timeline is unclear, Cheatham said she expects to complete the contracts "fairly quickly" while also taking time to ensure the process is done correctly and has an outcome acceptable to all parties.
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On Thursday, Chris Rickert - writer for the Wisconsin State Journal - thankfully reminded us about Madison's dirty little secret. The district has a huge problem when it comes to the achievement gap - how students from different races are learning - and little in terms of a plan to fix it.Related: Madison's disastrous reading results.Indeed, Madison has one of the largest achievement gaps in Wisconsin. While 86.7 percent of white students in the district graduated in 2012, only 53.1 percent of their African American classmates could say the same. That's a graduation difference of nearly 34 percent. Even Milwaukee, the state's most embattled district, beats Madison on this very important issue. African American students in Milwaukee Public Schools were six percent more likely to graduate than their counterparts in MMSD.
For a city that goes out of its way to preach utopian equality and the great successes of union-run public schools, Madison's lack of an answer for the achievement gap should come as a shock.
Here's how the district stacked up, in terms of graduation rates, with the state's other large districts:
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That's really not such a brilliant insight. The growth is already there, and constant - except when it pops up a bit.And why is this?
Two reasons.
Parents and children are getting more and more frustrated with institutional schooling, both public and private.
Secondly, homeschooling is getting easier.
(A little easier. It's always a challenge, but the Internet has transformed it, making it so much easier to connect with information, classes and other people)
I hesitate to even begin a post like this because the minute I do, my head explodes with a million ideas, concerns and stories, and I end up sitting here for three hours, just meandering.
I'm going to try to not wander down that road, and offer instead smaller bits and pieces.
I've talked before about why we're here, doing this. That post is here.
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Oberlin College has modified its "No Trespass" policy and formed a community advisory board in the wake of campus and community concerns over how it was enforced.
The college, known as one of the most liberal in the country, made several changes to the policy after questions were raised about the secret list that barred people from campus without them knowing their offense.The new policy includes allowing security to issue a written warning, providing a list of college property, providing more written information on the trespass order, creating a one-year trespass order and creating an appeals process.
"We have approached this work with a desire to create more effective policy and procedures that balance the need for safety with greater transparency and community involvement," Dean of Students Eric Estes said in a news release.
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Parents who yell at their adolescent children for misbehaving can cause some of the same problems as hitting them would, including increased risk of depression and aggressive behavior, according to a new study.A good, warm relationship with Mom and Dad doesn't protect teens from the negative effects of parents' yelling, cursing or lobbing insults, such as calling teens "lazy" or "stupid," the study found. Conducted by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Michigan, the study was published Wednesday on the journal Child Development's website.
While spanking has become taboo in many U.S. communities, yelling doesn't have nearly the same social stigma. Indeed, parents sometimes think yelling will make their charges listen and behave. But the study found the opposite to be true.
"Shouting cannot reduce or correct their problem behavior," said Ming-Te Wang, an assistant professor in the departments of education and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and a co-author of the study. "On the contrary, it makes it worse."
Timothy Verduin, clinical assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the Child Study Center at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York, who wasn't involved in the study, said parents can effectively discipline kids by taking away privileges, such as screen time or the car keys.
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One would think that the last thing the American reading public needs is yet another book on affirmative action. Even by the late 1990s, library shelves were groaning with dozens of books, pro and con, on the subject. The positions are clear:The right is opposed to affirmative action on the grounds that it denies or perverts merit; that it emphasizes the group over the individual; that it generates reverse discrimination, which is pernicious; that it insists on equal results instead of equal opportunity, a goal that is patently un-American and can be realized only through egregious social engineering; and that it intensifies racial consciousness by creating a compensatory racial caste system as a form of bourgeois patronage.
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There is a painfully uncomfortable episode of "Louie" in which the comedian Louis C.K. muses that maybe child molesters wouldn't kill their victims if the penalty weren't so severe. Everyone I know who watches the show vividly recalls that scene from 2010 because it conjures such a witches' cauldron of taboo, disgust and moral outrage, all wrapped around a disturbing kernel of truth. I have similar ambivalence about the case involving former Montana high school teacher Stacey Dean Rambold. Louie concluded his riff with a comment to the effect of "I don't know what to do with that information." That may be the case for many of us, but with our legal and moral codes failing us, our society needs to have an uncensored dialogue about the reality of sex in schools.As protesters decry the leniency of Rambold's sentence -- he will spend 30 days in prison after pleading guilty to raping 14-year-old Cherice Morales, who committed suicide at age 16 -- I find myself troubled for the opposite reason. I don't believe that all sexual conduct between underage students and teachers should necessarily be classified as rape, and I believe that absent extenuating circumstances, consensual sexual activity between teachers and students should not be criminalized. While I am not defending Judge G. Todd Baugh's comments about Morales being "as much in control of the situation" -- for which he has appropriately apologized -- tarring and feathering him for attempting to articulate the context that informed his sentence will not advance this much-needed dialogue.
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This weekend, the National Football League would like you to see The Butler, We're the Millers, or maybe The End of The World--anything but The United States of Football. Sean Pamphilon's documentary, controversial even before its release, is about the dangers of America's No. 1 sports obsession, football, from youth leagues to the pros. Pamphilon, a Emmy and a Peabody Award-winning filmmaker who exposed the New Orleans Saints' "Bountygate" scandal in April 2012, has assembled nearly three years' worth of investigative reporting on the damage football, as it's played today at all levels, can do to the human brain.Like the game itself, The United States of Football is, in turns, exciting, stimulating, and heartbreaking. There's no other word but that last one to describe what too many hits to the head did to the late, great Baltimore Colts' Hall of Fame tight end John Mackey: In 2000, when he was just 59, he became the first NFL player to be diagnosed with frontal temporal dementia. In Pamphilon's film, Mackey's wife Sylvia feeds him, constantly calling to him "John Mackey!" because, she says, "I don't want him to forget his name." The United States of Football also tells the story of Dave Duerson, an 11-year veteran, most notably of the 1985 Chicago Bears Super Bowl champions, who shot himself in the chest in 2011 at age 50. Neurologists later confirmed that Duerson suffered from a neurodegenerative disease linked to concussions.
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The needle is 21 gauge, 1.5in. A hogsticker. Forty of them arrived in a package from Greece. Ever received a package from overseas? You get that puff of air when you rip it open - air that's travelled thousands of miles. Foreign, like stepping into a stranger's house. The syringe wrapper has instructions in Italian, French, Greek and Arabic - not a word of English. But it's a needle. Operation is self-explanatory. I had put them out on my work desk a few days ago - an unignorable fact. An invitation. A threat.Buck up, laddie. Fortune favours the brave.
What's inside looks like oily urine. 1cc of Equipoise - a veterinary drug normally injected into beef cattle - and 2cc of Testosterone Cypionate: 10 times the testosterone a man my size produces naturally in a week.
It was going into my backside; plenty of meat there. But the sciatic nerve radiates from my hips; plus, if I hit a vein I could go into cardiac collapse. I tucked a bag of frozen corn beneath my underwear to numb the injection site. The hash marks on the syringe were smudged away by my sweaty hands. That couldn't be a sign of quality medical equipment, could it?
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The kids are back in school. And you've probably shelled out for pencil cases, notebooks, a new backpack--and AP French."Free public education" clauses are written into state constitutions nationwide. Yet at many public schools around the country it has become anything but. Schools are charging parents for programs and items that have traditionally come standard--including fees for course supplies, school-run extracurricular activities, transportation and even basic registration fees.
School districts have seen their budgets slashed over the past few years as states cut back funding amid the economic downturn. And this year is no exception, even as the economy continues to slowly improve. Thanks to the federal budget sequester earlier this year, schools nationwide have had to adjust to additional budget cuts of 5%, says Dan Domenech, executive director of the AASA, the School Superintendents Association, a nonprofit public-education advocacy group based in Alexandria, Va.
Parents aren't happy about having to cover some of the tab. And some are even fighting back.
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On a family vacatiEmpty classroom© Valentin Armianu | Dreamstime.comon a few weeks ago, my older nephew's unhappiness with school was a major topic of conversation. His fifth grade teacher, it turns out, required all of the kids in class to read assigned books at the same rate--sprinting ahead was strictly forbidden. For a kid who just tested at the reading level of a high school senior, this was a pointlessly morale-killing rule that contributed to a very smart boy's growing discontent with school. Sixth grade is now underway, and so are parental negotiations for a more flexible approach toward education, or else a healthier venue, including home. It's with this experience in mind that I read research psychologist Peter Gray's all too accurate piece in Salon comparing modern schools to prisons--horrible, curiosity-crushing institutions that teach all the wrong lessons. His points are excellent in themselves, and provide a major insight into why the school choice debate is often so off-base.Gray, a professor at Boston College, writes:
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September, 2013 Parent Power Index: How does your state stack up! See where your state ranks in ensuring great learning opportunities for your children.Wisconsin ranks 7th.
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American higher education is the envy of the world. Students flock to this country from all over, and the most highly ranked schools tend to be here. We should be proud!American higher education is a mess. With high costs, low graduation rates, unhappy faculty members and coddled students, our universities are about to be radically disrupted by massive, technologically driven change. A good thing, too!
How to reconcile these opposing views? At a time when ambitious business-school professors and salivating entrepreneurs predict the end of the university as we know it, and at a time when we have never been more in need of an educated workforce and citizenry, the task of understanding the evolving mission and performance of American higher education has never been more urgent. Thank goodness Derek Bok, a two-time president of Harvard and a judicious, learned analyst of education, has taken on this undertaking. His book is too long to be called a report card, but it is a detailed progress report on the challenges and opportunities facing our nation's colleges and universities.
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People's Palace': the £189m Library of Birmingham, which opens on TuesdayBirmingham officially opened its new public library, one of the largest in Europe, on Tuesday.
At a time when councils across the UK are trimming library services as part of the cuts in public funding, Birmingham city council has delivered a £189m building to grace the city centre.
The building, which has won critical and popular acclaim, replaces the brutalist concrete-clad Central Library, designed by John Madin, the foremost Birmingham architect of the postwar period.
Francine Houben, the new library's Dutch architect, described it as a "people's palace".
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Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email:
In the last few years, those at the helm of the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) have become increasingly hostile to the city's fast-growing charter school sector. Last year, the school board refused (despite a directive from the state to approve) a charter application from Great Hearts Academy, a respected Arizona charter management organization. This is despite the fact that only about 40% of the district's students in grades 3-8 are meeting proficiency standards. In the past few weeks, the relationship between the MNPS directors and charter schools has deteriorated to the point that some describe as nuclear war. Schools Director Jesse Register has engaged lawyers to argue that the decade-old charter school law is unconstitutional.Last week, a Nashville paper called for MNPS to adopt a portfolio strategy, meaning that the district should stop trying to be a monopoly operator of schools. Becoming a portfolio district would not mean that Nashville would put all its schools out to bid to charter schools. It would mean that the district would stop treating the students in Nashville charter schools as somebody else's responsibility and start seeing its job as ensuring that all children in the city are well served by the public schools, no matter who runs them. If a particular neighborhood was not being well served and a renowned district principal wanted to open a new school there, great. If a high-performing charter school was in a position to open a new school there, great. Portfolio districts don't have a preference for charters or district-run schools; they prefer whatever arrangement gets good results for kids.
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The recent news release from the State Department of Public Instruction revealing that 67 percent of the applicants to the Walker administration's expanded school voucher program are already attending private schools elicited cries of "scam" from many quarters.Dana Goldstein on Sweden's voucher system.And well it should have.
That two-thirds of the voucher applicants had their children already enrolled in private schools lays waste the argument by Wisconsin legislative Republicans and the governor that vouchers are needed so poor families can rescue their children from poorly performing public schools.
That has always been a spurious argument, even back in the days when Gov. Tommy Thompson shepherded the nation's first school choice program through the Legislature for low-income Milwaukee families. It was sold based on the argument that poor families, said to be ill-served by Milwaukee's public school system, ought to be able to send their children to private schools just as do rich people. So, in order to do that with taxpayers' money, vouchers were devised to technically make tuition grants to the families, which in turn would use them to pay the private schools.
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Over the past year and a half, the credit ratings of several prestigious liberal arts colleges have been downgraded or assigned a negative outlook by Moody's Investors Service.
(Note: This article has been updated from an earlier version to note that these ratings were issued over the last 18 months, not the past several months.)These are institutions -- Haverford College, Morehouse College, Oberlin College and Wellesley College - that top students seek out, yet they are showing small but noticeable signs of fiscal stress several years after the end of the recession. Their downgraded ratings are still better than those of plenty of other institutions, and Moody's has issued plenty of gloomy projects about colleges during the economic downturn. But the recent actions are notable because they affect colleges that are by many measures -- money, prestige, history -- among the most fortunate in the country.
"We do see pressure on small private colleges as a group and that's primarily because they don't have a lot of different things they can do, so they are primarily dependent on tuition revenue," said a Moody's analyst, Edie Behr.
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"The machine lasts indefinitely. It gets no wrinkles, no arthritis, no hardening of the arteries . . . Two machines replace 114 men that take no coffee breaks, no sick leaves, no vacations with pay," proclaims the watch-twirling, hard-hearted CEO Wallace V. Whipple in a particularly prescient 1964 episode of The Twilight Zone. Despite the emotional pleas of the workers and their union, Whipple robo-sources 250,000 factory jobs to the "X109B14 modified, transistorized, totally automated machine." The machine - a cardboard prop filled with vacuum tubes, twirling doo-dads and feverishly blinking diodes may be hilariously outdated, laughable even. But less laughable, though, is that this cautionary tale has come to pass: Today, 50 years later, American workers need not only compete with foreign labor, but with automatons. It's no longer science fiction, but common-sense corporate practice.
Mr. Whipple was not a warning, but rather, a muse.Nowhere has Mr. Whipple inspired more watch-twirling CEOs of late than in the Global Education Reform Movement, which seeks to privatize public education. Last year, Adam Bessie profiled this movement - lead by billionaires, industrialists and the Wall Street elite - in a three-part comic series with graphic journalist Dan Archer "The Disaster Capitalism Curriculum: The High Price ofEducation Reform" (See also episode II, and episode III).
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For the last seven years, Dave Stieber has taught history and social studies at public schools in Chicago's South Side. He currently teaches at TEAM in Englewood. Dave will be online today between 12.30pm and 1.30 ET (5.30-6.30 BST) to answer your questions. What would you like to know? Toss your questions in the comments.
My typical work day consists of me waking up at 5am, walking the dog, breakfast, and getting dressed by 5.40. Giving my son and wife a kiss then out the door by 6.10am. I'm on the bus to work and at school by 6.40am.I'm a morning person, so I need time before kids arrive to get everything set up and prepared and make sure my plans are ready to be carried out. Students come up at 7.30am and class starts at 7.45am.
I have five classes from 7.45am - 3.08pm, with one 48-minute block for meetings, one for preparing my lessons, materials/copies and grading, and another for lunch. Most days I have to stay after school to meet with students or prepare for the next day. Some days I have meetings or a spoken-word club that I along with two other teachers run.
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Madison has plenty of challenges. That's for sure. Yet the district has a lot going for it, too, as students return to classes Tuesday.Cheatham has embraced higher standards and will publish annual progress reports. She's a fan of using student data to measure for results and hold educators accountable.
Yet Cheatham also talks convincingly about supporting principals and teachers. She plans to focus intently on high-quality teaching practices, shared leadership and professional development. Teachers seem to appreciate her call for more consistent priorities and curriculum.
It's almost a back-to-basics approach, using research and results to inform strategies.
Unlike her predecessor, Cheatham hasn't proposed a long list of new spending initiatives. Money, of course, matters. Yet Madison already has lots of resources, and it does many things well. Cheatham wants to start with what's working and build from there.
"The really exciting news is we have all the ingredients to be successful," Cheatham said this summer.
That's good to hear.
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Union leaders said the pay increases are the biggest that teachers have received in five years. By some counts, the new contract will maintain Seattle as one of the top-paid districts in the Puget Sound area, although some teachers point out that the cost of living is higher here, too.Though the district succeeded in adding 30 minutes to elementary-school teachers' workday, putting them on par with their middle- and high-school counterparts, it compromised in how they can use that time, with teachers retaining much flexibility.
The agreement also calls for the district to work toward setting limits in the caseloads for school psychologists, speech therapists, and occupational and physical therapists, and a pledge to add more such employees.Two other groups within the SEA approved new contracts on Tuesday, too -- paraprofessionals, such as classroom aides, and school secretaries.
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When Madison public school students go back to class Tuesday, they'll find some lessons will be tougher, according to Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham.The gradual implementation of the Common Core standards, a series of benchmarks for what students should know and be able to do, will begin this year by helping educators, students and staff understand what the standards are and how instruction will change .
Teachers will implement Close Reading, a practice used to study literacy standards , to become more familiar with the increase in rigor and standards while monitoring how the students and the teachers themselves are faring .
"The study will allow teachers to better understand the standards and learn about what it will take to plan instruction using the standards and learn more about instructional practices necessary to teach the standards and learn about" ways to assess what students are learning, Cheatham said.
An example of a Close Reading lesson would be reading a primary source document in a history class and later answering short-answer questions. Teachers would review how students performed, what challenges there were and what the teacher could do to improve.
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The Madison School Board is taking a "step in the right direction" in acknowledging the role of educational assistants in helping students succeed, says a union leader.Much more on the Madison Schools' 2013-2014 budget, here.The 737 educational assistants in the district had been working without a pay raise since 2009 says Erin Proctor, president of their Madison Teachers Inc. collective bargaining unit.
The $433.6 million budget for the 2013-2014 school year approved Monday also includes a 1 percent salary hike for teachers and administrators. The budget will translate to a 4.47 percent increase in the property tax levy.
The pay increase will boost the starting base wage for educational assistants to $12.58 an hour which, with longevity increases, can rise to more than $20 an hour for some work assignments, according to the labor contract. But educational assistants typically don't get as many work hours as most full-time workers do, Proctor says.
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Some critics of the new Common Core standards embraced by Wisconsin schools feel they set the bar for students too high too early.Tina Hollenbeck, a former classroom teacher and homeschooler in Green Bay, believes the standards require abstract thinking that's too hard for children in kindergarten and first grade. "That would be a huge stress that's coming for these kids."
Tuyet Cullen, an eighth grade math teacher in Madison, notes that Common Core has children multiplying fractions in fourth or fifth grade. Before, this skill was not usually taken up until sixth grade.
"Are their brains ready for that concept?" Cullen asked. "If (the standards) aren't developmentally appropriate, they're going to be too hard."
Others argue that the standards are too easy.
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Emily Kram, via a kind reader email:
With a sigh, Michelle Janz put a hand to her face and flipped through a folder of letters, memos and official forms. She shook her head over the mass of paperwork accumulated in eight months.Much more on open enrollment, here.Nex a sigh, Michelle Janz put a hand to her face and flipped through a folder of letters, memos and official forms. She shook her head over the mass of paperwork accumulated in eight months.
"It shouldn't be this hard," she said. "We should have a choice like any other student."
Janz, who lives in Superior, had spent the better part of a year applying for open enrollment, facing rejection and working through the appeals process. Her goal was to enroll her son, Travis, in another school district.
During the 2012-13 school year, Travis was a special education student at Superior High School. Like a typical 17-year-old, Janz said, Travis loves computers. He also enjoys skateboarding and spending time with his friends.
"Everybody knows Travis," Janz said. "He loves school, and he loves being around kids."
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Over the next few weeks, the BBC wants to take you on an amazing journey through digital India.
Our special Digital Indians series will tell you stories of five successful technological innovators and explore their distinct connections with India.The tales including a home-grown entrepreneur-turned public servant, a US-born Indian who migrated to his parents' homeland to work with farmers and a businessman's daughter who left the country to become the first female engineer at the world's leading social networking site.
On Tuesday, we'll give you a short history of India's digital evolution and introduce you to the subjects of the series.
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When we talk about the historic civil-rights gathering whose fifty-year anniversary will be celebrated on Wednesday, we usually call it the March on Washington. In fact, the full name of the event was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; early in his speech, Martin Luther King, Jr., lamented that black Americans lived "on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity." The marchers had ten demands for Congress, at least four of which were aimed at improving black people's financial circumstances and narrowing the gulf between black and white Americans' economic opportunities.Fifty years later, that gulf hasn't changed much. By some measures it has widened. In 2011, the median income for black households was about fifty-nine per cent of the median income for white households, up slightly from fifty-five per cent in 1967, according to Census dataanalyzed by the Pew Research Center. But when you considerwealth--that is, everything a family owns, including a home and retirement savings--the difference seems to have grown. Pew found that the median black household had about seven per cent of the wealth of its white counterpart in 2011, down from nine per cent in 1984, when a Census survey first began tracking this sort of data.
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In 1979, when Jim Stigler was still a graduate student at the University of Michigan, he went to Japan to research teaching methods and found himself sitting in the back row of a crowded fourth-grade math class."The teacher was trying to teach the class how to draw three-dimensional cubes on paper," Stigler explains, "and one kid was just totally having trouble with it. His cube looked all cockeyed, so the teacher said to him, 'Why don't you go put yours on the board?' So right there I thought, 'That's interesting! He took the one who can't do it and told him to go and put it on the board.' "
Stigler knew that in American classrooms, it was usually the best kid in the class who was invited to the board. And so he watched with interest as the Japanese student dutifully came to the board and started drawing, but still couldn't complete the cube. Every few minutes, the teacher would ask the rest of the class whether the kid had gotten it right, and the class would look up from their work, and shake their heads no. And as the period progressed, Stigler noticed that he -- Stigler -- was getting more and more anxious.
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Across the nation, students and teachers are headed back to school. Teachers, such as myself, are furiously preparing their classrooms to welcome students and planning new lessons to ensure that this year is an educational one.For many across the country, the planning and preparation has taken a new turn with the official adoption of the Common Core education standards - President Obama's replacement for No Child Left Behind. The Common Core includes new definitions for school success as well as new national standards for core subjects such as reading, writing and math. Before the Common Core, states had the ability to create their own standards, meaning a student in Illinois might be held to one level of expectations while a student in Arkansas might be held to another. This caused many problems in education, especially when students moved from state to state. The Common Core now unites all of the participating states with the same standards that are both rigorous and skills-based with a focus on utilizing technology in the classroom.
In many ways, this is a great thing both for students and for teachers. Main subject classes have long been behind the curve when it comes to utilizing technology in the classroom. Being technologically competent is now considered a vital life skill, not to mention something today's students need if they are ever going to be employable. English classes in particular have been a little lost in the digital age; when we English teachers went to school, we had been taught to teach literature as an art form for the sake of the appreciation of beauty. Now, with fewer and fewer students going on to study the humanities, we have been tasked with making our classes relevant to the masses. The Common Core's skills based standards could help us do just that. With the focus no longer on content, we can teach whatever pieces we want in our classroom, as long as students are being taught how to read, write, and think critically.
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This piece is part of Mashable Spotlight, which presents in-depth looks at the people, concepts and issues shaping our digital world.
In the middle of Brooklyn's high-end Dumbo neighborhood, 20 inner-city children sit around two wooden tables at what appears to be a small summer camp. Tablet computers are scattered across the tables, punctuated by plates of corn chips and bowls of salsa. The kids are restless on this sweltering July afternoon, fidgeting in their chairs and asking the handful of twenty-somethings if they can play Temple Run or maybe just head home for the day.These kids aren't technically campers, and these Millennials aren't counselors. Instead, the children are product testers (paid weekly in $100 Amazon gift cards) for News Corp., the Rupert Murdoch-founded media conglomerate that began Fox News. The "counselors" are News Corp. employees, tasked with recording these children's every reaction to the educational games into which News Corp. has poured at least $180 million, according to Bloomberg, on top of the $360 million it spent to acquire the technology.
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Steven Strogatz, professor of mathematics, Cornell University; author, "The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math, From One to Infinity."
If I could do one thing, I'd get real mathematicians who are math types to become math teachers. K-12 students need someone there with a real feel for the subject matter. Give them the freedom to teach what they want. It has to be discouraging to have to teach to a test and a set curriculum.Freeman A. Hrabowski III, mathematician; president, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
When I give talks around the country, I often ask the audience: "How many of you knew you were an English/history type or a math/science type by the time you were in 11th grade?" Almost all the hands go up. And, when I ask why, I often hear, "Because I was better in English."
The question is: How does someone know that at 15 or 16? The way that math or science works in our lives is not always obvious.
We need to create opportunities to excite students about how math and science connect to real life. Few teachers have opportunities to use their math skills outside the classroom. I would like to see more partnerships involving school systems, the corporate sector and government that provide teachers paid summer work opportunities applying their math skills to real-life problems.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. Newsletter via a kind Jeanie (Bettner) Kamholtz email (PDF):
WELCOME BACK!To each and every one of the nearly 5,000 District employees who are represented by MTI, welcome, as the 2013-14 school year begins! MTI is the collective bargaining agent for all teachers and non-supervisory professional staff, educational assistants (EA-MTI), clerical/technical personnel (SEE-MTI), substitute teachers (USO-MTI), and school security assistants (SSA-MTI) who are employed by the Madison Metropolitan School District. It is the Union's mission to negotiate the best possible Collective Bargaining Agreements, and to provide the best representation and service possible, when assisting members with any Contract or work-related matter. Contact your Union staff at MTI Headquarters (257-0491 or www.madisonteachers.org) should you have a question or need assistance with any Contract or work-related matter.
This school year will be one of challenge as MTI moves to preserve members' wages, benefits and rights. MTI is one of the few public employee unions with contracts in place, given the devastating impact of Walker's Act 10.
MTI Greets New HiresMembers of MTI's Board of Directors, Bargaining Committee and Union staff greeted the District's newly hired teachers at New Teacher Orientation last Monday. On Tuesday MTI hosted a luncheon for the 250 new members of MTI's teacher bargaining unit.
MTI President Peg Coyne and MTI Executive Director John Matthews addressed the District's new teachers during Tuesday's luncheon. In doing so, Matthews provided a brief history of the Union, its reputation of negotiating outstanding Collective Bargaining Agreements which provide both employment security and economic security, and in explaining the threat to both, given Act 10, said all MTI members would need to pull together to preserve the Madison Metropolitan School District as a quality place to teach.
President Coyne gave a warm MTI welcome to those present, discussed MTI's structure and stressed the need for member participation in political action, if public employees are to regain the right to collectively bargain and if schools are to be adequately funded.
District retiree Jan Silvers lighted up the room when discussing how her life and career was much more enjoyable and rewarding having MTI as her advocate, especially when it came to the ability to experience religious freedom and work during pregnancy. She was awarded 16 years of back pay plus interest as a result of MTI's litigation. Teachers, through the early 1970's, had to advise their principal "immediately upon becoming pregnant" and were obligated to resign when the pregnancy "began showing". As a result of MTI's accomplishments, such antiquated and degrading policies are history.
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The Madison School Board and new Madison School Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham sure have the nerve proposing a new tax levy for Madison homeowners that will raise the average homeowner property tax bill in Madison by about $120.Much more on the Madison Schools' 2013-2014 budget, here.Not only is it hard for those homeowners on fixed incomes (think retirees), but what about all of those public employees who are on reduced incomes as the result of the last several years of public employee bashing?
Most public employees in Madison will be lucky to get 2 percent raises over the course of the last 5 years, not to mention having to pay considerable more for their benefits.
Enough is enough. We all can't afford to continually pay more.
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Silvia Romero-Johnson is the Madison Metropolitan School District's new executive director of multicultural and global education and she could not be more excited."This time of year right now is a very exciting time for me," she tells The Madison Times. "It's an exciting time when we start preparing for the year and we get our teams back together. I will be out in the schools on the very first day and after that will be visiting them regularly. It is exciting."
But late August has always been an exciting time for Romero-Johnson who started out teaching as an English as a Foreign Language teacher in her home country of Argentina. After immigrating to the United States, she was a bilingual resource specialist (BRS), a bilingual classroom teacher, and a program support teacher (PST) for bilingual education programs. Two years later, she became the coordinator for Bilingual Education and Dual Language Immersion.
"I've had multiple roles in the District working in classrooms and supporting classrooms," Romero-Johnson says. "I think I've done every position that our division supervises so that gives me experience and hopefully empathy for how the work takes place and how the work is done."
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In one exchange with a particularly pharisaical special education teacher in Chicago I asked if she could tell me her story of choosing a school for her black children.via Laura Waters.
Sadly, that ended our conversation. I've asked the question of others too. Still, no response.It isn't meant to be a rude question. I'm willing to answer it because it forms the bases for why I care about education policy.
Two factors combined inspire all of my educational activism. The first is my own unremarkable k-12 career, and the second is the fear, worry, and great aspirations I had as a young father.
During my own time in K-12 I witnessed the real disparities in schools. I gained insight, as a kid, into the obvious differences between public and private, rich and poor, safe and dangerous, and so on. This included time in a west coast hippy school, a few poor southern schools, a working class Catholic school, a middle-class Midwestern school, and an ultra-wealthy school for children of privilege.
If we all carry our own experiences (and sometimes baggage) into family decisions about education, that's mine.
When my first son was born I had all of the normal insecurities a young first-time father might have. But the normal anxieties were accelerated by love, fear, and low income. Suddenly I cared for someone so much more than myself, and I didn't want my own experience to be his. Specifically, I didn't want him to work in the service industry as I had up to that point.
There was only one real way to launch him toward his God-given potential, beyond the limitations of income, neighborhood, and demography. Education. It was my one shot at getting him on more equal footing with the children of millionaires I was working for at the time.
Now, many years later, many lessons later, and many confounding choices later, I've transformed from unremarkable student, to desperate father, to damn near full-time education activist. Not because my story is special. It's not. Indeed, my story is too common.
Having seen the immense power of school choice, and the real need for parents to have options when they encounter an educational crossroads for their child, how could I be anything other than a school choice advocate?
Related: A Majority of the Madison school board rejected the proposed Madison preparatory Academy IB charter school.
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What is the explanation? According to Ripley, there is a primary postulate running through the psyche of South Koreans, Finns, and Poles when it comes to education: an expectation that the work will be hard. Everything else is secondary. So anything that gets in the way, anything that compromises the work, will be downplayed or eliminated. Sports, for example. Kids do that on their own time, and it's not part of school culture.Related: Madison's disastrous reading scores.Several consequences follow from this laser-like focus on academic rigor. For example, if schoolwork is challenging kids are going to fail frequently. So failure necessarily is seen as a normal part of the learning process, and as an opportunity for learning, not a cause of shame.
If the academic work for students will be difficult, teachers will necessarily have to be very carefully selected and well trained. And you'll do whatever is necessary to make that happen. Even if it means, as in Finland, offering significant financial support during their training.
So what is the primary postulate of American education?
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Self-driving vehicles threaten to send truck drivers to the unemployment office. Computer programs can now write journalistic accounts of sporting events and stock price movements. There are even computers that can grade essay exams with reasonable accuracy, which could revolutionize my own job, teaching. Increasingly, machines are providing not only the brawn but the brains, too, and that raises the question of where humans fit into this picture -- who will prosper and who won't in this new kind of machine economy?Who will do well?
THE CONSCIENTIOUS Within five years we will are likely to have the world's best education, or close to it, online and free. But not everyone will sit down and go through the material without a professor pushing them to do the work.
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Carly and her mom are friends on Facebook, but that doesn't mean they share everything.Via Susan Poling
The 17-year-old from Marin County, California, has refined her Facebook privacy settings so that her mother can't see all the posts that fill her Timeline. Her father, meanwhile, never checks the social network."Right now, my mom can only see things that I post. She can't see anything I'm tagged in or anything that my friends say to me on my profile," said Carly, a high school senior who asked to be identified only by her first name. "She doesn't know that, though. I'm like, 80% sure that every other teenager has done that too."
With teen-agers and their parents (grandparents, even) increasingly active on social networks, both generations are joined in a delicate dance over privacy, safety and freedom of expression online.
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Paul Graham managed to put a very important question, the one of the English language as a requirement for IT workers, in the attention zone of news sites and software developers [1]. It was a controversial matter as he referred to "foreign accents" and the internet is full of people that are just waiting to overreact, but this is the least interesting part of the question, so I'll skip that part. The important part is, no one talks about the "English problem" usually, and I always felt a bit alone in that side, like if it was a problem only affecting me, so in this blog post I want to share my experience about English.
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Social practices and cultural beliefs of modern life are preventing healthy brain and emotional development in children, according to an interdisciplinary body of research presented recently at a symposium at the University of Notre Dame."Life outcomes for American youth are worsening, especially in comparison to 50 years ago," says Darcia Narvaez, Notre Dame professor of psychology who specializes in moral development in children and how early life experiences can influence brain development.
"Ill-advised practices and beliefs have become commonplace in our culture, such as the use of infant formula, the isolation of infants in their own rooms or the belief that responding too quickly to a fussing baby will 'spoil' it," Narvaez says.
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Last spring, as Linzy Heim was narrowing down her list of college choices, she got a call from the softball coach at Concordia University in St. Paul.Fascinating. quite different than Madison's K-12 bubble, where we spend twice the national average per student despite disastrous reading scores.
Did she know that the century-old Lutheran college was slashing its tuition by $10,000?Her mom, Denice, was stunned.
"When we started looking, the tuition was quite frightening," she said. The price cut helped seal the deal.
Last weekend, Linzy, an All-Star softball pitcher from Plattsmouth, Neb., moved into the freshman women's dorm, Luther Hall, as part of Concordia's biggest entering class in decades.
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Nicholson Baker, via a kind Marc Eisen email:
In 1545, Girolamo Cardano, a doctor, a wearer of magical amulets, and a compulsive gambler, published a math book in Latin called Ars Magna. The "great art" of the title was algebra. When Cardano was done, he knew he had come up with something huge and powerful and timeless; on the last page was the declaration, written in five years, may it last as many thousands. The equations in Ars Magna looked very different from the ones we are familiar with -- here, for instance, is how Cardano wrote the solution to x3 + 6x = 20:Rv : cu. : R108 p : 10m : Rv :cu. R108m : 10
But the algebraic rules Cardano described and codified are variants of the techniques that millions of students are taught, with varying degrees of success, today.
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As we begin a new school year, this story reminds us that our struggling with learning is not any indicator of a lack of intelligence.
Alex Spiegel
In 1979, when Jim Stigler was still a graduate student at the University of Michigan, he went to Japan to research teaching methods and found himself sitting in the back row of a crowded fourth-grade math class.
"The teacher was trying to teach the class how to draw three-dimensional cubes on paper," Stigler explains, "and one kid was just totally having trouble with it. His cube looked all cockeyed, so the teacher said to him, 'Why don't you go put yours on the board?' So right there I thought, 'That's interesting! He took the one who can't do it and told him to go and put it on the board.' "
Stigler knew that in American classrooms, it was usually the best kid in the class who was invited to the board. And so he watched with interest as the Japanese student dutifully came to the board and started drawing, but still couldn't complete the cube. Every few minutes, the teacher would ask the rest of the class whether the kid had gotten it right, and the class would look up from their work, and shake their heads no. And as the period progressed, Stigler noticed that he -- Stigler -- was getting more and more anxious.
"I realized that I was sitting there starting to perspire," he says, "because I was really empathizing with this kid. I thought, 'This kid is going to break into tears!' "
But the kid didn't break into tears. Stigler says the child continued to draw his cube with equanimity. "And at the end of the class, he did make his cube look right! And the teacher said to the class, 'How does that look, class?' And they all looked up and said, 'He did it!' And they broke into applause." The kid smiled a huge smile and sat down, clearly proud of himself.
Stigler is now a professor of psychology at UCLA who studies teaching and learning around the world, and he says it was this small experience that first got him thinking about how differently East and West approach the experience of intellectual struggle.
"I think that from very early ages we [in America] see struggle as an indicator that you're just not very smart," Stigler says. "It's a sign of low ability -- people who are smart don't struggle, they just naturally get it, that's our folk theory. Whereas in Asian cultures they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity."
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To remember the loneliness, the fear and the insecurity of men who once had to walk alone in huge factories, beside huge machines. To realize that labor unions have meant new dignity and pride to millions of our countrymen. To be able to see what larger pay checks mean, not to a man as an employee, but as a husband and as a father. To know these things is to understand what American labor means.Yin & Yang:-- Adlai Stevenson, in a speech to the American Federation of Labor, New York City on 22 September 1952
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
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I believe in science, but I spend almost no time reading the academic literature where the science of my craft (journalism) has traditionally been published. I spend even less time trying to craft research that would get publishing in those outlets.For most normal human beings, this is not a controversial stance. As a tenure-track professor, this cuts against the grain of how you are normally told to proceed. In the Academy, professors traditionally are expected to do research and then publish that research in one of a number of peer-reviewed journals.
A growing number of faculty, including myself, have begun to reject that road to tenure.
The reason: the academic publishing system is built around a 1-2 year publishing process that requires the best and brightest minds to turn over all of their intellectual property without any compensation for that work.
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As kids and teachers head back to school, the future of education in our state is a boiling-hot topic.Related: NCTQ survey on teacher education quality.And no one is more ready to plunge into the roiling waters of school controversy than Tim Slekar, the new dean of the school of education at Edgewood College.
Slekar, who just moved to Madison from Pittsburgh, has been blogging about the dangers of corporate-backed education reform for years atatthechalkface.com. He is also the cohost of the online chalkface weekly radio show on Sundays at 5 p.m. and a founder of United Opt Out, a group that encourages parents and teachers to refuse to participate in high-stakes standardized tests.
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Ashland University, a private institution in Ohio, is joining a small but growing group of colleges that have sharply cut their tuition while also reducing the amount of institutional aid they offer, to come up with a sticker price that's closer to what students actually pay. That strategy is one of many that smaller institutions are exploring to try to ease concerns about college costs and shore up enrollments.Instead of being charged an estimated $30,000 for the 2014-15 academic year, the roughly 3,200 undergraduates at Ashland will pay a little less than $19,000--a decrease of 37 percent. And while the university is also reducing the institutional financial aid it offers, it says it is still lowering the net price that most students will pay.
The changes in tuition and aid are meant to reduce the sticker shock that potential students and parents might experience when weighing Ashland against other college choices, campus officials said in a news release.
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Luke Muehlhauser: I'd like to start by familiarizing our readers with some of the basic facts relevant to the genetic architecture of cognitive ability, which I've drawn from the first half of apresentation you gave in February 2013:The human genome consists of about 3 billion base pairs, but humans are very similar to each other, so we only differ from each other on about 3 million of these base pairs.
Because there's so much repetition, we could easily store the entire genome of every human on earth (~3mb per genome, compressed).
Rather than scanning an entire genome, we can just scan the roughly 10 million locations where humans are likely to differ (these are called SNPs).
Scanning someone's SNPs costs about $200; scanning their entire genome costs $1000 or more.
But, genotyping costs are falling so quickly that SNPs may be irrelevant soon, as it'll be simpler and cheaper to just sequence entire genomes.
To begin to understand the genetic architecture of cognitive ability, we can compare it to the genetic architecture of height, since the genetic architectures of height and cognitive ability are qualitatively the same.
For example, (1) height and cognitive ability are relatively stable and reliable traits (in adulthood), meaning that if you measure a person's height or cognitive ability at multiple times you'll get roughly the same result each time, (2) height and cognitive ability arevalid traits, in that they "measure something real" that is predictive of various life outcome measures like income, (3) both height and cognitive ability are highly heritable, and (4) both height and cognitive ability are highly polygenic, meaning that many different genes contribute to height and cognitive ability.
All cognitive observables -- e.g. vocabulary, digit recall (short term memory), ability to solve math puzzles, spatial rotation ability, cognitive reaction time -- appear to be positively correlated. Because of this, we can (lossily) compress the data for how a person scores on different cognitive tests to a single number, which we call IQ, and this single number is predictive of their scores on all cognitive tests, and also life outcome measures like income, educational attainment, job performance, and mortality.
This contradicts some folk wisdom. E.g. parents often believe that "Johnny's good at math, so he's probably not going to be good with words." But in fact, the data show that math skill is quite predictive of verbal skill, because (roughly) all cognitive abilities are positively correlated.
By convention, IQ is normally distributed in the population with a mean at 100 and a standard deviation of 15.
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You must have seen the warning a thousand times: Too few young people study scientific or technical subjects, businesses can't find enough workers in those fields, and the country's competitive edge is threatened.It pretty much doesn't matter what country you're talking about--the United States is facing this crisis, as is Japan, the United Kingdom,Australia, China, Brazil, South Africa,Singapore, India...the list goes on. In many of these countries, the predicted shortfall of STEM (short for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workers is supposed to number in the hundreds of thousands or even the millions. A 2012 report by President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, for instance, stated that over the next decade, 1 million additional STEM graduates will be needed. In the U.K., the Royal Academy of Engineering reported last year that the nation will have to graduate 100 000 STEM majors every year until 2020 just to stay even with demand. Germany, meanwhile, is said to have a shortage of about 210 000 workers in what's known there as the MINT disciplines--mathematics, computer science, natural sciences, and technology.
The situation is so dismal that governments everywhere are now pouring billions of dollars each year into myriad efforts designed to boost the ranks of STEM workers. President Obama has called for government and industry to train 10 000 new U.S. engineers every year as well as 100 000 additional STEM teachers by 2020. And until those new recruits enter the workforce, tech companies like Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft are lobbying to boost the number of H-1B visas--temporary immigration permits for skilled workers--from 65 000 per year to as many as 180 000. The European Union is similarly introducing the new Blue Card visa to bring in skilled workers from outside the EU. The government of India has said it needs to add 800 new universities, in part to avoid a shortfall of 1.6 million university-educated engineers by the end of the decade.
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President Obama has put forth a comprehensive plan to increase higher education value, holding colleges and universities accountable via a rating system based on the "outcomes" of access, graduation rates, graduate earnings and affordability.It is hard to argue with the President's intentions, nor the shove-rather-than-nudge strategy he employs, given the decades of higher education's failure to rein in its costs or improve the success rate of students. The plan affirms higher education's crucial role in fostering economic and social progress, puts colleges and universities on notice that the time for systemic change is now, not tomorrow, and creates rewards and punishments for institutions and students alike.
The president's plan largely fails, however, to appropriately tackle the more fundamental value issue - far too little student learning. Myriad studies over the past several decades document that too little "higher" learning is taking place; college students do not make significant gains in critical thinking, problem solving, analytical reasoning, written communication skills, and ethical and moral development.
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I spy: technologists are helping parents keep track of their children with new devices, such as the Filip smartwatch
When Apple introduced the Find My iPhone app three years ago, its aim was to help people locate their lost smartphones. But EJ Hilbert, a 43-year-old former FBI officer, had a better idea - installing the app on his three children's devices, so that he could track them wherever they went."They have it on their phone and that's the way it's going to be," says Mr Hilbert, whose day job is investigating cyber crime.
By adapting the Find My iPhone app, Mr Hilbert is part of a wider trend. Until recently technology gave power to the children. Now it is starting to give something back to the parents.
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Six. The new kids on the block. There are quite a few, but three new schools particularly interest me. They are:Carmen North. Will the people involved in the successful Carmen High charter school on the south side successfully launch a middle school-high school program in a long-troubled MPS building on the northwest side?
Rocketship Southside Community Prep. This high-profile charter elementary, the first expansion for Rocketship Education beyond its base in San Jose, Calif., will be watched by education activists nationwide who heatedly debate the virtues of the program, which includes a strong component of technology-based learning.
Universal Academy for the College Bound This Philadelphia-based charter school operation is opening elementary and middle schools in two MPS buildings on the north side. The questions I had about how this will go were only compounded when the key Milwaukee leader, Ronn Johnson, was charged recently with sexually assaulting children. But Universal appears intent on weathering the damage that caused.
Seven. MPS leadership. There was a period in the spring when the future of Superintendent Gregory Thornton seemed in doubt.
I still don't get why School Board members considered putting $80,000 in the budget for a superintendent search.
But last week the board voted to extend Thornton's contract until 2016. I'd suggest the focus now should be on the rungs below Thornton.
There's been a lot of change in administrative ranks and a continuing wave of changes in principals. It may be difficult for outsiders (including me) to figure out how this is going, but I know it's really important.
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Today's RealClearPolicy slate features a piece from Dylan Matthews of the Washington Post claiming that college is a good investment. It pushes back against arguments in the vein of critics like Charles Murray and Richard Vedder, who argue that too many people are going to college.Several years ago, I wrote a few pieces for National Review outlining the Murray/Vedder view (here's one from the website), but I hadn't kept up with the debate, and Matthews's piece features a lot of newer research on the subject. What follows isn't necessarily a response, but more of an overview of the topic and a reconsideration of my views in light of the updated evidence. I have six main points to make.
1. It's not about college, it's about college-for-all.
Matthews spends a considerable amount of time explaining that attending college is a good idea for the average student. This is true -- but to the best of my knowledge, no college critic disputes it. For a lot of high-paying jobs, you simply need a college degree, no matter how smart you are; today's doctors, teachers, engineers, and so forth would not be nearly so well off if they'd stopped after high school.
What we argue is that not all students benefit from college the way that the average student does, and that efforts to draw even more students to college could do more harm than good, because such efforts are focused on students who today rationally decide that college isn't for them. We especially bristle at the notion that America should aspire to send all students to college.
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Seaman High School senior Tori Munsell's school day starts much like any other student's. The 17-year-old has three classes in the morning -- chemistry, government and British literature.
But in the afternoon, Munsell heads to the Washburn Institute of Technology, where she spends five afternoons a week learning graphic design."I feel like this is going to start my career faster," Munsell said. "I can build a portfolio."
Munsell is one of 400 high school students enrolled at the technical college so far this semester. They study alongside high school graduates, accruing college credit before even finishing school.
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As Ed Money Watch previously reported, the U.S. Department of Education has placed three states - Kansas, Oregon, and Washington - on "high risk" status for their ESEA waiver plans related to new teacher evaluation systems. If they don't get up to speed by the end of 2013-14, these states could face a series of increasing sanctions, from losing state administrative or programmatic Title I funding, to losing ESEA flexibility entirely. With the latter, the state would again be subject to all of the requirements and provisions of No Child Left Behind.Now, the Department has released initial guidelines for all states seeking to renew their waivers this winter. Waivers granted from the first two application windows (November 2011 and February 2012) expire at the end of the current school year. Without the two-year extension, the consequences for these 35 states are the same as for those on high risk: NCLB, in full effect, in 2014-15. I won't go into the details of the renewal process (yet), but for more analysis take a look at these thorough recaps from Education Week's Michele McNeil and Politico's Caitlin Emma.
Instead, I'd like to focus on the challenge the U.S. Department of Education faces in ensuring state compliance with flexibility. The Department has a few tools at its disposal to cajole states into cooperation, but these kinds of punishments are rare, if not unprecedented. Few states have lost Title I funding, administrative or programmatic, under NCLB. And several states have been placed on high risk for their Race to the Top plans, but the Department has yet to follow through on the warning and revoke a portion of states' funding.
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